Still retainin', still dreamin'
continuation of the second archive, originally posted on 12/29/08, 11:43 AM.
2/2
all quarter, I had skipped two classes (calculus, and english?) i needed to pass to graduate, and a test was coming up in each. i missed one (?), and had little time to prepare for the other. i met outside at a table with Ozer, who told me he was unhappy with how my work didn't seem to express my own interests, and wasn't going anywhere. i was concerned that i couldn't do anything about it and my tests at the same time, but we were interrupted by rude young people sitting across from us who made fun of his seriousness. he ignored it at first, but as they continued, he took notice, got up, and warned them that he would call security on them if they continued. i saw an opportunity to escape immediate accountability for the work that needed to be done. one black girl was particularly defiant, and Ozer went around a corner to access security through Domino's Pizza (the call-security option was right next to all the food options). i warned the girl that she was making a bad move, and she turned aggressive toward me. security came immediately and escorted the disruptive people away. when we resumed talking, i couldn't remember where we had left off, and Ozer reminded me. we didn't get far into the conversation before walking back to where we'd come from.
i later found out one of the boys in the disruptive group was attacked by a bear on his way home, and in uncertain condition. i considered visiting the hospital, and expressed my sympathy for him, thinking he might've avoided it if not for the encounter with security.
i watched a large warrior-like guy with long hair walk with a woman like Kate Beckinsale in Van Helsing through a tunnel of snow and ice. he was wounded, and said he was dying. Prerna watched with me, and said he should make up his mind about dying if he was going to, as apparently he didn't act like it. the woman discouraged him from continuing, and with a stone face he grabbed her leg and dragged her along the floor of the tunnel.
at the end, in a large domed cave of ice, he fell next to a small chest containing a yellow, egg-shaped orb with black blotches and veins, as well as the blue, frozen corpse of a baby vampire, whose head came out of the top of an egg-shaped body that had cracked and split in the cold. instructions for using the heart and reviving it were written on brown paper like Prerna's schedules, but one piece with a series of assonant words to be chanted was deteriorating.
2/8
in vegas (looked more like new york), i was walking along a street. kellum dressed up all fancy and was walking back behind me up the street from an event with jim and lawrence. i heard him talking about how rare an event it was that he was so dressed up and eager to please, and i circled around to the left to surprise him from behind. i wasn't particularly careful, so i think he saw me.
other people i knew from UCR were coming up the street, including Rakel and another girl. i bought a cheap piece of jewelry and hung it where i knew they would see it as they passed. i left a note attached saying it was for the first person who came by, and signed it.
other people i knew went into what looked like an amusement park ride, and i followed. it turned out to be an hour-long personal sauna craft with face stretching and an annoyingly "calming" automated hostess voice.
i got ready for an event in a house with my cousin alex. he was playful in his usual way, and asked me to bring him a beer. i left to change, and said i'd "come back with a beer...for myself!"
at the event, Sonja appeared on an extremely tall display in reds, oranges, and yellows, gloating to the audience over how she could assign whatever she wanted, but wouldn't make it too bad. i whispered to the guy next to me that she was a benevolent dictator. i had my laptop open on my lap, and considered vertically resizing her display like one would a window, when a man came running through aisles as part of an act. i closed my laptop to hide it, and startled the guy next to me in the process, as he was looking at my screen.
i heard an offer for a date with a semi-famous, model-shaped woman on an island through a radio show as i was disembarking from a boat onto the island with a number of other eligible guys who seemed mildly enthusiastic at best. i walked through the forest, dropping down into a crevice with a log crossing the top. i peered into a hole on the side of the rock wall. feeling lost, i climbed out, passed a series of columns set up around a small court, and found myself in an indoor exhibit. as i walked out past the ticket tellers, trying to appear nonchalant so as not to be stopped, i checked for my wallet, and it was missing. i "reset" to my initial position (like in San Francisco Rush) by going to sleep, and woke up with my wallet.
2/9
a young black woman in a yellow dress with a purple fuzzy frill at the bottom was being pursued by police, but had lost them temporarily. as she walked past the entrance to a hotel, a man in the passenger seat of a car called out to her as to a prostitute. she continued on, and took off the dress (wearing a yellow shirt and blue jeans underneath) to look less conspicuous. a friend of hers called to her from the entrance to a shadowy courtyard flanked by trees. she went to him, and met more people she knew, who beckoned her into the courtyard. it was a raised ledge with high fences at the edges, and as she drew near the fences, she saw silhouettes of a SWAT team lined up along the outside of the fence. the police chief and his squad boxed her in from behind, and she begged one of the SWAT team members to pull the mesh fence open and let her run away. hesitating, he did, and the police chief drew his gun on the mutinous man and ordered him to kneel. another officer shouted to the chief not to fire, and the chief lowered his gun toward the mutinous man's head dramatically, saying, "You will address me as SIR!" he fired, deliberately missing the man by an inch (and somehow not ruining his hearing). i had assumed the perspective of another officer at his side, and observing this, remarked to the chief, "That was lame."
2/14
a breakfast of waffles and small lizards from outside (caught fresh off the sidewalk) with my parents.
also found it surprisingly easy to play keyboard and organ along with a couple Yes songs. Travis was on guitar, and had a big bracelet-lookin' cylinder to use for a slide at just the right moment. i was impressed.
2/17
I was followed by two asian guys along a path slightly offset from a road. I turned and walked backward staring at the first one until he passed me. I drew my knife as the second followed closer, and stabbed him shallowly in the stomach as he made his move. I offered to call the police for him, and he nodded, grimacing.
On an island, indigenous people walked in a tightly packed line down curving stairs carved out of the brown earth. someone recounted a story of poorly written textbooks. the entire first chapter of 200+ pages had to be shredded and replaced for mistakes.
2/22
went to see a movie with Ozer, Denton, Lawrence, Kellum, Kate Sweeny, etc. the movie involved Schwarzenegger joining a self-help group and agreeing to go on TV as the 150th person to express interest and confidence in the program. in the few minutes before he was to go on, he talked with the guy heading the movement while standing on top of the playground equipment of Meadow Lake Park. the guy, who resembled Mike Steger, admitted that his program was an ineffective, money-driven hoax. Schwarzenegger ditched the assembled audience, and was later ambushed by a cameraman who asked him what he thought of the program while he was sleeping on a couch. he gave a halfway honest review, doing a poor job of hiding his knowledge of the vapidity of the program. as he was headed home on a jet, he was held up by two women from the program's administration. one held him at gunpoint, and threatened him. she pointed with the gun to the pilot of the jet, and I thought she was going to shoot through Schwarzenegger's shoulder and hit the pilot. instead, she merely told Schwarzenegger that he had to help the pilot, or else. the pilot went unconscious and slumped over to the side, and Schwarzenegger jumped to the rescue. he dove from the plane, and did his aerodynamic fall routine from whatever movie that was to catch up to a little escape-pod plane. his fall was a strangely shallow diagonal glide, and at one point he scraped across the surface of a hill in the road, which dropped away again, allowing him to catch up to the plane and get inside. he piloted it back up to the jet and docked it in the bottom, thus saving the jet (somehow).
i thought the movie was great and "epic." i seemed to have been high though. Ozer had a critical opinion, but I don't remember talking to him. the group of psychology types walked down a hallway, heading the long way toward some destination we all had in common. Lawrence noticed them going the wrong way, and split off to beat them there. I followed, laughing about how he didn't bother to correct anyone. I later met up with Denton, and told him how I had gone camping somewhere with the group. He said he had gone to the same place, which surprised me, but then I remembered seeing him at the movie.
2/23
Watching a Rush concert: Geddy Lee was standing and playing some big electronic drums, and Neil Peart was on a guitar (bass?). Geddy was shirtless and hella ripped, with big frizzy red hair (like a FAR cooler carrot top), and energetically playing drums with a grin on his face. Neil had long black hair that kinda reminded me of Slash. it draped over one eye, and he put effort into looking mysterious.
2/28
I alternately watched and starred in a scary movie. In a sort of theater building with long halls, I walked to where the show was, around a couple corners in the long hall. A frightened woman was running up behind me as i neared the door. A big, beefy brute thing chased her down and picked her up as I entered, and I felt as though I had narrowly escaped the same. Inside, a sterile environment with circular metallic workstations were scattered about, and people slaved away on assembly tasks at each. The woman who had been caught was among them, working diligently. One group had conspired to sabotage the program with poor workmanship, and as a manufacturing recall was announced for their part over televisions at each station, the conspirators were poisoned with gas clouds from their workstation.
In another room, I saw a waist-high furnace with focused jets of blue flame being used for the refinement of some metal. nearby, a larger metal surface glowed blue with heat like a supersized cigarette lighter. my perspective zoomed out, and i saw a creepy bald guy with a mechanical Borg-style monocle displayed on a large screen, watching over all the workers. i knew then that they were making a nuclear fission bomb to promote cult objectives through terrorism.
went to lunch with michael, where he explained that he wasn't sure he could take me on a trip (a polite way of saying he didn't want to) because he had talked with his new roommate and they had decided there was some problem with me. we discussed a disagreement, and i explained my heuristic for giving myself greater authority in uncertainty. he asked me, if one person called a disputed object an orange and the other person called it an apple, who is right? I answered that if I could tell him what kind of orange it was, that greater wealth of information was my claim to the truth. implying disagreement, he proposed age as another cue to authority in uncertainty, and i rejected this flatly. we walked up to his apartment on the 13th floor of a high rise, and he unlocked the door while going to an external multi-stall restroom. i opened his apartment door, couldn't see a trash can for all the rinds from the fruit we'd eaten, and decided to go dump it out in the restroom instead. when i did, i heard him say from his stall, "That was low." Then he told me a quick anecdote of something he knew a jazz player did once, and said it always seemed sort of "low" to him. I asked him sharply, "If I dumped it here because I didn't want to go into your apartment without you, knowing that your roommate has some kind of problem with me, is it still low?" He said, "I don't want to answer that," and I replied, "That's fine, I know the answer anyway." We walked out, I asked him where the staircase was, and walked away from him, to a broad staircase that descended multiple levels at a time. A woman was walking up the far side of it.
3/3
browsing titles at a video store, a number of ceiling-high shelves had entire anime series available, one box per episode, so a series looked like about 30 boxes rather than 4-6. i got to the end of the series section and looked at individual titles, and saw one called "michelle." i started reading from a computerized catalogue about all their other options, and Prerna came along. she noted that one option was called michelle, and another "michelener." I jokingly read the description for "Megan's Body," saying it would probably turn out to be about a Michelle too. i started visualizing the movie, which instead was about a blonde woman who didn't know she had killed her therapist and other people by turning into a werewolf. she came home to her boyfriend, who chastized her about having so many "imaginary scars" which were actually fresh scabs from a night of fighting and assaulting. she blew him off, and they laid in bed, which was like mine here. when friends came to pick her up for an event where she had to appear publicly for someone, she pulled on a pair of jeans and met them. they asked if she was ready, and she said she was. she started to talk about bringing her boyfriend along, but then came up with a reason to say he had said he was going to a store to pick something up instead, and couldn't come. she looked coolly over her shoulder at him as she excused him from being able to come along.
3/5
i had a room in the back of a large house, and brought my laundry out to the living room, left it on the couch, and sat down. i got up and went to the kitchen, where a new roommate, a blond guy, was cooking. i had the impression that he was a little spoiled, albeit nice. his parents were paying for him, and i felt he wouldn't have such a good place if he wasn't relying on his parents. he had three burners going on the gas range, one of which was very high with nothing on it. katie was apparently my roommate, as she came home and commented, "You're burning a lot of air in there." a brief debate followed about whether one could really burn air, since it turns into carbon dioxide. the blond guy said he believed one couldn't burn rosemary either, at which point i jokingly chimed in, "I'm sure you could incinerate it if you really wanted to." He replied, "The recipe doesn't call for that." He might've understand and have been replying in jest, or he might've been a little dull: i'm not sure which.
3/6
watching a talk show set in a bar with a middle-aged gray-haired tv actor as guest: when a song came on in the background that the guest didn't request, he got up to leave and started walking around shaking the hands of all the production crew before shaking hands with the hosts.
after a show (the above one?) ended that i was watching with my parents in their living room, the next one that came on was one i liked to watch, but my parents didn't care for, and my dad began complaining. it was a fast-talking, tongue-in-cheek anime-style show, and i thought, if it weren't for the style of the voice-acting and script, it would be just another power rangers knockoff. as i watched the intro, it made its concept fairly fascinating: characters used cards to summon objects, like a ramp on a slope and a large wrecking ball, or a sword from a weapon shop. he threw the card up in the air, and caught the sword as it appeared and descended into his outstretched hand. then the theme changed to little glowing red orbs that one fed to a pet rat, that began a dull grey, and as fed turned colors to a shinier silver with glowing eyes and more intelligent movement. i knew it would change to white and other odd colors as it was fed further. it began playing with one orb with its tail in the hallway of my parents' house outside our bedrooms. i woke up thinking about how the rats could "evolve" humanoid hands.
i also dreamt of having lost an illegally owned tiger in a big city (a la Hangover), and being unable to recover it (what are ya gonna do, call the cops?), and having to abandon a car at an empty intersection out in the boonies (like around Scandia), and dumping out into my coin purse a roll of change given to me by joe graciolett, just thinking i could pay him back with a bigger bill (like i had Prerna for taco bell yesterday), and watching Jackie Chan in the filming of a movie where he had to do a very high flip and land flat on his back, then still kick a guy's ass while lying down. he was clearly in REAL pain after the flip, but pulled it off otherwise.
3/7
looked at an "evolution of 'hair down there'" diagram for butt mustaches. a friend told me he had seen the real thing.
in a kitchen, hugged my cousin elizabeth and kissed her on the cheek. we were having a conversation about something.
david & michelle talked about moving to a different shack behind the Getaway, and stats problems. i joined in on the one that had to do with relationships and kids, and said i wouldn't want too many kids (implying a max of 4 or so, less than the 9 we talked about once upon a time), because i'd never have time outside taking care of them and my job for the things i like to do, or even a full night's sleep. michelle argued for having a deeper life experience with more children.
i came back from this talk to where my parents were waiting in the car for me on a snowy street in a residential neighborhood like in Minneapolis. i went past for a bit to retrieve things i thought i'd left just up the block from where they were parked (i thought i left something on the side of the street somewhere?), then realized i had everything, and turned back to get in the car with them. i talked to my mom about how i must not be happy because every dream i have is a discontent one about work or women or just something generally uncomfortable.
3/11 - wasn't drunk for this one, just had to recover it from my keylogger, and didn't feel like fixing it.
had estherplayinga a drinstats study game with may, and she guessed two thinkgs that i pcouldpn't previously,: a dthe re rela drinking wheel, and a fancy work fd pertaining to a weird wine bottle that i couldn't rpronnounce properly.
driving out t o somewhere tin on thlike on the west bank, took a wrong turn and that i had taken before and had to turn around in a resnowy residential area
working late in the lab, dan came in and we talked. and agreed. he shook my hand, and i asked him to turn on the light on hi s way out. he did, but it torurned off again right away.
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prerna had friends over who khad known her friend who died in the crash.l they were going to sleep with us. i think i had to leave ffor one of the other dream reasons , but acame back later.
i was in bednaked , and heard them coming in. one friend was naked, gave some idea of they'd had, and got in wit bed with me. i think we made out,. a, cuz i couldn't see prerna coming, but i heard her voice, and she joined us briefly. then the friends left, and we followed on f in cars,oot. one car had a problem we could hear, and i was felt like i was doing a walk of shame because i had put one glove on and was otherwise looking disheveled walking along a streetbusy .
3/13
attending a departmental mini-conference / seminar in a museum. brown-bag-style presentations given in a small room with glass walls behind the audience and in front of the presenter, and rows of tables just in from the wall where people would sit around the presenter's open space in the middle, like in Goldman. I presented, and it went fairly well. i was with Prerna, and as her presentation went well, Dr. Murray said something sly to me about waiting for her next presentation to indicate that she would be admitted. My advisor presented (?), and Dr. Murray presented, but as she did she was interrupted by an announcement over the high-school-style loudspeakers. at first she tried to keep everyone's attention by talking over the announcement, then froze in place with her attention-getting expression as she realized that the announcement was too important to ignore. at some point i got up and wandered around the museum to check out the sights. one room with statues had a couple suited mob-lookin' kinda guys in it standing toward the back arguing with one another. i turned around and returned after going much further. when I did, I saw Dr. Ozer sitting with his arm around a blonde woman sitting next to him. [i had thought briefly before going to bed about how i admired his intelligence, but pitied his seeming loneliness.]
3/14
as one of three people at a special meeting for the GSA, i had special information on a project to add a diagonal corner of green space to a rectangular driving space like a parking lot circling a smaller rectangular space inside. the idea was to get people to turn without causing traffic pileup and driver confusion. being the only person who'd attended the special meeting who was present at the present meeting, i found myself in a position to answer confusion when the topic came up. as i finished describing what had to be done, i added a little personal advocacy off the top of my head from the point of view that it was a no-brainer because this configuration was used at the other 3 corners already. after finishing my impromptu presentation, budget issues came up, and i said i didn't know, but then remembered i had the budget info printouts in my backpack and went for them. it was rather confusing.
after that, May was present, and i overheard her in a conversation with others responding quizzically when told she should pick a codename for their project. i begged her facetiously to take the codename Deathstrike. she didn't get it, and i thought of where i knew the name from to explain. i thought of it as the name of a character from G. I. Joe.
i imagined Deathstrike as an assassin dressed in a red bodysuit with black circling designs around his eyes. (probably a ripoff of some Marvel universe villain.) he dropped in from the sky with two small parachutes attached to his shoulders over a large orange canyon to an isolated compound. he used two pistols to shoot grappling hooks and reel himself in Batman-style for an acrobatic landing. his mission was to assassinate the Venture brothers (and probably Rusty Venture too). He snuck up on Dean and tranquilized him with a dart from his gun while alone, and carried his unconscious body to an isolated, raised platform with bars he circumnavigated gymnastically. the ploy was to lure the others out while they searched for Dean. being incompetent as usual, they moved unpredictably within the main house, and Deathstrike hid and waited. having dropped in with no resources, he suffered from hunger. as the two targets left the building, he went to a transparent glass shower out on the edge of the compound from which he could see the others' movement inside the house...and he took a shower. it felt like he really needed it...and maybe he'd been waiting a long time already. anyway, as he showered, he saw Dean walking back through the house alone, inexplicably naked and in a daze. Deathstrike maneuvered in through the bathroom in the back of the house.
3/17
i finished a project for my lab. Dan told me he was happy with my progress, that he'd doubted me in the past, but i had erased his concern, and that i could consider him a friend. Prerna invited him to a small concert by a local metal band held inside a random room of a school building. we all went, including michael. later, back in my lab, michael questioned some of my work, and i dismissed him. Dan told me Prerna had invited him to something else, and he had some misgivings about the last band. we had also signed up for a 5-mile race, and were told by Faye that everyone else had dropped out. Dan made some comment expressing doubt about the outcome, and to indicate I wouldn't be much competition, I told him I'd never ran 5 miles before. he joked, "Thank you for signing up!" to run against him. I envisioned a rather fancy body suit I would be given to run in...it looked a bit like the padded suits worn for riding motorcycles. I looked out the back window of my parents' house, and saw path markers set up that led straight through the back yard and across the lake. I realized we had those suits for running through such obstacles as 4-foot-deep water.
I went to a bathroom in a school building that had no doors on any of the many stalls. I was wearing my blue robe, and pulled it closed in front of me. a nervous asian guy came in a door, looked around, and with a blank face, stuttered about how none of the stalls had any doors. I suggested looking for another bathroom (or maybe just using this one, since I was done and no one else was there?)
3/20
a female friend had turned all my clothes white by mixing things improperly while doing the laundry. i wanted to be repaid for the damage, negotiated this with her, and she grew increasingly uncooperative until refusing altogether. i talked to another mutual friend who shared responsibility (by being in the same organization?) who gave me an acceptable deal in agreeing to remunerate me in some limited way.
playing a virtual reality battle game with Wii-like controllers, i was confronted by a egyptian temple guard lookin' kinda enemy who threatened me by twirling a staff that had round mace heads on both ends. i didn't have to fight him then, but i knew i would later, so i tried to figure out how to dodge his attacks by dodging left or right, punch-out style.
kellen split from our group of friends and went to a weightlifting room. i followed, and tried to find a bench press, but was confused by the few of the machines that looked vaguely appropriate. kellen might've been using the normal one.
3/21
a large gymnasium-like room had levels of seats all up the walls stacked on top of each other, with just enough space in between levels to sit down beneath the next. a large parliament-like council filled the seats. i was climbing up the outside of them to a space on the top row when i heard a speaker acting like a game show host, posing a question about the purpose of psychoanalysis. seeing confused glances and silence among the council after he asked, i gave my own definition, willfully relating it to issues of identity, as well as the more obvious matters of examining how a patient's patterns of behavior developed through life experience. after answering there was a brief pause, and the council applauded me as i stoically took my seat.
seated on a high level of a building with an odd staircase winding up (or down from?) the side wall to my platform near an object i had to protect, i waited for a kunoichi (who looked like the captain skin from BattleStations!) to invade past the guards toward the front of the building, and talked to a less experienced guard next to me about useful things one could do to help repel the invasion long before she reached our level. when i saw her fighting guards on the ground outside through the door of the building, i threw my six shuriken wildly and inaccurately, knowing she would withdraw and i would get a chance to go retrieve them before the next round of attacks when she might make it closer to my level. most shuriken greatly missed her, but one nearly hit an allied guard she was fighting at the time.
3/23
I was staying in a large Vegas-like hotel in Florida for a conference. Again there were large stairs or escalators, and I had to carry a lot of food down them, because when it was time to return home I had a lot of food we didn't use up still in the hotel refrigerator. I enjoyed the hot, humid weather, and made a negative comment about returning to a cooler California. I think Kellen was there again too, sharing my room, among others. At some point I was also called down to a space at the back of an indoor stage or performance area where the ceiling was lower than out in the seating area, kind of like the bar area of the casino Dr. Murray invited Prerna and I to. In this space I waited for my name to be called, and received a large manila parcel like the UCR campus mail envelopes.
3/24
opened up a new two-pack of toothbrushes that were made different for use in the afternoon and night. one had softer bristles to avoid causing soreness from brushing twice in the day, and the other had a more fancy design for more thorough cleaning at night. i just took the softer, simpler one.
i was in a gymnasium with high ceilings like at meadow lake elementary, with cafeteria tables set up throughout, and a lot of people milling around in cornflower blue jumpsuits with white shirts underneath. i understood that we were all waiting to be euthanized for whatever reason, and didn't particularly mind. i was walkin around with a friend, and decided to throw away a tiny pumpkin-colored "weapon" shaped like a mushroom. as i did, my friend panicked and tried to stop me, but was too late, as i'd already thrown it. as i walked away, i saw an explosion of fire rolling at me from underneath the tables. i saw it in slow motion, and dove into a corner with my arms over my head to brace for the impact of the explosion. i think my little mushroom thingy was an explosive too.
i got up and stood at the door of the room, which was in a large cargo jet that was now going for a crash landing. my friend and i tried to get the parachuting gear together to jump. this included something resembling a riot police gas mask. i remarked to my friend that i had never expected to skydive in my life, but knew that he already had. as i tried to get everything together, i looked out the door and realized we were already skimming the ground over a highway and there was no time to jump. i braced for the landing as the plane slid to an absurdly smooth (it even surprised me in my dream) crash landing along the highway, through a fence at the end of a T junction near an overpass, and up a grassy hill. once we had come to a halt, I grabbed what i thought would be useful from the emergency escape equipment, and left with my friend. we walked along residential streets resemblin San Francisco near Golden Gate Park, and i wondered if anyone would come after us. i may have talked with my friend about this. i/we concluded that it was doubtful anyone would care enough to look for us. [it was all kinda like being a waste product of human manufacturing, to be disposed of as a matter of efficiency but not worth tracking down for any reason.]
3/26
I was writing a book about a young man's childhood. It was a little somber throughout, but had a somewhat optimistic direction. It ended with a passage about his father harvesting trees the father planted and managed the growth of.
In my parents' basement, next to the door to the back yard, a thin, completely straight branch as tall as me from a pine tree was propped up against the wall. It had a bunch of needles about 3 feet long attached to the very end that hung down along the side of the branch. I cut these off where they attached to the branch, then thought twice about it, and reattached them by pressing them back on where i'd cut them off. I thought they would slowly heal and continue to grow.
I had carefully chosen a song to fit the end, as though it would be adapted to a play or movie and have credits. [This was undoubtedly inspired by the episode of Moral Orel named after a song by the Mountain Goats, "No Children."] When I woke up I thought of it as Paul McCartney's modern version of Let It Be [which had also been on TV about 2 days ago], but I don't think that was the song...
3/30
a super-monster guy went on a rampage, smashing a guy with a long coat and long silver hair into the ground, capturing a woman and doing the hentai thing with her.
kyle and kenny were arguing over who should dive through a sewer grate into greenish/brownish/black muck. kyle threatened to fight kenny over it. at some point i took kyle's perspective, and argued that if kenny were a man he'd just volunteer to do it himself. he went over to a larger square pool of the muck on a hill overlooking a playground, jumped in, and was swallowed up. i watched a small trail of bubbles cross the surface after a few seconds of waiting, but nothing else happened.
4/10
inside a big, dimly lit building with a rectangular dirt floor in the middle, i looked around. all the walls had small rooms in them, where people that seemed to be something like tribal circus performers slept. some were rooms with modest furniture separated by a white drape from the platform walkways extending out from the walls circling the open middle area. others were simply deep, dirt-floored cubbyholes about 3 square feet in size that entered at various heights into the walls. i was a lanky Nubian-lookin' guy. i looked inside one of the ground-floor rooms that i understood to be mine first, then considered one of the smaller holes. I saw a young boy come out from behind a large curtain in the wall to the right.
i lowered myself slowly and quietly to the floor level (i was on the third) by hanging off the edge and carefully dropping down. i came down next to the queen of the tribe, who was sitting next to a small campfire and talking to a small crowd. she selected me as a bodyguard and offered me an armband signifying the position.
back on the third level, an asian samurai-lookin' guy in white and blue expressed his resentment and doubt to his wife about the queen's decision to trust a strange foreign newcomer with such responsibility.
sitting at a table like the circular one in BJ's with various people including Troy from "Community," i asked what everyone was ordering. Troy was ordering a medium pizza, and the guy sitting between us a small one. When the waiter guy came by, I ordered a full pizza, and was told the kind i asked for would take extra cooking phases for the bell peppers and meat. i asked what the others were getting on their pizzas, hoping to talk them into sharing a bigger one with me. Troy was getting "everything" on his, except a few weird ingredients.
4/11
variations on themes from the Trailer Park Boys, which I'd watched throughout the previous day.
slept an extra couple of hours trying to remember them, but forgot as soon as I woke up. seems appropriate.
4/12
sitting at a restaurant with wide glass windows kind of like the McDonald's we all stopped at on the way to disneyland with Michelle and her friends nearby...talking about moving to new places...she offered to give me a ride, but i walked instead. went up to Elliott Hall through the odd side entrance, and walked around on the top floor looking for the men's bathroom. saw the label "men" outside a number of rooms where cognitive psychologists were working, and guessed they must be moving the signs around as a joke.
4/13
walked around a strange neighborhood carrying a beautiful but absurdly scrawny woman around in some impossible way having bizarre sex all the way down a hill to a grassy area with a tree full of cobwebs cousins' wedding photos pimpin black guy
walked through a gated neighborhood harassed by a soccer mom tried to cancel out of a code-entry system threatened to talk to the mayor about me went through back streets quickly to a hill that let out onto a larger street a black guy in a black car that vaguely resembled an undercover cop passed, then reversed up to me. he asked if i was going to a city whose name i couldn't understand. he said it was the place where some ongoing event had been taking place. (Student riots?) i admitted i was completely out of touch with the news. he then asked if I was going to California instead, and I said I was from there. [Must've been in MN at the time..?]
had to climb into an empty room above a plain hallway [kind of like the indoor decor of Portal]. had to push past a relatively weak person [a woman?] standing in my way by first getting my hands inside the doorsill and then one foot after the other. i dreamt of it as an analogy to a dungeon in a Legend of Zelda game, heard the creepy "there's enemies about that don't see you" music, and thought also of the music that played when fighting enemies that had detected me [kind of a more somber music that was otherwise in the spirit of the "outdoor world" music] and the silence that would fall when enemies in the area had been defeated.
had to travel from california to minnesota brian warp elevator room instructed to stand around the person with the lowest hit points (which I effectively disregarded), and i knew to hold my luggage around me to assure it would be transported british accents to chicago door leading to flight near the top of an escalator. sat in middle row of what must've been a 747 that was crowded with business commuters. saw Howard Friedman's recent travel documents, which showed him doing the same roundabout travel to somewhere domestic by getting long layovers in exotic locations [including Cairo and/or locations in India or Southeast Asia?]. Friedman was there, laughing with a wide grin.
[at other points i can't properly fit in chronologically]:
encountered the woman, "Alex Janusonis[sp?]," who seemed to be based on Aletta Ocean.
sat out in the cold on a dark porch eating breakfast by myself, when someone else came out and interrupted me.
Measuring personal values: An evaluation ofalternative methods
ants were coming into my room at my parents' house, and no one was home. there were zombies outside somewhere, so i had to plan carefully to escape quietly to a neighbor's house a few doors up West Meadow Lake Rd.
i called Sarah Klein and got no answer. her boyfriend called back and left a message in an odd European accent saying i should come over because he wanted to meet me and hear more about some psychological ideas of interest.
some major disaster was happening/going to happen/had happened [earthquake?], so everyone had to relocate to a different part of town. i drove at first through streets crowded with children crossing haphazardly, driving carefully but a bit pushy (i sort of expected people to move for the big car). a a black female crossing guard in uniform said to me, "you don't have to run them over."
further on, i was biking up a street that was still crowded with people on the sidewalk. i reached a heavy wooden door in a wall at the end of the street, and went through it to find crowds of people taking refuge. i navigated the seated crowds, looking for people i knew and intended to meet. strangers waved to other people, and i waved to quite a few people I knew. i saw Sheri Selton, then Liz Selton, and passed by until i found stadium seating to climb. I searched the empty top rows for my misfit friends, and saw Kellen waving to me off to the side.
4/20
planned to meet with Ozer after going to a movie theater. was late and saw him walking out with my laptop in hand.
went to the theater late to meet with Prerna and friends. saw her car on the way in after passing another red car [like the one i'd seen outside her condo the previous day]. couldn't find the particular room in the theater that i was looking for on the second floor, which was high above the first floor, so I descended a large staircase or escalator and walked out. as i was walking through the parking lot, Josh Koscheck ran out ahead looking pissed off. other guys chased after him, yelling to him as if to keep him from losing his temper. he detonated a bomb in the theater, and ran. the other guys and i ran with him. they pulled out assault rifles, fell prone into some grass underneath a parked trailer truck, and started shooting at people coming into the lot. off to the side, i fell into the grass as well and watched them. one guy with a rifle watched me out of the corner of his eye as he shot at others. i saw my car in the lot, but feared being shot if i ran to it. i waited for the rifleman to turn away from me so i could make a dash for the car, but the military showed up and shot the riflemen lying in the grass. [i disassociated with the man waiting to run at this point.] the man waiting to run was also shot once, having been mistaken for a rifleman. he now wore camouflage and face paint, and lay face up in the grass while the military swooped in to take him prisoner. a black woman with bleached brown hair tied back ran up and told them he was a friend of hers and a bystander.
the next moment, the man was standing in a room surrounded by his friends. he had bronze-black skin and spiky hair. [this had become a scene in the movie.]
4/23
i was lookin to meet with Ozer, and saw him go into the men's bathroom. I went to my dorm room to get dressed, and a woman peeked in accidentally while i was putting my pants on. a while later, she came back with someone else and knocked on the door. it sounded like this other person was supposed to move into my room, and I wondered if I had overstayed the period of time for which I had rented the room. [Dr. Murray and I moved Prerna out the previous day.]
I woke up at my parents'. They took care of me for a day, and I played video games and asked if I could stay. they teased with mock uncertainty. around 2 AM I realized Prerna was still at my place waiting to move her crap.
4/25
as an army dude on leave, sex with a relatively unattractive redhead. lots of other weird army things i can't remember.
walking around in a casino, i passed many of my colleagues, went down an escalator, and saw Erik Jensen at the front of a line for a fried food he claimed was really good [as in the episode of Community I'd watched with Prerna two days ago].
watched a movie with pretty badass music, and stayed through the credits. i saw credits for the music go to Colin Shull and someone else whose name I didn't recognize, and said, "I know that guy!" i turned and saw him there in the theater, and congratulated him on his work. he relayed a story of once having stayed so late at a theater that he had to pay again in the morning.
4/26
dreamt Hokey had actually become a great band after I left, and had an album out that I hadn't listened to for a long time, but immediately loved when I did listen to it.
4/29
sitting on a couch in a room with Prerna and another thin woman with long black hair. the other complained about her outfit having some protruding features placed directly over her nipples. Prerna asked if she should complain to Ed about it [implying this woman was May, despite the lack of physical resemblance], and I thought that unnecessary since her relationship with Ed was over. i was trying to work, but Prerna asked me if I wanted a BJ now, or some other thing and the BJ later. i thought I'd better take it now before something else came between us and her intention to deliver, and touched her labia as i decided to take my indulgence immediately. [Then I woke up to the alarm reminding me I'd skipped class because dogs had prevented me from getting enough sleep even with the extra hour. Reality BITES.]
4/30
trying to think of exceptions to some rule, and a flashback followed in which Andy from the Office moved up next to a blonde woman (nicer than Angela, sort of like a cross between her and Pam?) who was standing in a stadium row at a concert. She was wearing a white dress with spaghetti straps, and Andy was wearing a white towel that was wrapped around his chest below his arms, as if to appear similar to her outfit in the most awkward way imaginable. he got the woman's attention, and moved to embrace her. oddly enough, she hugged him and laid her head on his chest. it occurred to me that Andy had surprisingly good muscle tone in his arms. i understood that nothing came of this outside of the concert, but that it was merely a moment of closeness they shared in this public yet private setting outside of their usual environment. [i'd watched a new episode yesterday involving Michael being surprised by a kiss from a woman who publicly shunned him.]
5/2
a girl was in my shower, and I had to bring her something like clothes or a wet towel. she said something that struck me as a little discomforting or unappreciative, so i made a jibe defensively about how she now insisted on showering without me. there was reason to mention my landlady, but neither of us could remember her name.
i remembered "Michelle" as i was driving in an area resembling Brooklyn Center, north of the mall by the Best Buy and theater.
both Prerna and a particular kind of bird were passing through my neighborhood, and I was concerned they wouldn't stop at my place for a visit. i was concerned with why Prerna wasn't talking to me. [i'd just sent her an email hoping to hear from her in CO yesterday.]
5/5
i'd bought the last thing i needed off the BattleStations! market and completed my work amassing a fortune in the game, so i cancelled my account. i went to meet Jim at a pizza restaurant, and had to rush to get a room at a nearby hotel that was closing, since he had nowhere to stay.
i had to use a bathroom, but the two i usually used in my house were occupied, so I went back into an area of the house i hadn't visited before, because i thought it was a bedroom. i walked past mirrored closets, and checked out the room of my impressively artistic female roommate with black hair. it was blacklit and featured a lot of impressive paintings, including one of a woman. i realized a third bathroom in this area was available and not a part of her bedroom. [incidentally, i'm writing this as nature is banging on my back door because both bathrooms have been full for over 10 minutes. damn roommates.]
5/7
someone was showing a movie inside their house. this was a big deal due to some kind of movie prohibition.
i was at a conference with Jim. we signed up to attend a symposium that otherwise might've been cancelled, and expressed possible interest in another by writing "prompted" next to it [whatever that means]. Michael had signed up for a few of them as well. i said i was also tempted to sign up for pizza hut in a list of pizza deliverers [had just gone out for pizza with May the previous day]. Ozer and Funder were standing nearby, and i overheard Ozer saying to Funder that his symposium wouldn't be cancelled because we signed up.
later, i heard him talking in the middle of a large conference hall, first at the front of a poster session, and then from the middle of the audience seated in folding chairs. he was presenting as though it were a symposium based on a poster I had forgotten to do, and he said my poster wasn't there as one of his opening remarks, and mentioned it repeatedly. I struggled to remember what the poster abstract had been, pondered why i'd forgotten when I'd already done a poster for SPSP earlier in the year [this was apparently another SPSP in the spring], and wondered why he was talking with a corded microphone from such an awkward position amongst everyone else rather than up at the front of a room. i later read my abstract, which referenced a lot of possible topics but lacked focus on any one.
i left, and said i was going home. i got on a flight very quickly, and when i arrived, I hung out in the living room of a house with Penny Peterson for a while, then called my parents from this home in california. [the room and couch seemed a lot like the old layout of my parents' house in MN, but slightly different outside, as if it were sunny like CA and perhaps on a ground level with palm trees nearby.] as i was apologizing to them for not having stopped by before I left for CA, May called in reality, and I woke up saying out loud that I had to take this call and would call them back.
I visited Prerna in a dorm-style apartment. she changed clothes outside in the hallway, surprising me with her comfortability. Seems she was a blonde white girl for some reason.
5/9
I was called away from playing a multiplayer strategy game online. I left my army blocking my allies' access to the ultimate objective, which pissed them off to no end. when i returned, i saw a bunch of angry messages they'd left for me.
in a room sort of like a theater for a play, i left a small "castle" and headed to another one that was closed. these were the scale of castles on an RPG world map, so barely bigger than me. i then went to a dilapidated castle with a broken door, against the warning of a voice of an unknown origin. i saw a glade to the right where the moon (looked flat, as if it was painted on a wall) was shining onto a spot on the ground. i understood that if i stood in the light it would allow me to escape, but as i reached it, i turned and saw a werewolf pouncing on me. i'd arrived at the light too late, and the screen (my "vision") went red as i was hit.
i came to in a shack at the end of a pier in a tropical coastal environment. knowing i was a werewolf, i considered (heard a voice suggesting?) i transform into a wolf to pass the guards outside without arousing their suspicion. [somehow a wolf is less suspicious than a dude. i guess this was all too goofy for me to take seriously, so at this point it became a game.]
i saw logos for the game title screen. it was called "Ibushi No," which i understood as meaning ninja. [even though "ninja" means ninja, and ibushi apparently means "fumigation / oxidation of metal"...] it was a war game, perhaps like Dynasty Warriors. I read the manual, and saw that i was one of four characters, each of which could transform. the second one rode a white tiger, and could transform into it himself [a little pointless?], and the third was an archer woman who could transform into a blue-skinned water sprite type thing. can't remember #4, other than a theme of green...
I realized i was late for my art class with Ms. Choksondik (not sure if this was just the students' nickname for her, or her actual name), but didn't care. it was the only class i had at 11 AM on Monday, and i didn't like it. it was in a location like the IT room of Hosterman.
I saw David Wight returning to a house with Michelle. Michelle ran out in a loose white dress to put a parcel in the mailbox. I watched from down the street, and saw into their bedroom as David took his shirt off. he actually did have a pretty good physique after all.
5/11
somehow had Nikki Perkins in my car. dunno if i was doing her a favor driving her somewhere, or if we were on a date...but we parked at her destination, and she leaned over to kiss me. i was a bit flabbergasted, and after she got out, i rolled down my window and told her something about how i'd always wanted to do that. she answered my awkwardness with a smile.
we headed out somewhere together along a highway resembling 394W. i drove, and she rode a bike. Harper Jones-Hermending (sp?) also followed along in a big SUV (i got the feeling he was angry...but i also thought of him as Nikki's brother at the time). at some point (around where 394 turns north into 169?) i felt odd about it, and got out to offer to ride the bike and let her drive. she agreed, and impressed me with her nimbleness in doing something.
i had to deliver something to someone in a hospital. i arrived at what i thought was a backdoor entrance. i had Jim on the phone, and asked him if I could get to the room i meant to go to by coming in that way. he gave one of his characteristically dumb, nonchalant answers with no informational value, so i decided to go in and try it. around the corner of the narrow entryway, a receptionist sat at a counter behind a glass window built into the wall next to the door leading inside. i approached to show her the parcel and explain where i needed to go.
i had to give someone tips on how to recognize a middle-aged woman who'd dyed her hair blonde, wore too much makeup, and dressed younger than she looked.
5/13
someone was nervous about moving into a house. a woman shooed visitors away, and an adolescent laid in bed worried. he'd opened a container that had once held a small demon (or some part of it), and had allowed the humanly imperceptible smell of the demon's blood, which had infused the surface of the container, to escape and permeate the area, attracting others.
my mom had a number of animal cages stacked on top of one another in the garage (configured like my garage in CA). at first there was only one with a bird in it, but when i came back to check on it, there were multiple cages. the one on the bottom had a bunch of different snakes in it with their species names written sloppily on the outside. one was an aquarium with a little miniature shark swimming around in it. i noticed the bird's cage had flooded, and saw the bird coming to the surface for air. alarmed, i asked my mom what the heck was going on with the cages, and she explained about the different snakes. she drained the bird cage. it looked like the bird was giving a live birth (with no egg).
5/15
sleeping next to Prerna. at first she was distant. then she snuggled up next to me, and i held her. i rested my hand on her breast, and she objected.
5/17
i lived in apartments across from a beautiful girl. we'd been seeing each other, and while lying in bed together, i asked her circumspectly about the prospect of continuing to. in a very casual way, she agreed, then said she had to get back to her place. i was a little off-put, but agreed nonchalantly, feeling that i'd just landed a keeper and had to take it slow.
i had to take out a full bag of garbage, and was supposed to take it all the way out of the building, but passed an unattended janitor's trash collection cart and decided to toss mine in as i passed.
a young girl was somehow associated with me through the woman across the hall from me. she was locked out of the woman's apartment, and was frantic because she needed to use the bathroom, so she texted me.
i wound up using a neglected women's bathroom down the hall. i habitually went into the handicapped stall, the floor of which was paradoxically raised a bit off the level of the rest of the room, though it had no door. a janitor came in, and i tried to obscure my chest and look away to make it less obvious that i wasn't a woman. he left immediately, and i moved to another stall, but couldn't get the door latch to shut properly. [dream analysis would say i'm overstepping boundaries and in need of letting out old emotions or frustrations, but am afraid of judgment and criticism. fair enough.]
5/19
I was waiting at the top of the hill at the entrance to the New Hope golf course, and overheard a black policewoman (with a body type resembling the black policewoman from Reno 911) talking on the phone to someone about interesting psychological facts she'd learned recently. she was on the opposite side of the driveway, sitting on the fence a little ways down the hill. she made reference to "means," and asked her listener, "You know what means are right? They've taught you about that?"
another black woman (kind of homely) drove up the hill, harshly chastising her child. then i was in a car with the policewoman, who had also been listening with disdain to the poor mother. she told me that even if she'd caught the woman robbing the place across the street (to which she pointed), she'd have to let her go. amazed, i asked why, and she explained that the jails downtown where she'd be taken were so racist that the woman would be in mortal danger. i asked her if that didn't mean, as it quite plainly did, that the system had failed.
as we drove, we came to a high point in the road overlooking a large, snow-capped, dome-shaped hill resembling something out of Mario 64. i was momentarily amazed at the deeply crevassed landscape. feeling sheepish for my wonderment, i explained to the policewoman that i was used to sitting around in a suburb where the landscape was hilly, but not as dramatically so. at the mention of my suburban roots, she smirked briefly. I asked if we were on the way out toward St. Cloud, as I recognized the [ironically, counterfactually hilly] landscape as being on the way out there, and she confirmed this.
we came to a jail, and i followed her deeper inside inside through heavy, swinging double doors. i asked coyly if i should wait on a wooden stool next to the doors, where arrows and words on the wall indicated one should wait for processing (whether as a visitor or a prisoner, i'm not sure). without being particularly amused, she said no, and that i should (could?) follow her instead. she talked to a clerk who sat behind a desk built into the wall immediately through the double doors, and he handed her a boxed pizza. i half-expected to be offered a slice, not out of obligation, but because the policewoman seemed very agreeable in general. [i woke up after the following dream craving a fudge pop tart, though i'd not had one in a long time.]
on the field outside Meadow Lake Elementary School, I realized that instead of walking regularly, I could move instantly adjacent to other people on the field (as if by holding the Ctrl button while pressing arrow keys to move amongst words in text). i tried and failed to make it work with distant people, but managed to move up next to another person near an ongoing game of soccer. i was careful to avoid getting in the middle of the game, but now managed to move instantly to the edges of the field, up to the corner of Boone and 60th St. beyond the school itself, and over to the area by the far eastern basketball court and bleachers near the baseball diamond. i returned to the people by the soccer game, and called out for people to play "catch the birdie." i became a small sparrow, and did my teleportation routine over to the sidewalk along Boone outside the parking lot again. lying on the sidewalk, i flapped my wings and chirped like an immature bird, appearing unable to walk or fly. my only pursuer was a baby in a diaper, who crawled after me on all fours. i led the baby on, moving ahead with the teleportation trick (that no longer seemed to require an object to reference as a destination), and thought of leading the baby into the street where it might be run over. my inner, semi-lucid voice spoke to say not to do so, but my sparrow-self moved at an angle, leading the baby into the street as trucks passed by. i then saw the baby at the wheel of a car that drove by. i turned and proceeded back down the sidewalk toward the field, half-expecting to hear a crash behind me. [i woke up thoroughly disturbed, with the Doors' "The End" in my head. I'd listened to it in the shower before sleeping.]
5/21
got lost in a big country club type compound looking for friends/colleagues who'd wandered off. passed through a room with people taking a drawing class, and a fancy buffet. went to use a bathroom, but found an old woman's purse and gloves (like the red ones I bought for Prerna) sitting outside. an old authoritarian woman (like the boss from the episode of The Office that I'd just watched before bed) was complaining about having to kick someone out.
my dad was interviewed on camera about a "flame from Philadelphia that burned in New Hope," akin to the olympic torch I suppose. the interview later made it onto national news, and when it came on, it was at first a clip of Jon Stewart from the Daily Show, but when my dad came on, i woke up saying, "I recognize that guy" aloud.
5/23
Mr. Lizard grew so big that he started sitting on top of the binder. his nose elongated to look a little more gar-like. one day he stood up tall enough to climb out of the cage right in front of me. i had trouble catching him too.
Michael was troubled about something, and sat outside just up a hill while the sun set. i talked with him for a while, and went in to make breakfast [maybe the sun was rising? probably not, given my schedule], asking indirectly whether i should come back outside with it. while inside, i heard michael talking through the windows, so i opened the kitchen window and listened. he said he had come to be viewed as the one in the lab with expertise on rural lifestyles and personalities due to personal experience. he seemed to think Ozer both overestimated and pigeonholed him in this way.
when i came inside, i asked my dad, who was sitting in his grey armchair at the back of his living room where it used to be why the sun hadn't gone down all night. he said it had gone down for a little while, but i pointed out that it was still odd that the sky was bright in the early hours of the morning (the 2-4 AM range i think).
a black mailwoman came inside to ask me if we were the proper recipients for postcards addressed to someone with an African name. i was tired, and didn't want to be bothered with it, but talked to my parents and made sure everybody agreed that they weren't ours and should be returned to sender. i said it was too bad we couldn't recycle them, as there was something good about everything being postcards. my mom was sorting things on a table, and had a large pile of green twist ties that were tangled up. i untangled a few.
celebrities appeared on a talk show dressed up as 18th-century historical figures and Hank & Peggy Hill. one of the 18th-century types squirted a slice of something like a grapefruit at the other 18th-century type across the table, and someone else retaliated by throwing another piece of food he also happened to bring as a joke.
a story of people going to a large festival like woodstock was intermittently interrupted by advertisements for things the characters were wearing. the third advertisement [and the first one i remember, for obvious reasons] was for a toddler costume that was all black with a white skull face paint design, touted to prevent anyone from questioning the age or admissibility of the wearer. the fourth was for an "air-fro," a hairstyle for midgets that would give them the extra height they needed to get past certain requirements. one proud wearer gave testimony, expressing hope that it would one day become bigger than the afro (in terms of size, not popularity).
5/24
i was sitting in a classroom like in high school, with Steve Clark as the teacher. not sure if i was a student or a TA, but something unreasonable or difficult that I'd made harder on myself had to be done regarding a quiz, paper, or short answer assignment regarding a movie. he later came by outside of class to see me and make sure i knew what to do about it, so i must've been a TA at that point. i acted as though there would be no problems, then started stressing out after he left.
may came to me, and there was some amount of nakedness in bed that followed, but i might've slept or had to grade instead of what two should do under such circumstances. [this might've been after she called and woke me up. in any case, I woke up with Santana's "Evil Ways" in my head...mainly the part about how i can't go on and lord knows you got to change...baby.]
2/2
all quarter, I had skipped two classes (calculus, and english?) i needed to pass to graduate, and a test was coming up in each. i missed one (?), and had little time to prepare for the other. i met outside at a table with Ozer, who told me he was unhappy with how my work didn't seem to express my own interests, and wasn't going anywhere. i was concerned that i couldn't do anything about it and my tests at the same time, but we were interrupted by rude young people sitting across from us who made fun of his seriousness. he ignored it at first, but as they continued, he took notice, got up, and warned them that he would call security on them if they continued. i saw an opportunity to escape immediate accountability for the work that needed to be done. one black girl was particularly defiant, and Ozer went around a corner to access security through Domino's Pizza (the call-security option was right next to all the food options). i warned the girl that she was making a bad move, and she turned aggressive toward me. security came immediately and escorted the disruptive people away. when we resumed talking, i couldn't remember where we had left off, and Ozer reminded me. we didn't get far into the conversation before walking back to where we'd come from.
i later found out one of the boys in the disruptive group was attacked by a bear on his way home, and in uncertain condition. i considered visiting the hospital, and expressed my sympathy for him, thinking he might've avoided it if not for the encounter with security.
i watched a large warrior-like guy with long hair walk with a woman like Kate Beckinsale in Van Helsing through a tunnel of snow and ice. he was wounded, and said he was dying. Prerna watched with me, and said he should make up his mind about dying if he was going to, as apparently he didn't act like it. the woman discouraged him from continuing, and with a stone face he grabbed her leg and dragged her along the floor of the tunnel.
at the end, in a large domed cave of ice, he fell next to a small chest containing a yellow, egg-shaped orb with black blotches and veins, as well as the blue, frozen corpse of a baby vampire, whose head came out of the top of an egg-shaped body that had cracked and split in the cold. instructions for using the heart and reviving it were written on brown paper like Prerna's schedules, but one piece with a series of assonant words to be chanted was deteriorating.
2/8
in vegas (looked more like new york), i was walking along a street. kellum dressed up all fancy and was walking back behind me up the street from an event with jim and lawrence. i heard him talking about how rare an event it was that he was so dressed up and eager to please, and i circled around to the left to surprise him from behind. i wasn't particularly careful, so i think he saw me.
other people i knew from UCR were coming up the street, including Rakel and another girl. i bought a cheap piece of jewelry and hung it where i knew they would see it as they passed. i left a note attached saying it was for the first person who came by, and signed it.
other people i knew went into what looked like an amusement park ride, and i followed. it turned out to be an hour-long personal sauna craft with face stretching and an annoyingly "calming" automated hostess voice.
i got ready for an event in a house with my cousin alex. he was playful in his usual way, and asked me to bring him a beer. i left to change, and said i'd "come back with a beer...for myself!"
at the event, Sonja appeared on an extremely tall display in reds, oranges, and yellows, gloating to the audience over how she could assign whatever she wanted, but wouldn't make it too bad. i whispered to the guy next to me that she was a benevolent dictator. i had my laptop open on my lap, and considered vertically resizing her display like one would a window, when a man came running through aisles as part of an act. i closed my laptop to hide it, and startled the guy next to me in the process, as he was looking at my screen.
i heard an offer for a date with a semi-famous, model-shaped woman on an island through a radio show as i was disembarking from a boat onto the island with a number of other eligible guys who seemed mildly enthusiastic at best. i walked through the forest, dropping down into a crevice with a log crossing the top. i peered into a hole on the side of the rock wall. feeling lost, i climbed out, passed a series of columns set up around a small court, and found myself in an indoor exhibit. as i walked out past the ticket tellers, trying to appear nonchalant so as not to be stopped, i checked for my wallet, and it was missing. i "reset" to my initial position (like in San Francisco Rush) by going to sleep, and woke up with my wallet.
2/9
a young black woman in a yellow dress with a purple fuzzy frill at the bottom was being pursued by police, but had lost them temporarily. as she walked past the entrance to a hotel, a man in the passenger seat of a car called out to her as to a prostitute. she continued on, and took off the dress (wearing a yellow shirt and blue jeans underneath) to look less conspicuous. a friend of hers called to her from the entrance to a shadowy courtyard flanked by trees. she went to him, and met more people she knew, who beckoned her into the courtyard. it was a raised ledge with high fences at the edges, and as she drew near the fences, she saw silhouettes of a SWAT team lined up along the outside of the fence. the police chief and his squad boxed her in from behind, and she begged one of the SWAT team members to pull the mesh fence open and let her run away. hesitating, he did, and the police chief drew his gun on the mutinous man and ordered him to kneel. another officer shouted to the chief not to fire, and the chief lowered his gun toward the mutinous man's head dramatically, saying, "You will address me as SIR!" he fired, deliberately missing the man by an inch (and somehow not ruining his hearing). i had assumed the perspective of another officer at his side, and observing this, remarked to the chief, "That was lame."
2/14
a breakfast of waffles and small lizards from outside (caught fresh off the sidewalk) with my parents.
also found it surprisingly easy to play keyboard and organ along with a couple Yes songs. Travis was on guitar, and had a big bracelet-lookin' cylinder to use for a slide at just the right moment. i was impressed.
2/17
I was followed by two asian guys along a path slightly offset from a road. I turned and walked backward staring at the first one until he passed me. I drew my knife as the second followed closer, and stabbed him shallowly in the stomach as he made his move. I offered to call the police for him, and he nodded, grimacing.
On an island, indigenous people walked in a tightly packed line down curving stairs carved out of the brown earth. someone recounted a story of poorly written textbooks. the entire first chapter of 200+ pages had to be shredded and replaced for mistakes.
2/22
went to see a movie with Ozer, Denton, Lawrence, Kellum, Kate Sweeny, etc. the movie involved Schwarzenegger joining a self-help group and agreeing to go on TV as the 150th person to express interest and confidence in the program. in the few minutes before he was to go on, he talked with the guy heading the movement while standing on top of the playground equipment of Meadow Lake Park. the guy, who resembled Mike Steger, admitted that his program was an ineffective, money-driven hoax. Schwarzenegger ditched the assembled audience, and was later ambushed by a cameraman who asked him what he thought of the program while he was sleeping on a couch. he gave a halfway honest review, doing a poor job of hiding his knowledge of the vapidity of the program. as he was headed home on a jet, he was held up by two women from the program's administration. one held him at gunpoint, and threatened him. she pointed with the gun to the pilot of the jet, and I thought she was going to shoot through Schwarzenegger's shoulder and hit the pilot. instead, she merely told Schwarzenegger that he had to help the pilot, or else. the pilot went unconscious and slumped over to the side, and Schwarzenegger jumped to the rescue. he dove from the plane, and did his aerodynamic fall routine from whatever movie that was to catch up to a little escape-pod plane. his fall was a strangely shallow diagonal glide, and at one point he scraped across the surface of a hill in the road, which dropped away again, allowing him to catch up to the plane and get inside. he piloted it back up to the jet and docked it in the bottom, thus saving the jet (somehow).
i thought the movie was great and "epic." i seemed to have been high though. Ozer had a critical opinion, but I don't remember talking to him. the group of psychology types walked down a hallway, heading the long way toward some destination we all had in common. Lawrence noticed them going the wrong way, and split off to beat them there. I followed, laughing about how he didn't bother to correct anyone. I later met up with Denton, and told him how I had gone camping somewhere with the group. He said he had gone to the same place, which surprised me, but then I remembered seeing him at the movie.
2/23
Watching a Rush concert: Geddy Lee was standing and playing some big electronic drums, and Neil Peart was on a guitar (bass?). Geddy was shirtless and hella ripped, with big frizzy red hair (like a FAR cooler carrot top), and energetically playing drums with a grin on his face. Neil had long black hair that kinda reminded me of Slash. it draped over one eye, and he put effort into looking mysterious.
2/28
I alternately watched and starred in a scary movie. In a sort of theater building with long halls, I walked to where the show was, around a couple corners in the long hall. A frightened woman was running up behind me as i neared the door. A big, beefy brute thing chased her down and picked her up as I entered, and I felt as though I had narrowly escaped the same. Inside, a sterile environment with circular metallic workstations were scattered about, and people slaved away on assembly tasks at each. The woman who had been caught was among them, working diligently. One group had conspired to sabotage the program with poor workmanship, and as a manufacturing recall was announced for their part over televisions at each station, the conspirators were poisoned with gas clouds from their workstation.
In another room, I saw a waist-high furnace with focused jets of blue flame being used for the refinement of some metal. nearby, a larger metal surface glowed blue with heat like a supersized cigarette lighter. my perspective zoomed out, and i saw a creepy bald guy with a mechanical Borg-style monocle displayed on a large screen, watching over all the workers. i knew then that they were making a nuclear fission bomb to promote cult objectives through terrorism.
went to lunch with michael, where he explained that he wasn't sure he could take me on a trip (a polite way of saying he didn't want to) because he had talked with his new roommate and they had decided there was some problem with me. we discussed a disagreement, and i explained my heuristic for giving myself greater authority in uncertainty. he asked me, if one person called a disputed object an orange and the other person called it an apple, who is right? I answered that if I could tell him what kind of orange it was, that greater wealth of information was my claim to the truth. implying disagreement, he proposed age as another cue to authority in uncertainty, and i rejected this flatly. we walked up to his apartment on the 13th floor of a high rise, and he unlocked the door while going to an external multi-stall restroom. i opened his apartment door, couldn't see a trash can for all the rinds from the fruit we'd eaten, and decided to go dump it out in the restroom instead. when i did, i heard him say from his stall, "That was low." Then he told me a quick anecdote of something he knew a jazz player did once, and said it always seemed sort of "low" to him. I asked him sharply, "If I dumped it here because I didn't want to go into your apartment without you, knowing that your roommate has some kind of problem with me, is it still low?" He said, "I don't want to answer that," and I replied, "That's fine, I know the answer anyway." We walked out, I asked him where the staircase was, and walked away from him, to a broad staircase that descended multiple levels at a time. A woman was walking up the far side of it.
3/3
browsing titles at a video store, a number of ceiling-high shelves had entire anime series available, one box per episode, so a series looked like about 30 boxes rather than 4-6. i got to the end of the series section and looked at individual titles, and saw one called "michelle." i started reading from a computerized catalogue about all their other options, and Prerna came along. she noted that one option was called michelle, and another "michelener." I jokingly read the description for "Megan's Body," saying it would probably turn out to be about a Michelle too. i started visualizing the movie, which instead was about a blonde woman who didn't know she had killed her therapist and other people by turning into a werewolf. she came home to her boyfriend, who chastized her about having so many "imaginary scars" which were actually fresh scabs from a night of fighting and assaulting. she blew him off, and they laid in bed, which was like mine here. when friends came to pick her up for an event where she had to appear publicly for someone, she pulled on a pair of jeans and met them. they asked if she was ready, and she said she was. she started to talk about bringing her boyfriend along, but then came up with a reason to say he had said he was going to a store to pick something up instead, and couldn't come. she looked coolly over her shoulder at him as she excused him from being able to come along.
3/5
i had a room in the back of a large house, and brought my laundry out to the living room, left it on the couch, and sat down. i got up and went to the kitchen, where a new roommate, a blond guy, was cooking. i had the impression that he was a little spoiled, albeit nice. his parents were paying for him, and i felt he wouldn't have such a good place if he wasn't relying on his parents. he had three burners going on the gas range, one of which was very high with nothing on it. katie was apparently my roommate, as she came home and commented, "You're burning a lot of air in there." a brief debate followed about whether one could really burn air, since it turns into carbon dioxide. the blond guy said he believed one couldn't burn rosemary either, at which point i jokingly chimed in, "I'm sure you could incinerate it if you really wanted to." He replied, "The recipe doesn't call for that." He might've understand and have been replying in jest, or he might've been a little dull: i'm not sure which.
3/6
watching a talk show set in a bar with a middle-aged gray-haired tv actor as guest: when a song came on in the background that the guest didn't request, he got up to leave and started walking around shaking the hands of all the production crew before shaking hands with the hosts.
after a show (the above one?) ended that i was watching with my parents in their living room, the next one that came on was one i liked to watch, but my parents didn't care for, and my dad began complaining. it was a fast-talking, tongue-in-cheek anime-style show, and i thought, if it weren't for the style of the voice-acting and script, it would be just another power rangers knockoff. as i watched the intro, it made its concept fairly fascinating: characters used cards to summon objects, like a ramp on a slope and a large wrecking ball, or a sword from a weapon shop. he threw the card up in the air, and caught the sword as it appeared and descended into his outstretched hand. then the theme changed to little glowing red orbs that one fed to a pet rat, that began a dull grey, and as fed turned colors to a shinier silver with glowing eyes and more intelligent movement. i knew it would change to white and other odd colors as it was fed further. it began playing with one orb with its tail in the hallway of my parents' house outside our bedrooms. i woke up thinking about how the rats could "evolve" humanoid hands.
i also dreamt of having lost an illegally owned tiger in a big city (a la Hangover), and being unable to recover it (what are ya gonna do, call the cops?), and having to abandon a car at an empty intersection out in the boonies (like around Scandia), and dumping out into my coin purse a roll of change given to me by joe graciolett, just thinking i could pay him back with a bigger bill (like i had Prerna for taco bell yesterday), and watching Jackie Chan in the filming of a movie where he had to do a very high flip and land flat on his back, then still kick a guy's ass while lying down. he was clearly in REAL pain after the flip, but pulled it off otherwise.
3/7
looked at an "evolution of 'hair down there'" diagram for butt mustaches. a friend told me he had seen the real thing.
in a kitchen, hugged my cousin elizabeth and kissed her on the cheek. we were having a conversation about something.
david & michelle talked about moving to a different shack behind the Getaway, and stats problems. i joined in on the one that had to do with relationships and kids, and said i wouldn't want too many kids (implying a max of 4 or so, less than the 9 we talked about once upon a time), because i'd never have time outside taking care of them and my job for the things i like to do, or even a full night's sleep. michelle argued for having a deeper life experience with more children.
i came back from this talk to where my parents were waiting in the car for me on a snowy street in a residential neighborhood like in Minneapolis. i went past for a bit to retrieve things i thought i'd left just up the block from where they were parked (i thought i left something on the side of the street somewhere?), then realized i had everything, and turned back to get in the car with them. i talked to my mom about how i must not be happy because every dream i have is a discontent one about work or women or just something generally uncomfortable.
3/11 - wasn't drunk for this one, just had to recover it from my keylogger, and didn't feel like fixing it.
had estherplayinga a drinstats study game with may, and she guessed two thinkgs that i pcouldpn't previously,: a dthe re rela drinking wheel, and a fancy work fd pertaining to a weird wine bottle that i couldn't rpronnounce properly.
driving out t o somewhere tin on thlike on the west bank, took a wrong turn and that i had taken before and had to turn around in a resnowy residential area
working late in the lab, dan came in and we talked. and agreed. he shook my hand, and i asked him to turn on the light on hi s way out. he did, but it torurned off again right away.
p
prerna had friends over who khad known her friend who died in the crash.l they were going to sleep with us. i think i had to leave ffor one of the other dream reasons , but acame back later.
i was in bednaked , and heard them coming in. one friend was naked, gave some idea of they'd had, and got in wit bed with me. i think we made out,. a, cuz i couldn't see prerna coming, but i heard her voice, and she joined us briefly. then the friends left, and we followed on f in cars,oot. one car had a problem we could hear, and i was felt like i was doing a walk of shame because i had put one glove on and was otherwise looking disheveled walking along a streetbusy .
3/13
attending a departmental mini-conference / seminar in a museum. brown-bag-style presentations given in a small room with glass walls behind the audience and in front of the presenter, and rows of tables just in from the wall where people would sit around the presenter's open space in the middle, like in Goldman. I presented, and it went fairly well. i was with Prerna, and as her presentation went well, Dr. Murray said something sly to me about waiting for her next presentation to indicate that she would be admitted. My advisor presented (?), and Dr. Murray presented, but as she did she was interrupted by an announcement over the high-school-style loudspeakers. at first she tried to keep everyone's attention by talking over the announcement, then froze in place with her attention-getting expression as she realized that the announcement was too important to ignore. at some point i got up and wandered around the museum to check out the sights. one room with statues had a couple suited mob-lookin' kinda guys in it standing toward the back arguing with one another. i turned around and returned after going much further. when I did, I saw Dr. Ozer sitting with his arm around a blonde woman sitting next to him. [i had thought briefly before going to bed about how i admired his intelligence, but pitied his seeming loneliness.]
3/14
as one of three people at a special meeting for the GSA, i had special information on a project to add a diagonal corner of green space to a rectangular driving space like a parking lot circling a smaller rectangular space inside. the idea was to get people to turn without causing traffic pileup and driver confusion. being the only person who'd attended the special meeting who was present at the present meeting, i found myself in a position to answer confusion when the topic came up. as i finished describing what had to be done, i added a little personal advocacy off the top of my head from the point of view that it was a no-brainer because this configuration was used at the other 3 corners already. after finishing my impromptu presentation, budget issues came up, and i said i didn't know, but then remembered i had the budget info printouts in my backpack and went for them. it was rather confusing.
after that, May was present, and i overheard her in a conversation with others responding quizzically when told she should pick a codename for their project. i begged her facetiously to take the codename Deathstrike. she didn't get it, and i thought of where i knew the name from to explain. i thought of it as the name of a character from G. I. Joe.
i imagined Deathstrike as an assassin dressed in a red bodysuit with black circling designs around his eyes. (probably a ripoff of some Marvel universe villain.) he dropped in from the sky with two small parachutes attached to his shoulders over a large orange canyon to an isolated compound. he used two pistols to shoot grappling hooks and reel himself in Batman-style for an acrobatic landing. his mission was to assassinate the Venture brothers (and probably Rusty Venture too). He snuck up on Dean and tranquilized him with a dart from his gun while alone, and carried his unconscious body to an isolated, raised platform with bars he circumnavigated gymnastically. the ploy was to lure the others out while they searched for Dean. being incompetent as usual, they moved unpredictably within the main house, and Deathstrike hid and waited. having dropped in with no resources, he suffered from hunger. as the two targets left the building, he went to a transparent glass shower out on the edge of the compound from which he could see the others' movement inside the house...and he took a shower. it felt like he really needed it...and maybe he'd been waiting a long time already. anyway, as he showered, he saw Dean walking back through the house alone, inexplicably naked and in a daze. Deathstrike maneuvered in through the bathroom in the back of the house.
3/17
i finished a project for my lab. Dan told me he was happy with my progress, that he'd doubted me in the past, but i had erased his concern, and that i could consider him a friend. Prerna invited him to a small concert by a local metal band held inside a random room of a school building. we all went, including michael. later, back in my lab, michael questioned some of my work, and i dismissed him. Dan told me Prerna had invited him to something else, and he had some misgivings about the last band. we had also signed up for a 5-mile race, and were told by Faye that everyone else had dropped out. Dan made some comment expressing doubt about the outcome, and to indicate I wouldn't be much competition, I told him I'd never ran 5 miles before. he joked, "Thank you for signing up!" to run against him. I envisioned a rather fancy body suit I would be given to run in...it looked a bit like the padded suits worn for riding motorcycles. I looked out the back window of my parents' house, and saw path markers set up that led straight through the back yard and across the lake. I realized we had those suits for running through such obstacles as 4-foot-deep water.
I went to a bathroom in a school building that had no doors on any of the many stalls. I was wearing my blue robe, and pulled it closed in front of me. a nervous asian guy came in a door, looked around, and with a blank face, stuttered about how none of the stalls had any doors. I suggested looking for another bathroom (or maybe just using this one, since I was done and no one else was there?)
3/20
a female friend had turned all my clothes white by mixing things improperly while doing the laundry. i wanted to be repaid for the damage, negotiated this with her, and she grew increasingly uncooperative until refusing altogether. i talked to another mutual friend who shared responsibility (by being in the same organization?) who gave me an acceptable deal in agreeing to remunerate me in some limited way.
playing a virtual reality battle game with Wii-like controllers, i was confronted by a egyptian temple guard lookin' kinda enemy who threatened me by twirling a staff that had round mace heads on both ends. i didn't have to fight him then, but i knew i would later, so i tried to figure out how to dodge his attacks by dodging left or right, punch-out style.
kellen split from our group of friends and went to a weightlifting room. i followed, and tried to find a bench press, but was confused by the few of the machines that looked vaguely appropriate. kellen might've been using the normal one.
3/21
a large gymnasium-like room had levels of seats all up the walls stacked on top of each other, with just enough space in between levels to sit down beneath the next. a large parliament-like council filled the seats. i was climbing up the outside of them to a space on the top row when i heard a speaker acting like a game show host, posing a question about the purpose of psychoanalysis. seeing confused glances and silence among the council after he asked, i gave my own definition, willfully relating it to issues of identity, as well as the more obvious matters of examining how a patient's patterns of behavior developed through life experience. after answering there was a brief pause, and the council applauded me as i stoically took my seat.
seated on a high level of a building with an odd staircase winding up (or down from?) the side wall to my platform near an object i had to protect, i waited for a kunoichi (who looked like the captain skin from BattleStations!) to invade past the guards toward the front of the building, and talked to a less experienced guard next to me about useful things one could do to help repel the invasion long before she reached our level. when i saw her fighting guards on the ground outside through the door of the building, i threw my six shuriken wildly and inaccurately, knowing she would withdraw and i would get a chance to go retrieve them before the next round of attacks when she might make it closer to my level. most shuriken greatly missed her, but one nearly hit an allied guard she was fighting at the time.
3/23
I was staying in a large Vegas-like hotel in Florida for a conference. Again there were large stairs or escalators, and I had to carry a lot of food down them, because when it was time to return home I had a lot of food we didn't use up still in the hotel refrigerator. I enjoyed the hot, humid weather, and made a negative comment about returning to a cooler California. I think Kellen was there again too, sharing my room, among others. At some point I was also called down to a space at the back of an indoor stage or performance area where the ceiling was lower than out in the seating area, kind of like the bar area of the casino Dr. Murray invited Prerna and I to. In this space I waited for my name to be called, and received a large manila parcel like the UCR campus mail envelopes.
3/24
opened up a new two-pack of toothbrushes that were made different for use in the afternoon and night. one had softer bristles to avoid causing soreness from brushing twice in the day, and the other had a more fancy design for more thorough cleaning at night. i just took the softer, simpler one.
i was in a gymnasium with high ceilings like at meadow lake elementary, with cafeteria tables set up throughout, and a lot of people milling around in cornflower blue jumpsuits with white shirts underneath. i understood that we were all waiting to be euthanized for whatever reason, and didn't particularly mind. i was walkin around with a friend, and decided to throw away a tiny pumpkin-colored "weapon" shaped like a mushroom. as i did, my friend panicked and tried to stop me, but was too late, as i'd already thrown it. as i walked away, i saw an explosion of fire rolling at me from underneath the tables. i saw it in slow motion, and dove into a corner with my arms over my head to brace for the impact of the explosion. i think my little mushroom thingy was an explosive too.
i got up and stood at the door of the room, which was in a large cargo jet that was now going for a crash landing. my friend and i tried to get the parachuting gear together to jump. this included something resembling a riot police gas mask. i remarked to my friend that i had never expected to skydive in my life, but knew that he already had. as i tried to get everything together, i looked out the door and realized we were already skimming the ground over a highway and there was no time to jump. i braced for the landing as the plane slid to an absurdly smooth (it even surprised me in my dream) crash landing along the highway, through a fence at the end of a T junction near an overpass, and up a grassy hill. once we had come to a halt, I grabbed what i thought would be useful from the emergency escape equipment, and left with my friend. we walked along residential streets resemblin San Francisco near Golden Gate Park, and i wondered if anyone would come after us. i may have talked with my friend about this. i/we concluded that it was doubtful anyone would care enough to look for us. [it was all kinda like being a waste product of human manufacturing, to be disposed of as a matter of efficiency but not worth tracking down for any reason.]
3/26
I was writing a book about a young man's childhood. It was a little somber throughout, but had a somewhat optimistic direction. It ended with a passage about his father harvesting trees the father planted and managed the growth of.
In my parents' basement, next to the door to the back yard, a thin, completely straight branch as tall as me from a pine tree was propped up against the wall. It had a bunch of needles about 3 feet long attached to the very end that hung down along the side of the branch. I cut these off where they attached to the branch, then thought twice about it, and reattached them by pressing them back on where i'd cut them off. I thought they would slowly heal and continue to grow.
I had carefully chosen a song to fit the end, as though it would be adapted to a play or movie and have credits. [This was undoubtedly inspired by the episode of Moral Orel named after a song by the Mountain Goats, "No Children."] When I woke up I thought of it as Paul McCartney's modern version of Let It Be [which had also been on TV about 2 days ago], but I don't think that was the song...
3/30
a super-monster guy went on a rampage, smashing a guy with a long coat and long silver hair into the ground, capturing a woman and doing the hentai thing with her.
kyle and kenny were arguing over who should dive through a sewer grate into greenish/brownish/black muck. kyle threatened to fight kenny over it. at some point i took kyle's perspective, and argued that if kenny were a man he'd just volunteer to do it himself. he went over to a larger square pool of the muck on a hill overlooking a playground, jumped in, and was swallowed up. i watched a small trail of bubbles cross the surface after a few seconds of waiting, but nothing else happened.
4/10
inside a big, dimly lit building with a rectangular dirt floor in the middle, i looked around. all the walls had small rooms in them, where people that seemed to be something like tribal circus performers slept. some were rooms with modest furniture separated by a white drape from the platform walkways extending out from the walls circling the open middle area. others were simply deep, dirt-floored cubbyholes about 3 square feet in size that entered at various heights into the walls. i was a lanky Nubian-lookin' guy. i looked inside one of the ground-floor rooms that i understood to be mine first, then considered one of the smaller holes. I saw a young boy come out from behind a large curtain in the wall to the right.
i lowered myself slowly and quietly to the floor level (i was on the third) by hanging off the edge and carefully dropping down. i came down next to the queen of the tribe, who was sitting next to a small campfire and talking to a small crowd. she selected me as a bodyguard and offered me an armband signifying the position.
back on the third level, an asian samurai-lookin' guy in white and blue expressed his resentment and doubt to his wife about the queen's decision to trust a strange foreign newcomer with such responsibility.
sitting at a table like the circular one in BJ's with various people including Troy from "Community," i asked what everyone was ordering. Troy was ordering a medium pizza, and the guy sitting between us a small one. When the waiter guy came by, I ordered a full pizza, and was told the kind i asked for would take extra cooking phases for the bell peppers and meat. i asked what the others were getting on their pizzas, hoping to talk them into sharing a bigger one with me. Troy was getting "everything" on his, except a few weird ingredients.
4/11
variations on themes from the Trailer Park Boys, which I'd watched throughout the previous day.
slept an extra couple of hours trying to remember them, but forgot as soon as I woke up. seems appropriate.
4/12
sitting at a restaurant with wide glass windows kind of like the McDonald's we all stopped at on the way to disneyland with Michelle and her friends nearby...talking about moving to new places...she offered to give me a ride, but i walked instead. went up to Elliott Hall through the odd side entrance, and walked around on the top floor looking for the men's bathroom. saw the label "men" outside a number of rooms where cognitive psychologists were working, and guessed they must be moving the signs around as a joke.
4/13
walked around a strange neighborhood carrying a beautiful but absurdly scrawny woman around in some impossible way having bizarre sex all the way down a hill to a grassy area with a tree full of cobwebs cousins' wedding photos pimpin black guy
walked through a gated neighborhood harassed by a soccer mom tried to cancel out of a code-entry system threatened to talk to the mayor about me went through back streets quickly to a hill that let out onto a larger street a black guy in a black car that vaguely resembled an undercover cop passed, then reversed up to me. he asked if i was going to a city whose name i couldn't understand. he said it was the place where some ongoing event had been taking place. (Student riots?) i admitted i was completely out of touch with the news. he then asked if I was going to California instead, and I said I was from there. [Must've been in MN at the time..?]
had to climb into an empty room above a plain hallway [kind of like the indoor decor of Portal]. had to push past a relatively weak person [a woman?] standing in my way by first getting my hands inside the doorsill and then one foot after the other. i dreamt of it as an analogy to a dungeon in a Legend of Zelda game, heard the creepy "there's enemies about that don't see you" music, and thought also of the music that played when fighting enemies that had detected me [kind of a more somber music that was otherwise in the spirit of the "outdoor world" music] and the silence that would fall when enemies in the area had been defeated.
had to travel from california to minnesota brian warp elevator room instructed to stand around the person with the lowest hit points (which I effectively disregarded), and i knew to hold my luggage around me to assure it would be transported british accents to chicago door leading to flight near the top of an escalator. sat in middle row of what must've been a 747 that was crowded with business commuters. saw Howard Friedman's recent travel documents, which showed him doing the same roundabout travel to somewhere domestic by getting long layovers in exotic locations [including Cairo and/or locations in India or Southeast Asia?]. Friedman was there, laughing with a wide grin.
[at other points i can't properly fit in chronologically]:
encountered the woman, "Alex Janusonis[sp?]," who seemed to be based on Aletta Ocean.
sat out in the cold on a dark porch eating breakfast by myself, when someone else came out and interrupted me.
Measuring personal values: An evaluation ofalternative methods
ants were coming into my room at my parents' house, and no one was home. there were zombies outside somewhere, so i had to plan carefully to escape quietly to a neighbor's house a few doors up West Meadow Lake Rd.
i called Sarah Klein and got no answer. her boyfriend called back and left a message in an odd European accent saying i should come over because he wanted to meet me and hear more about some psychological ideas of interest.
some major disaster was happening/going to happen/had happened [earthquake?], so everyone had to relocate to a different part of town. i drove at first through streets crowded with children crossing haphazardly, driving carefully but a bit pushy (i sort of expected people to move for the big car). a a black female crossing guard in uniform said to me, "you don't have to run them over."
further on, i was biking up a street that was still crowded with people on the sidewalk. i reached a heavy wooden door in a wall at the end of the street, and went through it to find crowds of people taking refuge. i navigated the seated crowds, looking for people i knew and intended to meet. strangers waved to other people, and i waved to quite a few people I knew. i saw Sheri Selton, then Liz Selton, and passed by until i found stadium seating to climb. I searched the empty top rows for my misfit friends, and saw Kellen waving to me off to the side.
4/20
planned to meet with Ozer after going to a movie theater. was late and saw him walking out with my laptop in hand.
went to the theater late to meet with Prerna and friends. saw her car on the way in after passing another red car [like the one i'd seen outside her condo the previous day]. couldn't find the particular room in the theater that i was looking for on the second floor, which was high above the first floor, so I descended a large staircase or escalator and walked out. as i was walking through the parking lot, Josh Koscheck ran out ahead looking pissed off. other guys chased after him, yelling to him as if to keep him from losing his temper. he detonated a bomb in the theater, and ran. the other guys and i ran with him. they pulled out assault rifles, fell prone into some grass underneath a parked trailer truck, and started shooting at people coming into the lot. off to the side, i fell into the grass as well and watched them. one guy with a rifle watched me out of the corner of his eye as he shot at others. i saw my car in the lot, but feared being shot if i ran to it. i waited for the rifleman to turn away from me so i could make a dash for the car, but the military showed up and shot the riflemen lying in the grass. [i disassociated with the man waiting to run at this point.] the man waiting to run was also shot once, having been mistaken for a rifleman. he now wore camouflage and face paint, and lay face up in the grass while the military swooped in to take him prisoner. a black woman with bleached brown hair tied back ran up and told them he was a friend of hers and a bystander.
the next moment, the man was standing in a room surrounded by his friends. he had bronze-black skin and spiky hair. [this had become a scene in the movie.]
4/23
i was lookin to meet with Ozer, and saw him go into the men's bathroom. I went to my dorm room to get dressed, and a woman peeked in accidentally while i was putting my pants on. a while later, she came back with someone else and knocked on the door. it sounded like this other person was supposed to move into my room, and I wondered if I had overstayed the period of time for which I had rented the room. [Dr. Murray and I moved Prerna out the previous day.]
I woke up at my parents'. They took care of me for a day, and I played video games and asked if I could stay. they teased with mock uncertainty. around 2 AM I realized Prerna was still at my place waiting to move her crap.
4/25
as an army dude on leave, sex with a relatively unattractive redhead. lots of other weird army things i can't remember.
walking around in a casino, i passed many of my colleagues, went down an escalator, and saw Erik Jensen at the front of a line for a fried food he claimed was really good [as in the episode of Community I'd watched with Prerna two days ago].
watched a movie with pretty badass music, and stayed through the credits. i saw credits for the music go to Colin Shull and someone else whose name I didn't recognize, and said, "I know that guy!" i turned and saw him there in the theater, and congratulated him on his work. he relayed a story of once having stayed so late at a theater that he had to pay again in the morning.
4/26
dreamt Hokey had actually become a great band after I left, and had an album out that I hadn't listened to for a long time, but immediately loved when I did listen to it.
4/29
sitting on a couch in a room with Prerna and another thin woman with long black hair. the other complained about her outfit having some protruding features placed directly over her nipples. Prerna asked if she should complain to Ed about it [implying this woman was May, despite the lack of physical resemblance], and I thought that unnecessary since her relationship with Ed was over. i was trying to work, but Prerna asked me if I wanted a BJ now, or some other thing and the BJ later. i thought I'd better take it now before something else came between us and her intention to deliver, and touched her labia as i decided to take my indulgence immediately. [Then I woke up to the alarm reminding me I'd skipped class because dogs had prevented me from getting enough sleep even with the extra hour. Reality BITES.]
4/30
trying to think of exceptions to some rule, and a flashback followed in which Andy from the Office moved up next to a blonde woman (nicer than Angela, sort of like a cross between her and Pam?) who was standing in a stadium row at a concert. She was wearing a white dress with spaghetti straps, and Andy was wearing a white towel that was wrapped around his chest below his arms, as if to appear similar to her outfit in the most awkward way imaginable. he got the woman's attention, and moved to embrace her. oddly enough, she hugged him and laid her head on his chest. it occurred to me that Andy had surprisingly good muscle tone in his arms. i understood that nothing came of this outside of the concert, but that it was merely a moment of closeness they shared in this public yet private setting outside of their usual environment. [i'd watched a new episode yesterday involving Michael being surprised by a kiss from a woman who publicly shunned him.]
5/2
a girl was in my shower, and I had to bring her something like clothes or a wet towel. she said something that struck me as a little discomforting or unappreciative, so i made a jibe defensively about how she now insisted on showering without me. there was reason to mention my landlady, but neither of us could remember her name.
i remembered "Michelle" as i was driving in an area resembling Brooklyn Center, north of the mall by the Best Buy and theater.
both Prerna and a particular kind of bird were passing through my neighborhood, and I was concerned they wouldn't stop at my place for a visit. i was concerned with why Prerna wasn't talking to me. [i'd just sent her an email hoping to hear from her in CO yesterday.]
5/5
i'd bought the last thing i needed off the BattleStations! market and completed my work amassing a fortune in the game, so i cancelled my account. i went to meet Jim at a pizza restaurant, and had to rush to get a room at a nearby hotel that was closing, since he had nowhere to stay.
i had to use a bathroom, but the two i usually used in my house were occupied, so I went back into an area of the house i hadn't visited before, because i thought it was a bedroom. i walked past mirrored closets, and checked out the room of my impressively artistic female roommate with black hair. it was blacklit and featured a lot of impressive paintings, including one of a woman. i realized a third bathroom in this area was available and not a part of her bedroom. [incidentally, i'm writing this as nature is banging on my back door because both bathrooms have been full for over 10 minutes. damn roommates.]
5/7
someone was showing a movie inside their house. this was a big deal due to some kind of movie prohibition.
i was at a conference with Jim. we signed up to attend a symposium that otherwise might've been cancelled, and expressed possible interest in another by writing "prompted" next to it [whatever that means]. Michael had signed up for a few of them as well. i said i was also tempted to sign up for pizza hut in a list of pizza deliverers [had just gone out for pizza with May the previous day]. Ozer and Funder were standing nearby, and i overheard Ozer saying to Funder that his symposium wouldn't be cancelled because we signed up.
later, i heard him talking in the middle of a large conference hall, first at the front of a poster session, and then from the middle of the audience seated in folding chairs. he was presenting as though it were a symposium based on a poster I had forgotten to do, and he said my poster wasn't there as one of his opening remarks, and mentioned it repeatedly. I struggled to remember what the poster abstract had been, pondered why i'd forgotten when I'd already done a poster for SPSP earlier in the year [this was apparently another SPSP in the spring], and wondered why he was talking with a corded microphone from such an awkward position amongst everyone else rather than up at the front of a room. i later read my abstract, which referenced a lot of possible topics but lacked focus on any one.
i left, and said i was going home. i got on a flight very quickly, and when i arrived, I hung out in the living room of a house with Penny Peterson for a while, then called my parents from this home in california. [the room and couch seemed a lot like the old layout of my parents' house in MN, but slightly different outside, as if it were sunny like CA and perhaps on a ground level with palm trees nearby.] as i was apologizing to them for not having stopped by before I left for CA, May called in reality, and I woke up saying out loud that I had to take this call and would call them back.
I visited Prerna in a dorm-style apartment. she changed clothes outside in the hallway, surprising me with her comfortability. Seems she was a blonde white girl for some reason.
5/9
I was called away from playing a multiplayer strategy game online. I left my army blocking my allies' access to the ultimate objective, which pissed them off to no end. when i returned, i saw a bunch of angry messages they'd left for me.
in a room sort of like a theater for a play, i left a small "castle" and headed to another one that was closed. these were the scale of castles on an RPG world map, so barely bigger than me. i then went to a dilapidated castle with a broken door, against the warning of a voice of an unknown origin. i saw a glade to the right where the moon (looked flat, as if it was painted on a wall) was shining onto a spot on the ground. i understood that if i stood in the light it would allow me to escape, but as i reached it, i turned and saw a werewolf pouncing on me. i'd arrived at the light too late, and the screen (my "vision") went red as i was hit.
i came to in a shack at the end of a pier in a tropical coastal environment. knowing i was a werewolf, i considered (heard a voice suggesting?) i transform into a wolf to pass the guards outside without arousing their suspicion. [somehow a wolf is less suspicious than a dude. i guess this was all too goofy for me to take seriously, so at this point it became a game.]
i saw logos for the game title screen. it was called "Ibushi No," which i understood as meaning ninja. [even though "ninja" means ninja, and ibushi apparently means "fumigation / oxidation of metal"...] it was a war game, perhaps like Dynasty Warriors. I read the manual, and saw that i was one of four characters, each of which could transform. the second one rode a white tiger, and could transform into it himself [a little pointless?], and the third was an archer woman who could transform into a blue-skinned water sprite type thing. can't remember #4, other than a theme of green...
I realized i was late for my art class with Ms. Choksondik (not sure if this was just the students' nickname for her, or her actual name), but didn't care. it was the only class i had at 11 AM on Monday, and i didn't like it. it was in a location like the IT room of Hosterman.
I saw David Wight returning to a house with Michelle. Michelle ran out in a loose white dress to put a parcel in the mailbox. I watched from down the street, and saw into their bedroom as David took his shirt off. he actually did have a pretty good physique after all.
5/11
somehow had Nikki Perkins in my car. dunno if i was doing her a favor driving her somewhere, or if we were on a date...but we parked at her destination, and she leaned over to kiss me. i was a bit flabbergasted, and after she got out, i rolled down my window and told her something about how i'd always wanted to do that. she answered my awkwardness with a smile.
we headed out somewhere together along a highway resembling 394W. i drove, and she rode a bike. Harper Jones-Hermending (sp?) also followed along in a big SUV (i got the feeling he was angry...but i also thought of him as Nikki's brother at the time). at some point (around where 394 turns north into 169?) i felt odd about it, and got out to offer to ride the bike and let her drive. she agreed, and impressed me with her nimbleness in doing something.
i had to deliver something to someone in a hospital. i arrived at what i thought was a backdoor entrance. i had Jim on the phone, and asked him if I could get to the room i meant to go to by coming in that way. he gave one of his characteristically dumb, nonchalant answers with no informational value, so i decided to go in and try it. around the corner of the narrow entryway, a receptionist sat at a counter behind a glass window built into the wall next to the door leading inside. i approached to show her the parcel and explain where i needed to go.
i had to give someone tips on how to recognize a middle-aged woman who'd dyed her hair blonde, wore too much makeup, and dressed younger than she looked.
5/13
someone was nervous about moving into a house. a woman shooed visitors away, and an adolescent laid in bed worried. he'd opened a container that had once held a small demon (or some part of it), and had allowed the humanly imperceptible smell of the demon's blood, which had infused the surface of the container, to escape and permeate the area, attracting others.
my mom had a number of animal cages stacked on top of one another in the garage (configured like my garage in CA). at first there was only one with a bird in it, but when i came back to check on it, there were multiple cages. the one on the bottom had a bunch of different snakes in it with their species names written sloppily on the outside. one was an aquarium with a little miniature shark swimming around in it. i noticed the bird's cage had flooded, and saw the bird coming to the surface for air. alarmed, i asked my mom what the heck was going on with the cages, and she explained about the different snakes. she drained the bird cage. it looked like the bird was giving a live birth (with no egg).
5/15
sleeping next to Prerna. at first she was distant. then she snuggled up next to me, and i held her. i rested my hand on her breast, and she objected.
5/17
i lived in apartments across from a beautiful girl. we'd been seeing each other, and while lying in bed together, i asked her circumspectly about the prospect of continuing to. in a very casual way, she agreed, then said she had to get back to her place. i was a little off-put, but agreed nonchalantly, feeling that i'd just landed a keeper and had to take it slow.
i had to take out a full bag of garbage, and was supposed to take it all the way out of the building, but passed an unattended janitor's trash collection cart and decided to toss mine in as i passed.
a young girl was somehow associated with me through the woman across the hall from me. she was locked out of the woman's apartment, and was frantic because she needed to use the bathroom, so she texted me.
i wound up using a neglected women's bathroom down the hall. i habitually went into the handicapped stall, the floor of which was paradoxically raised a bit off the level of the rest of the room, though it had no door. a janitor came in, and i tried to obscure my chest and look away to make it less obvious that i wasn't a woman. he left immediately, and i moved to another stall, but couldn't get the door latch to shut properly. [dream analysis would say i'm overstepping boundaries and in need of letting out old emotions or frustrations, but am afraid of judgment and criticism. fair enough.]
5/19
I was waiting at the top of the hill at the entrance to the New Hope golf course, and overheard a black policewoman (with a body type resembling the black policewoman from Reno 911) talking on the phone to someone about interesting psychological facts she'd learned recently. she was on the opposite side of the driveway, sitting on the fence a little ways down the hill. she made reference to "means," and asked her listener, "You know what means are right? They've taught you about that?"
another black woman (kind of homely) drove up the hill, harshly chastising her child. then i was in a car with the policewoman, who had also been listening with disdain to the poor mother. she told me that even if she'd caught the woman robbing the place across the street (to which she pointed), she'd have to let her go. amazed, i asked why, and she explained that the jails downtown where she'd be taken were so racist that the woman would be in mortal danger. i asked her if that didn't mean, as it quite plainly did, that the system had failed.
as we drove, we came to a high point in the road overlooking a large, snow-capped, dome-shaped hill resembling something out of Mario 64. i was momentarily amazed at the deeply crevassed landscape. feeling sheepish for my wonderment, i explained to the policewoman that i was used to sitting around in a suburb where the landscape was hilly, but not as dramatically so. at the mention of my suburban roots, she smirked briefly. I asked if we were on the way out toward St. Cloud, as I recognized the [ironically, counterfactually hilly] landscape as being on the way out there, and she confirmed this.
we came to a jail, and i followed her deeper inside inside through heavy, swinging double doors. i asked coyly if i should wait on a wooden stool next to the doors, where arrows and words on the wall indicated one should wait for processing (whether as a visitor or a prisoner, i'm not sure). without being particularly amused, she said no, and that i should (could?) follow her instead. she talked to a clerk who sat behind a desk built into the wall immediately through the double doors, and he handed her a boxed pizza. i half-expected to be offered a slice, not out of obligation, but because the policewoman seemed very agreeable in general. [i woke up after the following dream craving a fudge pop tart, though i'd not had one in a long time.]
on the field outside Meadow Lake Elementary School, I realized that instead of walking regularly, I could move instantly adjacent to other people on the field (as if by holding the Ctrl button while pressing arrow keys to move amongst words in text). i tried and failed to make it work with distant people, but managed to move up next to another person near an ongoing game of soccer. i was careful to avoid getting in the middle of the game, but now managed to move instantly to the edges of the field, up to the corner of Boone and 60th St. beyond the school itself, and over to the area by the far eastern basketball court and bleachers near the baseball diamond. i returned to the people by the soccer game, and called out for people to play "catch the birdie." i became a small sparrow, and did my teleportation routine over to the sidewalk along Boone outside the parking lot again. lying on the sidewalk, i flapped my wings and chirped like an immature bird, appearing unable to walk or fly. my only pursuer was a baby in a diaper, who crawled after me on all fours. i led the baby on, moving ahead with the teleportation trick (that no longer seemed to require an object to reference as a destination), and thought of leading the baby into the street where it might be run over. my inner, semi-lucid voice spoke to say not to do so, but my sparrow-self moved at an angle, leading the baby into the street as trucks passed by. i then saw the baby at the wheel of a car that drove by. i turned and proceeded back down the sidewalk toward the field, half-expecting to hear a crash behind me. [i woke up thoroughly disturbed, with the Doors' "The End" in my head. I'd listened to it in the shower before sleeping.]
5/21
got lost in a big country club type compound looking for friends/colleagues who'd wandered off. passed through a room with people taking a drawing class, and a fancy buffet. went to use a bathroom, but found an old woman's purse and gloves (like the red ones I bought for Prerna) sitting outside. an old authoritarian woman (like the boss from the episode of The Office that I'd just watched before bed) was complaining about having to kick someone out.
my dad was interviewed on camera about a "flame from Philadelphia that burned in New Hope," akin to the olympic torch I suppose. the interview later made it onto national news, and when it came on, it was at first a clip of Jon Stewart from the Daily Show, but when my dad came on, i woke up saying, "I recognize that guy" aloud.
5/23
Mr. Lizard grew so big that he started sitting on top of the binder. his nose elongated to look a little more gar-like. one day he stood up tall enough to climb out of the cage right in front of me. i had trouble catching him too.
Michael was troubled about something, and sat outside just up a hill while the sun set. i talked with him for a while, and went in to make breakfast [maybe the sun was rising? probably not, given my schedule], asking indirectly whether i should come back outside with it. while inside, i heard michael talking through the windows, so i opened the kitchen window and listened. he said he had come to be viewed as the one in the lab with expertise on rural lifestyles and personalities due to personal experience. he seemed to think Ozer both overestimated and pigeonholed him in this way.
when i came inside, i asked my dad, who was sitting in his grey armchair at the back of his living room where it used to be why the sun hadn't gone down all night. he said it had gone down for a little while, but i pointed out that it was still odd that the sky was bright in the early hours of the morning (the 2-4 AM range i think).
a black mailwoman came inside to ask me if we were the proper recipients for postcards addressed to someone with an African name. i was tired, and didn't want to be bothered with it, but talked to my parents and made sure everybody agreed that they weren't ours and should be returned to sender. i said it was too bad we couldn't recycle them, as there was something good about everything being postcards. my mom was sorting things on a table, and had a large pile of green twist ties that were tangled up. i untangled a few.
celebrities appeared on a talk show dressed up as 18th-century historical figures and Hank & Peggy Hill. one of the 18th-century types squirted a slice of something like a grapefruit at the other 18th-century type across the table, and someone else retaliated by throwing another piece of food he also happened to bring as a joke.
a story of people going to a large festival like woodstock was intermittently interrupted by advertisements for things the characters were wearing. the third advertisement [and the first one i remember, for obvious reasons] was for a toddler costume that was all black with a white skull face paint design, touted to prevent anyone from questioning the age or admissibility of the wearer. the fourth was for an "air-fro," a hairstyle for midgets that would give them the extra height they needed to get past certain requirements. one proud wearer gave testimony, expressing hope that it would one day become bigger than the afro (in terms of size, not popularity).
5/24
i was sitting in a classroom like in high school, with Steve Clark as the teacher. not sure if i was a student or a TA, but something unreasonable or difficult that I'd made harder on myself had to be done regarding a quiz, paper, or short answer assignment regarding a movie. he later came by outside of class to see me and make sure i knew what to do about it, so i must've been a TA at that point. i acted as though there would be no problems, then started stressing out after he left.
may came to me, and there was some amount of nakedness in bed that followed, but i might've slept or had to grade instead of what two should do under such circumstances. [this might've been after she called and woke me up. in any case, I woke up with Santana's "Evil Ways" in my head...mainly the part about how i can't go on and lord knows you got to change...baby.]