7/04/10 - Time Travel Pods

This is incredibly hazy because I woke up, didn't write it down, then went back to sleep.

All I remember is that I was in some sort of futuristic facility with a friend (nobody in particular) and we were being followed by a middle-aged guy with a beard and a sweet coat. He was bad news.

We came to a room with a giant glass sphere supported by a loose mesh of metal bands. It had hinged door and my friend and I went in and everything went black and white and time froze for a second.

I became aware that this was a time travel pod with a crazy made up name that I unfortunately can't remember (it was kind of cool). The pod could go one year in either direction, but once you hit the most recent year that anybody had lived naturally, you couldn't go further into the future (put simply, you could only travel backwards in time unless you're returning back to your original time).

Even though time was frozen somehow, we turned a dial to go back a year.

I was also aware that we had to go back about 30 years to stop something from happening, but this was complicated by the fact that the pod transported you but did not go with you, and you would have to find another pod somewhere in the world in whatever year you were then in.

So we had to find 30 individual pods SOMEWHERE in the world to avoid the catastrophe and I also knew that bad-news-beard-guy would be trying to catch up to us.

I knew all of this in a split second, though, and the dream basically ended as soon as we turned the dial.

6/30/10 - That guy is such an ass

I was traveling down a FFXIII-esque mountain with Scott, a childhood friend, and some other nameless people. After crossing a bridge thing we were on a little platform with a podium on it and we stopped to read what was written on it.

When we go to look at it, suddenly there is a guy sitting on a rock behind us and we whirl around. I know I've met him before in the dream but I don't remember that far back, nor do I recall his name. I know he is a total asshole. Scott is itching to fight him and says something insulting. The guy (hereon known as Jerkface) picks him up and throws him onto another platform not too far away. Scott struggles to get up while Jerkface explains with a you-can't-do-anything-about-it smile that he is going to tag along with us.

He say's he's interested in what we're trying to do, which I don't really remember from my dream. He also explains that there is an army camped at the bottom of the mountain that he has secretly lived amongst for a while, but that he had to leave. He is used to living among liars and thieves and fighters, but something was amiss. The level of corruption and inhumanity among the army was abnormally high and even he couldn't deal with it for that long. Something had corrupted them, and all I remember is that "what we were trying to do" had something to do with the corruption.

At the end of that conversation, the dream switched settings but not characters. I was at my house, watching from a dining room window as Scott and Jerkface grappled on my front porch. They're snarling at each other and trying to push each other off the porch, and Scott is furious because he is losing. My brother Matt walks up behind me and says "Shouldn't you stop them or something?" and I say "it's their business."

However, Jerkface manages to push Scott far back and he staggers and trips off the porch. Jerkface moves to follow and I rush out the door saying "woah woah, that's enough"

Scott is furious and ashamed and gets up and starts walking home without a word. I call after him, "do you want a ride home from Matt?"

He calls back with a sneer, "I'm not gonna be alone," which didn't make sense to me because being in a car with someone is the opposite of being alone. He starts running.

It takes me a minute in the dream of trying to work through what the hell he meant by that when he appears in the distance, coming back my way. He mutters as he passes me, "I realized I wouldn't be alone," and we pile into the family van (Jerkface is no longer present) and right as I buckle my seatbelt, I wake up.

6/25/10 - UMBRELLA FIGHT

Jocelyn and I were stuck in a massive deserted building. I guess it was a hotel; long hallways with tons of rooms and whatnot, but all the rooms were bare and you didn't need a keycard or anything to get into them. And there are a lot more interconnecting hallways than in a normal hotel. It's like a maze.

Also in this building are Heiwajima Shizuo and Orihara Izaya, rivals from the anime Durarara! in which they're always trying to kill each other. Shizuo generally rips street signs out of the ground and tries to nail people with them, whereas Izaya either uses a knife or just runs away.

Izaya:
Shizuo:


Anyway, they're fighting throughout the hallways and it's destructive and dangerous, and I'm pulling Jocelyn around trying to avoid them. We are on a low floor and I am aware that after a certain amount of time surviving on one floor, the stairwell to the next floor will open up and we'll have to survive for another amount of time on that floor before moving on, etc. etc. If we reach the roof, we win (whatever that means).

After hiding in various rooms and running about while Shizuo plows through walls and Izaya runs away from him, we're on the floor before the roof.

Somehow I end up running down the hallway towards Shizuo with an umbrella open in front of me while he charges back at me with an umbrella of his own. Right before we hit each other I close my umbrella and drop down on the floor and slide by him and Izaya jumps out from behind me and takes Shizuo down and they start brawling on the floor. I grab Jocelyn and we run down the hallway and into the final stairwell.

We make it to the roof, which is for some reason actually just a balcony with a bench on it. It's night and a billion stars are out. We collapse on the bench, looking at the sky, and a minute later Izaya walks out leisurely onto the balcony and leans on a railing and lights up a cigarette. Shizuo follows him out and sits down on the bench next to us.

Izaya says something I don't remember.

The dream ends.

6/11/10 - Abandoned High School

Don't remember very much of this one because I didn't record it right when I woke up.

Something about me and my uncle scaling the wall of and breaking into a giant abandoned high school that didn't resemble the one I actually went to and was ridiculously tall. For some reason everything we were doing had something to do with my late grandfather. When we got to the top there was a shaft leading down with a ladder and we started going down and eventually it came out in an empty gym.

We were like whaaaat and my uncle stayed there while I went exploring and eventually I got to another gym in the school but I heard dribbling and shoes squeaking on the floor and I looked in and there were a bunch of girls playing basketball and I was freaked out because the school was supposed to be abandoned and there were no usable entrances besides the one we had used. I know I was spotted but I didn't stick around.

I rushed back to my uncle but I'm not sure I got back. The only other thing I remember from this dream is that at some point I was floating in this metaphysical world talking to my dead grandpa and he was explaining why he wanted to be a Navy pilot and I started crying.

It was probably a lot more coherent right when I woke up.

5/28/10 - Nukes in Russia

I'm at a boarding school in Russia (though everyone looks, dresses, and talks as they do here). A few things happened prior to what I'm describing, but I can't remember them because they were at the beginning of a fairly long dream.

Anyway, I'm following a girl I don't really know down a hallway trying to persuade her to show me a hidden place she knows about. She's trying to ignore me but I keep following her. Eventually she stops and turns and stares at me for a minute before dejectedly agreeing.

The hallway is apparently partially underground, with decoratively grated windows high up on the walls that look out at ground level on a courtyard. We stop under one of these windows and the girl glances up and down the hallway to make sure nobody's watching. She jumps up, catches the windowsill, opens the grate, and pulls herself through. I follow.

We're crouching in the very corner of a spacious courtyard, closed into a tunnel of sorts by black decorative fencing similar to the grate. We're slightly hidden behind some thin shrubs. The girl motions to follow her and starts crawling down the fence tunnel. I notice some people walking down a path through the courtyard. They see us and come running.

They are clearly not friends. They can't stand in our way since they're outside the fence, but they block our path by standing outside it and we can't get by because we have to crouch and we're defenseless. We have to go back or confront them. [I don't remember what we did, if anything. Maybe the dream just switched gears without resolving that.]

Now we're in a massive lobby, still at the school. The ceiling is absurdly tall, like a concert hall ceiling but twice as high. People are clumping together in small groups on the floor in an organized grid to line up with the ceiling. The ceiling is like a square grid of honeycomb, with square indentations about 5 people wide and 5 across. There's word of an imminent nuclear explosion. People are organized in a grid because the ceiling indentations will drop soon to provide a small bomb shelter for each group.

I'm walking through the crowd trying to find somebody to shelter with. Eventually I meet up with Anna, my chem lab partner from last year. She's got a grid square to herself and says she's waiting for a friend, so I stay with her. I keep looking up nervously at the ceiling making sure I'm in the square and not under an edge.

Her friend shows up; I've seen him around but don't know him or his name. An alarm sounds, indicating that the nukes have gone off somewhere in the distance. The ceiling drops. Anna's friend was under an edge of our square. It smashes into his head and he drops to the floor. There are no lights in the squares; it's dark and they rumble as the blast hits the school.

After a while, the ceiling lifts. Anna asks about her friend, saying "[his name]...?" (i don't remember it) and I say "he's dead, let's go" and push her towards the entrance of the lobby. People are filing out into the plaza in front of the entrance, a wide open area full of stone ledges and fountains and stairs. We're up in the mountains. Two mushroom clouds are visible far in the distance.

I see a flash of light, closer than the other mushroom clouds, and I sprint back into the lobby, through it, down some stairs, and into a back lobby of sorts and throw myself to the floor, my hands over my head. The light was another bomb. The shockwave flies up the stairs of the plaza and vaporizes anybody who didn't get back inside.

I get up and walk out the back door of the school into a parking lot.

The dream switches gears here to a car chase. I'm in a yellow SUV, apparently, and am chasing a nondescript smaller car. After chasing it across what appears to be the Bay Bridge, we're back in some mountains in Russia. The road is incredibly twisty and is wrapping around and up the mountain. After every sharp turn, there are a bunch of motion-sensitive gatling guns that open fire on my car but it's bulletproof and they just dent the hell out of it. This part (going around curves and being shot at) goes on for what feels like FOREVER in my dream.

Eventually we finally come to the end of the road, and my front bumper apparently has spikes on it and I ram the other car.

[dream switches gears again]

Now it's me rappelling down a cliff face of the mountain with the other driver rappelling after me. I know somehow that he is responsible for the bombs. Somehow I've lost the upper hand I no doubt obtained from ramming his car. I'm panicking because he's about to catch up, and if he does, I'm dead. I rappel down past an overhang and catch onto a ledge underneath, where I can no longer see the other guy.

I'm tired and afraid but decide to make my last stand there and just try to kill him when he drops past the overhang. I wait and wait but he never comes. I peek my head out and look up past the overhang. He's still there, just a few feet short of coming down. He sees me and starts laughing. He says "I'd join you, but I'm out of rope."

We had both secured our rope to the only place on the cliff that would hold one, so my rope had just been like 10 feet longer than his. "I'll catch you later, then," he says, still laughing, and he starts pulling himself back up his rope. I sit down on the ledge, relieved.

[I wake up]

5/24/10 - je ne regrette rien

This dream happened in three parts. Unfortunately I only remember the second and third.

Part two started with me in what appeared to be a giant sewer tunnel. The ceiling and walls were rounded and I was on a walkway next to slowly running water. The tunnel went in both directions for as far as the eye could see, which was pretty far because the tunnel was fairly well lit for some reason.

Flowing along on top of the water at regularly spaced intervals were square platforms. Every so often a platform would have a person or people on it. They were all greying and old. I stood on the walkway with a clipboard and would demand that certain people on the platforms step onto the walkway, at which point they would keel over dead. To make this creepier, Edith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien" was echoing through the tunnel, with the kind of raspy sound quality you get from an old vinyl record.

The dream suddenly switches settings to part three. It's Halloween and we've loaded a few of the bodies from the sewer tunnel into the back of our family minivan. We drive to pick up Jocelyn, who lives on my street instead of where she actually lives. She gets in the van and asks my dad, "so what're we doing?" and he says "just go door to door and ask if they have any bodies." We pull out of the driveway and I wake up.

5/21/10 - Lucky Break...?

I was in another country but everyone still spoke English. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of what felt like the library at my old elementary school with a bunch of other people and a woman was sitting on a chair in front of us all. She would announce something she was giving out and people could take it or leave it, kind of like an auction but free.

The first thing she offered was a piece of paper with some information on some new program the biology department at SMCM was going to do. No takers.

The second thing was a coin with a picture of a hawk and a turtle on one side, but their heads were switched. It was apparent that in whatever country I was in, the dollar coin had that picture on it, but normally the heads were not switched, so somehow the coin had been misprinted with some head switchery.

My hand shot up; nobody else's did. I won the coin. I was fairly excited because usually mis-minted coins and go for a pretty penny (HAHAHAHA). I walked out of the place and started just asking passersby what they would give me just to see the coin. One woman gave me a beer, which I accepted for some reason even though I don't drink. Some people gave me money, but not very much, since I was just showing it off and not selling it. Some people didn't want to give me anything, but I showed it to them anyway.

[I wake up]