≤2011

31-12-11 An instance of altophobia.

First, I was perhaps a helicopter reporter watching, from the air, two lines of oddly stiff mechs and heavy tanks dispensing ineffective armaments at each other on a street, at night, in front of an impossibly tall spindly white building. The base was square and peripherally unabsorbed with parking lots or other contrivances. Rising for miles into the night sky, it never tapered, or lent itself to the use of guiding cables, despite being about 7 m x 7 m x 10 km. I then appeared in the second-highest floor.

C W and I were standing behind a few 2 m banners, as though we were exhibitioners until recently, and a woman who I disremember was standing on the other side in an office similar to ours. C seemed disgruntled by something socially trivial on his mobile. I think he checked his local newsfeed at that point, which was when the building began to shake, and the news came in that there was a human-made earthquake in progress, and that our building was being stormed by someone/something. We moved to the windows as the shaking intensified, and looked down at the massive but, by perspective, tiny city glowing below.

Further exposition:

26-12-11 This strikes me as being very much an autogenerated bit of fiction.

I suffer mnemonic wambles. Nevertheless, I recall being pursued by very evil and intelligent entities in some kind of Bioshock-hotel environment, with lights alternately destroyed and numerous. First, I recall hiding under or within some kind of angled-iron framework while one of the rapid entities walked determinedly above. I thought much more time was spent in that building, but I can only next remember, In boots and underwear, hunted, leaving the building through a door in an eatery into the deep hot snow and impressive hyperblack darkness. I then seem to recall traversing a great flat expanse between the little hill of the hotel and the high cliffs of pink-grey-cream slime: what was in this pitted land I disremember, however. Having crossed the indeterminacy, I summitted the slime by kicking and punching my feet and hands into the odd gelatinous material. At the top was an Adobe-style southern house, still under a sky of exceptional darkness, into which I climbed carefully in search of clothing and a place to hide.

Further exposition:

25-12-11 I had a walk through an oddly-configured pseudo-West Valley, often through apparently unconcerned but populated classrooms with bright or missing lights. A bit of third floor had been added somewhere, and upon part of its ricketiness I crept in a "King of the Wild Things" rumpus suit. There was likely more.

Further exposition:

24-12-11 Seems to actually be whole. (seems legit)

Again in some sort of Pittsburgh-ish under-bridge situation, this time under the same weather conditions as my trip to AASHE, I was addressing a shifty assembly of adults about the maladroitness of some new counterenvironmental happening (development). Despite what in hindsight seemed to be the ineffectiveness of my oration, and the fact that I once interrupted myself to resolve an individual’s doubts on the subject, I succeeded in garnering their support in a hurrah. I seem to recall seeing a woman with unusually large eyes, as well.

Further exposition:

15-12-11 The original contiguity I sensed in the original has, unfortunately, been lost by the morning of the 18th as I write this. It did, however, seem terribly topical.

First in recollection seems to be myself standing just behind the conductor and snare drummer of an ensemble, alone, in the well-floored bulb-lit rafters of a very tall old wooden building, whose original construction didn't seem to have been made specifically for our purpose (whatever it was). The other two seemed to be enjoying the greatest of times, while I leaned my back against an old and rather massive bell. Confused impressions of a sinkable-but-rising-out-of-a-lighted-understage-into-a-dark-overstage seemed to emerge, but I suspect them of being more pre-recordedly vestigial than chronological.

Next, and as the upper arm is to the lower arm in terms of sequence, Farfar and I were sorting electronics in a green cloth sack on an old wooden dock under an old steel bridge in early fall somewhere like Pittsburgh in 1881 without any lights at 5:30 p.m.. It, at the time, seemed rather like I could do nothing right, according to him, and I accidentally scraped him with the heavy shears I was cutting cords with. When it seemed that we had finished, I threw a rather unusual hammer of Dad’s at a parallel-by-five-inches dock, and seeing it mysteriously skip off and plunk into the rather mellow river, I dove in after it (which, now and at the time, seemed to be a very brave thing to do). As it was evening, I could see absolutely nothing, and fears of spiky perils pulled at me. But as I was beginning to wamble, I felt the handle of the hammer in my right hand. Turning about in the water coincided with kicking solidly off the bottom, and after struggling upwards against the weight of gravity on the hammer, I broke the surface for a moment, and awoke.

Further exposition:

11-12-11 Following an evening of secret meetings and a tolerable bit of running came what follows. As seems to be the custom, both were largely environmental experiences, containing only small event-vertebrae.

First, and fortunately isolated from its possible negative necessitous origins, I was riding Rocinante, shod as she was in winter hooves, through a sparsely-peopled old-white-tile subterranean shopping center. As a Fairbanks bumpkin, it seemed enormous to me. We clattered through many a white-tiled space, well-lit, all, and saw and passed a few normal-looking folks going about their business in the rather non-descript businesses along the walls, sporting primary colors most often, when they were needed. Second-most exciting were the occasional ramps we traversed. Most exciting was our appearance in the center of a large cubic plaza-ish room, with a sphere-skeleton statue in a pool of water girded by a stone bench in the center. Mom was standing next to it, in the quiet murmur of the room, with her hair in a high bun. I then balanced a chicken egg on her head and poked a non-leaking hole in the top of it. The idea seemed to be received famously, and we stood speaking happily for a few moments. Oddly, the physical appearance I was speaking to seemed to flicker between E and Mom, making it unclear as to whom the egg was actually intended.

Deciding, as the scumbag that I am, to sleep "a bit" past my nine of-the-clock alarm, I encountered a very vertical city from the inside of a large multi-story and pleasant apartment a hundred or so stories off the ground. I'd like to think it was a futuristic New York with many buildings being a mile or more tall, but any other option is possible. The apartment seemed, in its 4.5 story-state, to have a whole scad of interesting people in it, rather like P's old house on UAF’s main campus, and had large windows in the ceilings and walls. Exciting and child-like chasings seemed to be taking place, and this second half seemed to take up a significantly greater amount of time (so much so as to make me think the second came in advance of the first), but despite suspicions of vertebrate events, I recall none.

Further exposition: Rocinante is the name i gave my trusty bicycle.

30-11-11 What seem to be the possible future effects of this dream made me ask someone about their dream philosophy in my NRM class this morning. I reserve opinion here.

I got the mysterious impression that I have had this general dream before, but with a different outcome. In any case, the only similar scene was myself standing in a street, looking at the old-ish building in which was someone I was looking for (the day was fall-sunny, the southern street clean and quiet). Things mutated when I went through the door. For one, the ugly little windows on either side of the door (which may have locked itself) cried night, abruptly: another, the age of the poorly-lit interiors was not old or new enough to be anything less than creepy. Ahead were shelves of old boring useless books against an unlit wall. To my left was a desk at which two old white women with faces that seemed melted sat. I asked them if they knew where whoever I was looking for was. Though they were staring and typing dolefully on what seemed to be desktop computers, they both answered, in perfect, if discordant unison, that they did not know. As they spoke, their fish-belly-white skin faded to a medium grey, their form into medium opacity (I could see through them), and their remaining image to flicker fitfully. A voice then startled me from close behind me, and I turned to see a tall-ish man calmly burning in dried-blood-red flames. He spoke to me, but through a combination of asymptomatic softening, burning noises, or my lack of attention due to his slow sprouting of demon horns out of his head, I could only hear hollow mumbling.

Very glad was I to, awakening, lose this weirdness. Bleh.

Further exposition:

29-11-11 Despite being fragment-sized, this dream during a tiny doze I had in my Mom’s apartment closet seems thoroughly linear and succinct.

I was the apparently disembodied viewer of a planet scene. It seemed to be broad day. The sun shone on what seemed to be a dense French carnival in a grassy field. Carriages and horses stood rather formally in the sun. Something then hit the planet. In the darkening blueness of sky and space, as the atmosphere died, I saw the colossal plated body segments of an interstellar flatworm curling through the planet toward the sun. As its body hurtled through its intended course, the half of the planet in its path was flattened against the onrushing plates, eventually reaching the field, the carnival, the carriages, the horses. The roaring of the earth, the shattering of carriage timbers, and the fright of the horses, quickly died away as the atmosphere was, at last, wholly disseminated into the now very black but studded space. And only then did I realize that a solemn and beautiful German/Latin choir had been quietly easing the passing of our biosphere.

Further exposition: Succinctly eery, rather.

15-11-11 Fragment: I was some kind of advantage-endowed participant in a boardwalk bike race. I had, in my possession, a large head-start and a fairly excellent road bike (!), and I shot dangerously over a recently rained-upon sinuous boardwalk (with stairs in some places, even) between what seemed to be a long hotel and the sea. The flora pointed at Valdez in summertime. Having narrowly won, I assume, I awoke.

Further exposition:

10-11-11 What a night. I hope I shall be able to recall it all to memory.

Before awakening long enough to be inconsiderate enough to fall back asleep, I was outside some small snowflake-like pentagonal Elementary school. Although the sky was dark in the wintry fashion, the air temperature was estivalian. I had a reason for perambulating around the building, but it eludes me. In any case, and having gone perhaps once or twice around the elevated dirt mound it lay on under the orange street lights, I looked up again at the school and saw a little boy poking his smiling face above the level of the window.

I awakened (for a span I forget) and stared rather worriedly at the closet door. I then began a transaction of my discourtesy.

Next in my nocturnal drama was the tail end of what seemed to be a long series of unknowable misadventures. Having been forced or otherwise into a second-floor viewing-room of a 10 m³ arena, a small 10-15 person group of Asian businesspeople and myself watched the half-lit room uneasily. There were what seemed to be giant heavy chains for monstrous chainsaws hanging from the ceiling, reaching to about a foot above the sandstone-looking floor. My brain then let loose a short sluice of anthropomorphic but rather terrifying moments, in which it seemed as though the chains were combatants in the mortal arena, and I was a witness [to] their nonhuman, if gruesome, deaths. Having watched for a moment or two, some dark/indeterminate denizen of our indeterminate location arrived and chased us out into and down out of a hallway rather like those in the UAF Music Department. Looking back as I ran, I saw one or two of the businesspeople being absorbed eerily by the indeterminate pursuer. We were eventually forced out onto an elegantly-roofed stairs-only veranda with nothing separating us from a 2000-foot fall into the enormous and summer-somnolent valley before us. When we arrived, the sun was showing us the top of its face as it sank behind the mountains, and a heavy silver mist covered the valley floor. After the sun had set, we all begin to feel quite miserable, given the residual fear of our close proximity, on all sides (despite the fact that the door behind us seemed to have been absorbed into the mountain), to mortality. Then, with a beauty that I’m sure would have pulled the tears from my eyes, the businesspeople, who now resembled elderly, ancient, and magnificent Asian personages, began, slowly, to sing. I am very sorry that I can say nothing more about it. It was a sad thing they sang, in a chant or language very unintelligible to me, but it seemed to numb our fears and clothe us against the chilly night. Contrary to the normal operations of night, the mist that had accumulated during the day had parted to reveal a moon- and fire-lit group of ballet acrobats in what seemed to be a casual but well-executed performance put on for themselves alone. They seemed to say very little, or if they did, they conversed by the hololingual nature of laughter, and their bare feet made no noise on the damp night grass. K seemed to head them, wearing black, and smiling with all the rest as they cavorted humbly and merrily to something like early Scottish music.

Satisfactorily, the interposition of the ballet acrobats was just as conclusive as awaking from it was.

Further exposition:

31-10-11 A dog was this time in charge, or rather, a machine whose outward appearance was canine. It maintained a constant and sharply succinct lecture as it possessed/operated the vehicle I was spuriously at the wheel of. Oddly, I've sat between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, as though I were cycling, and could look back at the darkly metallic hound curled on the back seats. We were in some bland or amorphous immediate landscape, Britain, to my mind, and after a random shift in view from the car to lying on moist sand on my chest, I beheld a van. It simply appeared. And this time, without the physical presence of the dog, it rose up in the air and blasted its wheels off.

Further exposition:

13-10-11 Fragment: as seems to be the case in my general fortune, I recall being in some old senile gangster’s mansion (an odd vertical many-storied one), calmly searching the spare bedroom we had tricked him into occupying, moving sheets aside and finding automatic weapon handles, and something tasty, while, in the next room, my associate did all the hard work deceiving our host. Odd.

In a scene-change, my dashing companion was riding a singularly large-wheeled motor-bicycle across a very green field in . . . . Switzerland or something.

Further exposition:

?-7-11 Without a wholly reactionary preface, my sleeping brain gave me the feeling of a great well of sadness, and my waking brain gave me the feeling of fright and of the archaic macabre.

"Part 1" consisted only of me trying to sleep on an uncovered bed under a chokeberry tree while odd monochromatic people made trills and exclamatory outbursts all around me, and while the sky was a heavy dark evening grey (in my Dad’s front yard).

. . . . “Part 2” began in a very old run-down house in semidarkness. Some thirteenth-century raggedy looking people were chasing an oddly featureless she-archetype with cleavers. When I saw her next, the ruffs were, oddly, leading her to me, as though I would be responsible for whatever happened next. She had no lower jaw.

Further exposition: This was written a year or two before we planted a little chokeberry sprout in the middle of the front yard, and which is now about two meters tall. Premonition?

?-7-11 Without the appropriate preface I had intended immediately after its occurrence (the OS, you understand), I was a witness to a very much more dense and dark bottom floor of West Valley High School, or rather, the english/language department. All the center classrooms had been removed and replaced with a sunken punk clothing store with unusually high clothing racks. The entire affair was lit by a single LED, and perhaps one bank of dim dressing room lights, and the day outside was wintry and dark. If there was more, I forgot it.

Further exposition:

2-7-11 As these are dreams, I mustn't consider them “let-downs” in comparison to the Groundlings’ production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Even so, this one seemed unusual.

In some un-lit (non-electric?) academy-of-sorts (consisting of two long hallways with classrooms stacked on top of one another), I was in a two week sluice of classes. With six per day, and just one day and one class left until its completion, I received a very important call on my cell phone (even though I had no pants to carry it in since everyone was in their underclothes). Having finished my conversation outside (beyond a clearing of golden grass, there was a dense forest of East Coast trees), and began making steps back inside, an educator accosted me, and was apparently of an opinion opposite to mine regarding appropriate cell phone use. Atemporally, I was taken upstairs after the students had gone to bed (now in third-person view), and made to wear varyingly-spiked plant tails. I actually felt rather female at that point.

Further exposition:

1-7-11 Immediately archetypical. (?)

Despite lacking knowledge of the thing firsthand, I was apparently on tour with some indeterminate orchestra in Germany. We checked into the castle whose environs were rather like those of Tomb Raider IV (but grey and 4 p.m. cloudy). The first half of the entry hall had the same kind of secret darkness as the Davis concert hall, paneled in dark copper that looked like wood. Further in, the light increased, and as the few people with me sat upon their trunks, waiting for what to do, I seemed to become transfixed with silliness as I sang along with someone else a tune from Coraline. Then, in the last fifth of the hall, where the ceiling was a true castle-like 40 m above our heads, the copper walls in front of us spun in place and withdrew into the ceiling.

After another random scene-cut, another figure and I stood on the business side of an old little desk in the castle (furnished with an unattractive green light) and I seemed to to be explaining myself.

Further exposition:

21-6-11 Dreamlets.

20-6-11 As though in active continuation of the previous night’s dream, I was in some kind of sunken all-craft (land, sea, and space). Although too elegantly concerned with consequences to be human-made, the room I initially stood in was about eight feet in height. I stood in darkness contrasting excitingly with the luminescent orange pods recessed into the rusted walls (rusted, due to this all-craft’s having been deposited at the bottom of an ocean). Inside, as though these orange globules were the most excellent of egg-beds, were beautiful squid-like people: Haemomorphs as I had never seen them. Then the walls begin to dematerialize. First, the pods released their gorgeous cargoes into the water surrounding the ship, flattening and losing their glow to become grimy windows. Through one, obscuring most of my view of the ocean, was what looked like a fold in the surface of the enormous craft: above and below the pod-deck across from me were more such decks, studded with orange eggs, until, after about three more up, and five or six down, I saw open (very blue) ocean, and a service trench, respectively. Secondly, without any of the usual chaos or drowning one might have expected, the windows disappeared, and out of the ship I was pulled, until, remaining in the water a few feet above the craft, I looked around. Oddly, all the water visible to me, besides being alive with Haemomorphs, was the same sleepy dark blue, regardless of depth. And across a middling stretch of sea-bed, I saw a great blaze of light through the water, its source hidden.

Further exposition: pleasantly peculiar in its parallelism is the idea that I was rather like the human equivalent of a housefish: I, dry and small inside the allcraft; the Haemomorphs, large and Independent and splendidly wet on the outside.

P.S.: Haemomorphs are a science-fiction invention of mine. On land, and anhydrous, they appear human; rehydrated in water, among their groves of bioluminescent sclerenchymate plate-shrubs in the planet's core, their legs decompress into tentacles, rather like those of a cephalopod.

19-6-11 Spoke with a man in a gymnasium about how easy and fun it is to lift heavy objects off the bottom of large bodies of water. He seemed somewhat Filipino.

Further exposition: brool story, co.

2-6-11 Following the camping exchange, I had the most EXCELLENT replacement of it in the form of a health food store.

First I was flying high in the air above a bunch of buildings whose shapes spelled words. They might actually have been giant flowers since they were all birch-locked. I finally landed outside one of them and Mrs. H was there, rather excited, going on about something she enjoyed, dancing. Inside was a health/local food store which I apparently owned. I ran through it, somewhat madly, having missed it, I think. An amiable Samoan was stocking a freezer as I ran past him to my room on the second floor, and said "Hey bub" as I passed. My room, rather small and homely, I shared with my wife, who, in a rather interestingly fairy-tale-like turn of events, was a princess. She was a rather small woman, probably a musician, and the functionably comfortable trappings of her social status were evident in our room.

Then there was a cut-in-scene to winter, I being at a table in the dining area with a few undetailed friends under a single ceiling light. As I walked back to the aerie, there was a flash and rumble of lightning at the front door, and against the piping and wall and doors at the back of the store, I could see the outline of a witch (oddly) standing at the front. Rushing upstairs, I found my wife being levitated out the window into a strangely stormy night with silver cord extending from her wrists out of it.

I got her back, without the images to prove it (but with the incorporeal satisfaction).

Then I was cable-jumping off the top of a tall copper building in the middle of the desert. There were some mountains in the distance. Maybe Nevadan desert.

Further exposition:

1-6-11 Somewhat fragmented. There seemed to be a central hypnotic theme, but …

First was the concert hall of rather silly grandeur (but actually serious and exciting and dark). Standing in a rear upper hall as I was, looking down at the little seating lights, I felt unusually clothed. Likely, some professionally secret things were happening backstage. The rounded-edged stage was flanked by two stories of seats (dark non-balconies) and faced three stories, two above the main entrance floor, and that one. Then, in characteristic fashion, I was lying under some mattresses having just discovered a green-dust-filled canister responsible for some unwanted mind control in the area.

Further exposition: I think I may have actually been wearing white-tie regalia, which makes things rather exciting. Perhaps even with a real tophat.

30-5-11 This specimen seems to be representative of how the scariness of an agent is purely situational. An ignorant drunk man fleeing a zombie at night through a graveyard is immediately eclipsed by a knowledgeable woman facing the same zombie on the freshly cut lawn of a university by day.

In any case, the scene for this nocturnal phantasm was the hard-dirt yard of a 17’ square house, in a small-ish clearing surrounded by birch trees, about 20’ high, with tall rectangular windows. No idea who lived there. What concerned me most was that, having gone once around the house and returned to the front, I was confronted by what seemed to be a giant computer monitor (likely a final subconscious forgiveness of the ones at the Fairgrounds). I seem to remember flipping one of its massive switches at its back to no effect. After another go around the house, the back-lying monitor had been replaced by a punctuated lensed camera (meaning it had a door-shaped space in itself). At about 8 feet in height, and being of the decidedly older film variety, the door through the middle seemed to render it wholly useless. In any case, it was apparently full of hostile extraterrestrials. In a random cut in scene, I was in the earthen home of a friend of mine who I had apparently enlisted, with the addition of two or three more friends, the help of in catching these extraterrestrials. The four of them stood rigidly before me with their left hands inside their zip-up ski jackets. I had apparently instructed them to put the snake-like (“Dreamcatcher”) aliens into infant ski covers, and having foolishly tucked these into their jackets, they had bitten and chemically altered them. Their responses to the queries I made of them became increasingly disturbed.

I was saved the necessity of action by physical awakening.

Anyway, the effect of poor lighting on a foe was wholly ridden of here.

Further exposition:

29-5-11 Recalling the paint schemes of the Alliance base on Firefly’s Ariel, N and I were monkeying our way through some excitingly unsupervised department store (like Sam's or Home Depot, but light grey-blue). Some rather sparse boxes were stacked on five-foot shelves on twenty-foot shelf amalgams, up whose main support beams we clambered. We certainly had a good case of altophilia. Along the top, with our feet on the second-highest shelf, we walked shiftily through the store. For some reason, the top shelf wasn't our object, and after a space, N grabbed onto a bar bolted to the ceiling (separated by a few inches). After making room for me on it (it being about 1.5 m long), I climbed on and followed his example of unscrewing our only connection to the ceiling, though only one screwed remained. No falling occurred, however, due to my awakening.

Further exposition:

8-5-11 Contrary to what Halo kind of became for me, I dreamt of either a new level, an addition to an existing level, or simply a level I have never encountered but nevertheless exists. In any case, the graphical quality of the original Halo seemed to be there represented.

Lacking the clearest of recollections, I'll take it away from one or two images.

All I most clearly remember is a controlled fall into a deep and dark and quite exciting room not immediately indicated by the main path above it. (It was on a ring world, very deep in the ground.) After activating a holo-panel to bring about a faster or better sequence of events, I followed the sunken room through another dark passage to the upper wall of a brighter room, which I having entered, completely concealed my entry. I'd also like to think of the level as being entirely without enemies; devoted only to puzzles; or perhaps to just one or two rare enemies. In any case, it all seemed highly indicative of the Silent Cartographer. There might also have been an octagonal room, lacking gravity, in all eight of whose sides was a room with something inside to be excitingly done.

Further exposition:

10-4-11 NIGHTMARE inclusive of knives.

5-4-11 Not quite remembering if any of my other dreams have been carried out in third person, I seem to remember this one as transpiring largely in that manner.

Lacking the most modern of screen resolutions, something availed me of the idea that I was the witness to Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In some subterranean place, I saw, upon several bridges and connective stairways above a magma sea, a battle between a character (who I hope was not my own, given their unpreparedness) and as many dead things as guarded the castle at Fort Firemoth. Some seemed quite human in composition (all being of living bone), while others had narrow long skulls with long teeth, and still others with extra pairs of arms and tails in place of legs. Oddly, the character (a white, fat little man) never died under the assault rendered him by arrow or melee, nor did the weapons his enemies dropped prove to be anything other than Daedric. They were dreadfully unresolved, as was the whole situation, but some new additions to the large collection Morrowind created were made: belaying rods, pole vaulters, and odd shapeless things in general.

Further exposition:

3-4-11 In some vast herd-cropped field (likely in the Scotland of 1200 B.C.E.), behind a very old high barn, I was cutting sod. Shining steel in hand, I had a 2 x 4 m area going, the depth of about 75 cm apparently dictated by some odd stiff layer beneath. Having placed the exhumed and rather happy dirt blocks behind me, I paused to look at the hole: perfect 90° angles, and not a speck of dirt on what seemed to be the brown membrane beneath me. Then, after cutting about half way round, the trap-door I had been accidentally creating fell in. Somehow, I thought fast enough to stab my steel into the ground above my hole, and looking down, I saw my legs dangling over the edge of a pit whose bottom was hidden from my view. I thought about whether I would survive the fall. There might be spikes down there. Then again, there might be water. I might even just fall through some black fabric and into a crazy old cave. Instead, I remained above, holding the steel, and reawakened.

Further exposition: No head was lost in the viewing of this Lovecraftian weirdness.

20-3-11 I had a most delightful time in some kind of laboratory-school. The room I seemed to be in most was a rather narrow version of some of the rooms in the West Valley sciences wing with piles of jars and boxes and neat things all around on the peripheral shelving. Two or three people sat at each of the two rows of eight tables, curiously still and inattentive, even after the game broke out. Having not actually cased the joint, I suppose it must have been initiated before my immaterial arrival. In any case, I was caught up in a mysteriously harmless fight with several indeterminate and shadowy figures around the edge of the room: throwing and dodging glass instruments, making rushes, and taking cover. Either the things we snatched up and lobbed regrew, or there were so many as to be virtually undepletable, for in the apparent ten minutes I was a participant, none of us guerillas ran short of ammunition. I was withdrawn from my cavortings by the appearance of what seemed to be one of the more formidable members of the West Valley staff, emerging from the rooms’ only double-doored entrance reading my name from a slip of paper. Having attracted no silicate missiles, somehow, we both pushed our way through the double doors with porthole windows in them, to the equally interesting hallway beyond. Immediately across from was something dark, which I knew nothing of at the time. More importantly, to the left and right, was a penultimately long hallway; narrow, with piping growing like trees from the black spaces in the floor separated by railings from other doors like the one I had just exited. Light from windows above the something dark (not a malevolent darkness), reflecting blue light off the white pipes, showed the sky unclouded and sunny, though sunless. Least exciting among all these details was the fact that I was not in trouble, but instead was summoned elsewhere. Having stopped in the blue hallway, I awoke.

Further exposition:

19-3-11 WILL HE REMEMBER? (lurking, creeping?)

18-3-11 Fragment: J and I were running somewhere very fast, and I was either crouching or had somehow become as short to her as she was to me. I remember pressing very close to her and speaking conspiratorially.

Then there was some very disconnected wander through a large but deathly quiet shopping center. More than half the lights seemed to be off. I seem to remember being aware of some terrible orange horror through the glass of another shop, but then I tried to play the Maple Leaf rag, and it was highly inaccurate and terrible. Some crony types were sitting on/near the piano (5th Avenue Mall?).

Further exposition:

17-3-11 I get the impression this is the second half of a single dream.

The first half established us (I guess, the West Valley Symphonic Band) within a giant decoy octopus/jellyfish. Or perhaps we were all simply in diving suits near one. It was a rather mysterious body of water, appearing as it did to have "filled in" a mountain range, leaving us perhaps 500 feet from the surface on the side of one of these mountains, and 500 feet from the valley floor (vertically speaking). Anyway, this first unrecorded dream involved us being in some strange indeterminate danger from this giant beansprout-like octopus creature, who being more than the depth of the mountains long, was smothering us against them.

Like a vapid television series, the second dream picked up where the first had left off: same grey water, the same grey mountains, same puffy-looking octopus. Then there was a random cut to another scene, or perhaps an altered version of the same. The band was now enjoying itself by playing in shallow seas surrounded by mountains. Everyone looked rather nice in their shorts and swimsuits, and I seem to remember joining in with dives and adventures among the variously-tall grey columns extending up to the surface above the sand and blue water. They were rather like elongated flamingo nests, but retained their firmness in water.

Further exposition:

5-3-11 I get the unfortunate impression that this dream is practically a fragment, despite what I seem to remember.

Further exposition: Lol what.

26-2-11 Fragment: in a kind of high and ancient Southeast Asian stone structure, I looked out onto a falling waterfall, and inside to an odd character who seemed to be displaying the various ways a small mechanical exosuit could be outfitted. Two options I remember seeing where twin railguns on the forearms, which could function as blades. There was a stone bridge going to the other side, across the stream.

Then there was an odd to cut to the various back and front rooms of some legitimate but tacky-looking Pacific island hut-house, with light burning in odd places, and daylight showing at one door, and moonlight at another.

Further exposition:

8-2-11 The fact of my having been sick may shed light on these dreams.

The dark blue (evening) sky was on over Dad's house, and I was out in the yard, facing the apartment from beneath my window, over the two or three feet of snow. Or rather, what would have been the three feet of snow, had Dad not blown it all out of the courtyard. His doing so was in response to the rising-out-of-the-ground of four groups of large blocks of blue, clear, ice (the stuff for competitions, et cetera). With some unusual blue puffy snow gear on, I was sawing/chopping/scalding the adhered snow particles off one side of one of these blocks. Having gotten two sides finished, and somehow having not looked in previously, I looked. There was a large organism inside. It looked like a sarcophagus intended for a jackal, except that the ears were too small to be hollow, which imparted the impression that its skin would stop bullets.

After a brief interlude, I was elsewhere. In an early fall kind of environment, on a planet I suggest is not my own, but which seemed to share many of its characteristics, I was boppin’ along a fairly dynamic trail, in a forest of rather short aspens. The sky was grey and roiling with rather sharp clouds, but no rain fell, and the leaves of the aspen-like trees emitted a strong golden light. I was supposed to be following a kind of goat man who had run off in fright at great speed. On the path behind him, he had left a trail of alternately/brightly colored wool clippings. Having traced this for a little while, I found him dead and naked at the bottom of the hill. I was sad.

Then somehow I was younger and wilder and in the middle of a train of such infants heading back down the hill. We started stepping in a surprisingly easy fashion through difficult terrain, like enormous gaping puddles and tiny stepping stones, and finally into the backyard of a farm, where we were tasked with pulling dead plant parts off living ones.

Further exposition:

22-1-11 Having been told that the percussionists were not necessary in today's Youth Symphony practice, I settled into the leg-room couch for what I had intended to be only a few minutes. Styopa settled on my chest. Fortunately, I was awake when dad left to do something and so successfully say goodbye. After the numerous pre-sleep couch phases, I fell asleep.

Accounts will vary. I was in a kind of entryless circular and pillared room. I don't know the word for this kind of building [rotunda]. The roof was 15 feet or so above me and domed. The pillars that seemed to be in support of the roof were ringed with a wall, which design created extra shadows. There was a lack of pillars behind me where there might have been a door, but as I remember, there was just a 2-foot square hole about 10 feet off the ground that let in some of a sunset. I could see middling blue sky through a circular aperture in the ceiling. About an eighth of the wallspace to my right, out of the 15-foot-in-diameter room, showed a cutaway of another smaller domed building, similarly pillared, with two whitish floors in close proximity to the base floor. The ease with which it seemed that I could attain the second floor by climbing made me hasten to it. Two stone pillar seats separated by a small pillar table were on my right as I entered the second room, whose floor sank in the middle by about a foot and was springy. There was a half-meter-diameter hole in the low second floor, but my attempts at hoisting myself up were ceased both by the fact that the second floor was made of the same foamy material as the floor, and the fact that a voice coming from the pillared seats reported the same impassibility.

(see “The Meeting, at 7:84 a.p.m., on the Forty-Fourth of November, 2011 B.C.E.)

By the routinely unusual phenomenon of dreaming, I recognized the voice of Beatrice Portinari. I sat down in the seat across from her and tried to look at her. The conscious effort made me awaken flutteringly, but was also due to Biscuit jumping on me. I finally managed to tell Beatrice that she was pretty. Then I was awake for a minute or two.

When Biscuit had finally settled herself, I fell into another dream. I was walking slowly along with some old man, a tragedian type, in the bright light of a winter day. He was about 10 feet away, wearing boots, underwear, and a button-up T-shirt: but no pants. Despite the untraceable deafness that I seemed to be operating under, he seemed to be rhyming effortlessly. It was like an anti-babelfish. We were in the Phillips Field train yards, and behind the man I could see that Ester dome and the surrounding hills had become hugely mountainous, though houses still clung to them.

Having reawoken permanently, I had the impression that there were eight more dreams in the set of ten I had sampled. I felt jipped.

Further exposition: Pretty. Besides being dreadfully impolite and ineffectual, the word seems to imply a previous contact between us, as though I were referring to a previous in/timate/side conversation.

Spring-09 I had forgotten about this one. Probably as a result of my latest proto-romantic infatuation, I dreamt that she had stolen Rocinante. Although the dream consisted only of me watching her cartwheel and somersault rapidly down trails at a distance through a hilly brightly-lit birch forest, apparently the subtext was that my bike was involved.

Further exposition: Oh kids.

?-?-? I’d forgotten my first dream about being a woman, too: just a brief experience of myself, wearing only underwear, crawling down out of the end of a long pipe while someone shined a flashlight down it, as if in search of me.

Further exposition: A case of the dastardly autogynephilia?

?-?-? This is the first dream I recall having, and also one of only two or three times that I can remember having control over the dream. I was being chased by giant carrot people of uncertain descriptions through a very simply rendered virtual jungle, meaning all the bushes were Xs and they turned as I ran past them. As they were chasing me through an abandoned warehouse, it suddenly occurred to me that I didn't need to be afraid of them, and I turned to shake the hand of the giant carrot person closest behind me. It was very warm and friendly, and after having done so, all the carrot people turned into bowls of fruit and television sets and other mundane trappings of American dwelling.

Further exposition: