Dream Log 54: Cross-Over

"Hey, Matt! Look at this," I called after my friend. He jogged back to me as I held up an odd pair of plugs I found in the piles of refuse lining the road. "I'm sure I've seen one of these things before."

"Hmm," he contemplated, weighting one of them in his hands," Maybe the others will know what they are. I'll hold onto this - who's that?" I turned around and saw a little boy in Lederhosen standing stock still several yards away.

"Are you looking for your parents?" Instead of answering me, the child took hold of his own head, pulled, and lifted it off to reveal the metal helm of a cyberman. Matt and I fled. Only after putting several hills and forks in the road between us and the cyberchild did we stop. Panting, we collapsed onto another trash heap.

"I thought all the cybermen had been converted back to humans."

"Obviously not!" I snapped.

Once we recovered our breath, we started to plot how we might destroy the boy. Most of our ideas boiled down to finding a gun or a chainsaw and attacking from behind. However, before we could come up with anything cleverer, I noticed footsteps. The cyberchild marched into view, trapping us in the blind alley. I squeezed my eyes shut.

"Toby!" a woman snarled. My eyes opened in time to see a woman bustle over to the boy and yank his human head back over his steel one. She pinned Matt and I with a desperate glare, then scurried away with Toby in tow.

"What...was that?" The next day, I had an answer for Matt.

"We're cybermen."

"No, we're not?"

"Yes! It all makes sense. Don't you remember? The history books say that this planet was nothing but cybermen until the humans came and converted us back. But that doesn't make any sense! This place should be flourishing with plants and animals, but it's just mounds of metal scrap. And cybermen don't go inside of people like that boy. The people go inside of the cybermen suits."

"But that cyberman was wearing a human suit. We saw him"

"If you had to brainwash people that hate you into becoming your kind and reviling their own, wouldn't a psychic filter to make them see the good when they look at the bad and vice versa be a handy way of doing it?"

"So, you're saying that every human we see, including ourselves, is actually a cyberman."

"Exactly!"

"And how did you come up with this theory?"

I pulled the plug we had found the other day out of my pocket. "This. Do you know what it is yet?"

"No, but I suspect you do."

"Think about all the times you've gone to sleep and woken up, and you don't remember going to bed or getting out of it. The last and first thing you can remember is standing in front of a dresser drawer that you've never opened before. That's because when we need rest, we have to plug ourselves in to the wall with one of these to recharge. The filter making us think we're still human can't explain that away, so it just blacks it out."

Matt took the plug from me and examined it hesitantly. After a time, he returned it with a shaking hand. "We...we need to fix this."

I'm not entirely sure how or why, but it seemed that my band of friends included several experts in alternate universes and how to create them. They concluded that our entire universe was a rotten branch of the alpha timeline, and if we wanted to escape it, we would have to break through to a parallel universe. So, we started to dig, but not with ordinary shovels. Our shovels dug holes through the ether dividing timelines. As we dug, the barriers between our space and others broke down, and flares of purple light streamed through the cracks. At last, the hole had become large enough for someone to step through.

"Well, I guess I'll see you on the other side," I said, but before I could go through, the police appeared. They looked like humans, but they moved like cybermen, and they chanted "delete." I tried to leap through the crack before the ether filled it in, but one of them tazered me, sending my cybernetic circuits into lock-down. I woke from the dream with the most severe case of sleep paralysis I have ever experienced.

Then I fell back asleep...

It seemed like a typical dream; Loki, out on parole, defended me from a drunken oaf at a Christmas party; I went to the school cafeteria to order a meal, but I didn't know what any of the food was. Then, the lethal purple aurora started to appear. It seemed to happen at random. Hongkong would suffer earthquakes and storms induced by the violet lights crackling through the sky. An hour later, the same thing might occur in Zimbabwe. Every government agency from the secret service to PETA was looking for answers. A group of friends and I decided to help them out.

Using a combination of astrophysics, numerical methods, and a wealth of comic book multiverse knowledge, we came to the conclusion that the purple flares were caused by a breach in space-time originating in some other universe. They appeared seemingly randomly because our planet moved relative to the alternate earth. By running some equations, I could calculate the time and location of the next flare within 5% error. Naturally, it took a while to convince the feds that we weren't just some meddling kids. However, once they were convinced, they gave us everything we could possibly need, including access to some experimental air-flippers that let you swim through the atmosphere. I had just started writing a program to automatically compute the next flare location when I woke.

Dream Log 53: Peculiar Prerequesites

I just wanted to get into the Intro to Robotics course. The first day of the class, I showed up as a wait-listed student should and talked to the professor after the class to see how likely squeezing into the roster was.

"Well, do you have a final project in mind?"

"Excuse me?"

"Everyone's got to have a project. If you don't start with one in mind, you're going to start behind."

"I - it didn't say anything in the course description, but I'm sure I can come up with something."

"Now."

"Uh - I'd...like...to make a, uh, platform for remotely syncing any computers near one another to function as a single system." The fact that such a project has more to do with computer science than robotics did not really bother me at the time. I was just relieved that the professor seemed to accept the project proposal. Then, he told me the rest of the course requirements...

"Was I supposed to write up the personal narrative before or after I roller bladed to campus?" I asked my fellow wait-list squatter as I failed to stop beside him.

"Before. Do you even have normal shoes with you?" He neglected to offer me a hand, smirking instead.

"Crap. Okay, it'll be fine. I'll just skate back to my room and pick them up."

"No time. We've got to get ready for the evil genius party. Don't worry though, they're providing the costumes."

He finally deigned to help me to the meeting place for other wait-listed students. We went to our respective dressing rooms, got into black robes, mine coming with a Lisa Simpson wig, and made our way to the evil genius party located several blocks away. However, the get up was not enough to gain entry. You had to prove your worth to go through the gates of "hell", also known as the party entrance. My friend earned admittance quickly enough by declaring that he liked offering to help people study for subjects he knew nothing about and feed them misinformation. I suspect his trademark smirk helped him through. I, however, apparently did not have enough crazy in my eyes when I told the bouncer that I murdered children.

While trying to come up with a new line to get in, a bulky masked man trying to prove their evil approached me and threatened "If you want to live through the night, you'll have to do all my bidding, and I have some pretty unpleasant bidding to be done."

"Okay, listen up. I'm going to tell you the story of the last man who tried to pull anything with me. And it's even a rhyme! Gerald wanted to act tough. He started to be scary. I rammed a knife inside his butt, and that was the end of Jerry."

"Okay, you're in," the bouncer announced as the masked man backed away from me slowly.

Surprised, I slipped through the red painted doorway. I had expected more red and fake flames inside. Instead, I found myself standing in the most blindingly white room I had ever seen. People dressed in solid colored shifts sat around marble tables. The professor beckoned for me to join him at his table. Hesitantly, I took a seat between my friend and some red headed girl in a blue shift, whom I did not know.

"Now, is the time of thanksgiving and vision," the professor explained to me, "I'd like to show you newcomers something. Leah," he turned to the red head, "would you please cover your eyes and join with the greater spirit?" With a flourish, Leah pressed her palms to her eyes and swayed back and forth while the professor placed a series of photos in front of her. "Leah is one of our most talented mediums."

"Oh, I feel a place of avarice," she sighed. The photo on the top of the stack was a bank. The professor flipped to the next picture. I tried to hide my surprise. "Now, ah, it is steeped in mystery." The picture showed a house plant. So much for being impressed. The next few photos were equally vague and unconvincing

"You know," the professor tried to clarify, "sometimes the greater spirit is difficult to reach when we're locked in ourselves." He flipped to a picture of a prison.

"I feel it! A penitentiary!" Leah exclaimed. I could barely suppress a snort. He had clearly prompted that answer from her. It seemed the demonstration was over, and the time had come for everyone to make contact with the greater spirit. Anxiety started to build in me. As soon as they closed their eyes to make contact, I slipped out of my seat and broke into a run. It did not take long for the professor to notice my absence. He and his minions took up the chase.

As I bolted, gravity decided to play tricks on me. One moment, my feet hit the ground solidly, the next, I could barely make enough contact to propel myself forward. "So that's how you want to play it, eh?" I though to the universe. "Fine, I'll make it out without your cooperation." By swimming through the air and bouncing off of walls, I managed to get out of the building. Outside, gravity returned to normal. However, the geography did not. Instead of finding myself in the middle of a city, I was lost in a maze of courtyards and gardens. Worse, one of the cult followers in a white shift appeared hard on my heals.

"Back off! I don't want anything to do with you people!"

"I want to help you!" she cried after me. That got my attention. I paused to look her over. Sweat and fear beaded on her forehead. "I know how to get out of here, if you'll let me show you."

Without any other options presenting themselves, I let her lead the way. True to her word, we cleared the premises within minutes. However, a quick glance back gave me a lovely view of seven psychos sprinting. When it became clear that they would overtake us, I stopped fleeing and turned to face them. Leah sneered at us.

"You're wearing white. All whites are loners and cowards. No wonder you betrayed us, but neither of you can stand against seven strong colors," she hissed. At that point, I noticed for the first time that I had somehow gotten out of my black robes and into a technicolor dream dress, so to speak. I glossed over the question of how, when, and where I'd gotten it.

"Hey, Leah," I butted in, "I'm not wearing any one of your colors. I've got all of them. If you think packing yourself into one category is anywhere near as strong as embracing all aspects of life, then I can't wait to prove you wrong."

Unfortunately, the dream skipped right over the unquestionably spectacular battle that ensued and went straight to me climbing a tree for women's rights.

Dream Log 52: A Left Handed Noose

The inmate had to be transferred to a different ward for his execution. Somehow, schedules transpired that the one female cop in the area, Elliotte Thomson, had to assist. This was not lost on the inmate.

"What is a lovely lady like you doing in an abominable hole like this?" he inquired, all smiles and manners.

"Just ignore him," advised the lieutenant flanking the prisoner.

"Thank you," Elliotte snipped ,"I never would have come to that conclusion myself."

The lieutenant shrugged this off and turned to the inmate, "We're required to ask if you have any last requests."

"Well, I wouldn't object to a Steelers hat." This took the lieutenant off guard.

"Good man! For a murderous loony, that is. I'll see what I can do."

He somehow turned up a white hat with black and gold stitching and the Steelers' logo. Elliotte just snorted as the handcuffed man awkwardly slipped the merchandise on. They continued on their way until coming to the lobby, where the lieutenant had to slip off once again to sign the man out. He took the time to look Elliotte over.

"You're new, aren't you?"

"What makes you say that?"

"The way you carry yourself, tensed up and ready to go should anyone challenge your right to a badge. Really, you seem more hostile to your coworkers than to me."

"There's no point in hostility towards a dead man."

"Oh, my poor feelings," he smirked, "I wonder if a bomb threat would change your mind."

Elliotte turned pale, as did the lieutenant who had overheard the last remark. Then, her eyes locked onto his hat. It was no longer white but green. Without hesitation, she swept his feet from under him, pinned him face down to the ground and knocked his hat away. The lieutenant examined it, but found nothing.

"Oho! If you wanted to straddle me, you might have asked first."

Elliotte rammed the prisoner's face harder into the ground. "Talk! Where did you get the green hat, and where is the bomb, if you even have one." The murderer let out a sigh.

"A while back, the Steelers started a merchandising scheme to change colors every half time so that people would have to buy twice the number of products. The scheme fell through, but most hats are still made reversible with a green inside."

"What about the bomb?" the lieutenant demanded, casting the hat aside.

"Did I say there was a bomb? All I said was that I wondered how Officer Thomson here would react to one. And may I say, I am not disappointed."

Elliotte pushed herself back upright, trying to suppress a blush. The three of them continued on their way, exiting the main block and crossing over to the lethal injections building.

"Why did you kill all those people?" Elliotte demanded as the prison employees removed his chains.

"What can I say? When I walk down a hallway, and I know that to my left lie a sweet sleeping babe and its tender necked mother, and the world is screaming for me to turn right, I turn left. When the woman has finished struggling for breath, and the baby is crying at left and the door is to my right, I turn left. When I know that something precious is beneath my fingers, I cannot help but squeeze until there is nothing left."

"It sounds like you have an obsession with the sinister."

Surprise flashed across his face, then a twitch of the lips. Laughter bubbled out of him, genuine and unselfconscious. "Thank you," he finally gasped, "Thank you, Elliotte Thomson. Until we meet again."

The execution team led him into the back room. They did not lead him out.

Loki's Lovesong

Come, my friend,
to the twilight hour,
to the crest of power,
to the end.

Do not regret,
though the world may die
and so may I,
my pet.

Come
though  I can't say where to
Come
We have so much to do

Stay, my dear
til my final breath,
an immortal's death,
do not fear.

Dream Log 51: Friendship is Magic

For reasons transparent only to my subconscious mind, my college had a dorm room on top of a train. The poor students assigned there had to live in drywall and plywood boxes that constantly circled the city on the subway lines. Not surprisingly, these flimsy structures were frequently damaged. My dream began while the college was in the process of reconstructing them, as well as the subway tracks.

Some friends and I decided to ride a still roofless dorm room over to our apartment building. Since the subways were not running due to construction, the dorm room had to toddle along on a remote controlled train base. Eventually, the tracks led up to the surface, where we ran into a slight problem. When the college said "reconstructing tracks" they apparently meant creating a 100ft deep gulf where the rails used to be and bridging them with precariously placed stones. A worker laying the stones greeted us as we slowed to a halt.


"Hey, worker man," I yelled, "how can we get across?"

"Well, you could rent one of these $300 per hour lifters and lay some stones." He gestured to a hand powered fork-lift.

"Not going to happen. You're already working. How long til it's done?" He did not seem to appreciate my tone, and I did not seem to care. We bickered for a while, and I may have made insulted the dorm-train system a few times, but eventually, we came to understand one another. Through cooperation, he, my friends and I managed to construct a temporary ramp and drive our impractical vehicle across. Once safely on the ground, I leaped out of the room and grabbed the worker.

"Oh my gosh, do you know what this is like?"

"Um." He tried to pry me off of him to no avail.

"It's like...the first episode...of My Little Ponies."

"Okay, you seriously need to let go of me."

"No, listen! We had a problem, and the only way to overcome it...was through friendship." I had started to slur my words and lose my balance, so apparently friendship is a type of alcohol in this dream. My cohorts dragged me away and I forgot about the whole affair until a week or two later.

"Hey," my academic adviser greeted me as I passed her on the way to class, "Did you ever finish the application for an iPad?"

"What?"

"Don't you read your emails? Every month, we reward people exhibiting a different character trait. They have to be nominated to apply, and you got a nomination for your dorm-train affair."

"Really? But I was the most obnoxious person in the group. How did you even hear about it?"

"The worker didn't find you obnoxious. He went out of his way to tell us about you."

I blushed but then promised to check my email. This entailed, for reasons I cannot fathom, going to a minivan in the middle of an empty parking lot. Inside the van, I found a bed. This did not surprise me. What did surprise me was that the bed had been made with a fuzzy blue blanket and silver sheets.

"Ah, this is an elaborate email," I thought to myself as I opened the "email" by pulling down the covers. Tucked between the sheets, I found a pamphlet with all the relevant information on how to apply for the chance to win an iPad. The name of the contest was The Brave and the Bros: Courage and Friendship in Troubling Times. The main part of the application was an essay explaining the experience for which one had been nominated.

All I could think about this was "Crap, more work."

Dream Log 50: Can you believe this is the short version?

Some high school friends and I got together just to hang out and have fun. As we were changing to get ready for bed, one of us noticed that the most modest girl of the bunch was wearing rather peculiar underwear. Instead of normal fabric, it had the padded, silky look of a bra. The girl tried to defend her choice in undergarments, saying "Well, underwear is just a bra for your butt, isn't it?" We contemplated this concept for a moment. Without a word, my high school roommate bent down until she was on level with the braderwear...and poked it.

"It's squishy!"

"Hey, that's my butt!"

"Yes, and it's extra squishy!"

Underwear exchanges may or may not have ensued. The next thing I knew, I was sprawled out on the ground in a tangle of friendly limbs, and someone was offering me an orange. Unfortunately, I had to run off to work a shift as tech-support for the CAD program SolidWorks. The point of view shifted at this point to a woman at a payphone, twisting and worrying the phone's cord as she waited for someone to answer her.

"Good afternon" my voice came through.

"Are you a SolidWorks assistant?"

"Ma'am, you're speaking to the founder." I knew the moment I said it that it was true.

"I need some counseling. My wife is pregnant, and I need help choosing elementary school teachers for when the baby's old enough."

Apparently CAD in this dream stood for Counseling for Adolescents and Descendants or something because this request fell perfectly into the range of questions I was qualified to answer.

"Who are you currently considering?" I asked.

"There's this one teacher, Bicham. Do you know anything about her?"

I shift in my seat in the sports car to face the woman more directly. How I transported from my office to a sports car, I have no idea.

"Oh, she's wonderful. You don't have to worry about unappreciated talent with her. If you show brilliance, she recognizes it."

"Speaking from experience, oh brilliant one?" she derides.

"Well, yes, I mean...not that I think I'm...there's a difference between...just drive!"

We arrived at last at some sort of community center to meet her wife. During the ride, I had transformed into an aging Jewish man with a crippled arm. This is completely normal in every way. After weaving our way through the labyrinthine building a few minutes, we came to a nursery where her wife had holed herself up. I introduced myself, shaking hands leftie style because I could not properly lift my right. We got down to business, but I received the impression that she had a few screws that wanted tightening. Whereas her partner considered my advice soberly and contributed thoughts and concerns of her own to the conversation, the pregnant woman twitched at every word and spoke only in curt burst when directly asked. When I suggested "Solomon" as a boy's name, she snapped.

"You don't get to decide that!" she exclaimed, leaping out of her seat. She snatched up a box of baby clothes and clutched it to her chest as though it were a baby itself.

"It was just a sug-"

"NO! You can't tell me how to treat my child! It's my child! I'll have it how I want it. Get out!"

"Love," her wife began.

"Take him out of here!"

"It's all right, I should leave" I sighed to the wild woman's doubtful wife, "I do need your help getting out of this building though."

She led me back the way we came. Somewhere along the way, I turned back into myself. She prattled apologies, and I waved them off. At a doorway, we passed two teenagers entering the building. The boy had silvery-blond hair and sunglasses. The girl's hair was a black tangle, and she had candy-corn colored ram-horns on her head. Both wore red costumes with a gear on the front. We kept walking, they kept walking. My brain decided that Dave and Aradia from the comic Homestuck were far more interesting than me and followed them.

"I've gotta be honest here. I feel kind of weird," Dave muttered.

"Of course you do! You're dead!" Aradia sparkled.

"Wait, when? I usually remember this sort of thing"

"I drowned. Someone knocked me out and threw me into a lake on accident."

"Yeah, totally accidental right there. Like, 'hey man. I'm just going to put your unconscious body on this nice grass. Oh wait, it's a lake. My bad.'"

"Not like that! They punched me so hard I went unconscious and got knocked into the water."

"How do you even know that if you were unconscious?"

"Same way I know that you dove in after me and drowned because you forgot you never learned to swim. Our voices told me ahead of time! hehe!"

"Really? I'm that stupid."

"It was adorable."

"'Kay, so why aren't we in a dream bubble?"

"I don't know! But we probably won't be here long. Take your shades off and look at your arm." Dave glanced down, lifting his shades out of the way. Through his limb, he had a disturbingly clear view of the flood.

"Well crap. I'm disappearing. You too, come to think of it."

"Yup! But we aren't ghosts. Trust me, I know ghosts. I think there's some sort of trick to this."

"Well, if anyone can figure it out, I'm betting it's two God Tier time players. We're basically the best there is, hands down, no questions. You even try to put a hand up, we've already gone and stopped you from ever doing it because the alpha timeline ain't got no patience for questioning our coolness."

"Yes! Let's go trick death!"

They proceeded to have fantastic and awe-inspiring adventures. I, however, did not get to dream of them. Instead, I switched over to the rest of the trolls chilling in normal dream bubbles. Eridan tried to hit on Tavros, but ran off when Gamzee loped over towards them and had quite a tender conversation with Tavros in which they marveled at the miracle of each others' existence. Karkat, Rose, Equius and Jade all sat together on a patch of grass. The former two comforted the latter over the inexplicable absence of their loved ones in the afterlife.

Then, two forms passed, one sauntering and one skipping. They wore unbearably cheerful pastels plastered in hearts and candy decorations. "Dave?" Jade gasped.

"Sorry girl, can't stop. These digs make me invisible, says so on the label. I can't stop and mess with that. We trickster Tiers gotta go make some mischief transpire."

The trickster Dave and Aradia continued on. The remaining trolls sat in stupefied silence for a few moments.

"Rose, do drowned people come back as cutesy pastel God Tiers?"

"...Even I cannot shed any light on that question."

"Karkat, did you see Dave and Aradia walk past looking all--"

"NOPE!"

"Me neither."

To Germany

Remember, remember the 9th of November,
the republic, the hate crimes, the fall;
Who here would say that this bittersweet day
should be forgotten at all?

Dream Log 49: In Which I Am Very Creeped Out

It started off with the guy who plays Will Riker in Star Trek TNG going about his daily life. He was a sailor who happened to be at port. He and everyone else from the ship had noticed some strange things, like objects moving on their own or feeling as though someone was watching them when they were alone. As Riker walked from a cabin he'd been staying in to a meeting with the captain, he ran into an old flame. The woman had a face mask on. Ignoring the mask, Riker warned the woman about the strange events.

"Oh, I know. Isn't it lovely? Every once and a while, I'll feel a sweet brush on the cheek, a neck massage, it's so comforting." As she spoke, a part of her mask was rubbed off. She smiled at the phantom touch. Riker, who was not completely unhinged like this chick appeared to be, made a grab at the area that the ghost appeared to be. He hit something solid but was then hit by something solid in return, knocking him back and forcing him to lose his grip. The invisible being disappeared.

Riker continued to his meeting. It turned out, the meeting was for all the officers in order to decide what to do about these phantasmagorical events. Arguing ensued, tempers flared, and as one of the proponents for an all out ghost hunt brandished a glass bottle in the air, something took the bottle from his hand. All eyes were glued to the glass as it hovered. Suddenly, the glass plunged forward and into the chest of its former owner. It cracked through the ribs, and blood gurgled as it squirted out of him. On the up side, the blood stained whatever had been holding the bottle until the outline of a man's arm was clearly visible. However, even with the blood marking the ghost/invisible man, it managed to escape the sailors.

Later that night, as the captain prepared for bed in front of an open window, something set him on edge. Cautiously, he began to close the window, but something resisted. Try as he might, he could not force it shut. He grabbed a nearby broom and poked it through the opening. It hit something, but as he pulled the handle back towards him for another shot, a reddish brown hand gripped the other end. It surged towards the captain, grabbed a hold of his shirt, pulled him partway through the window, and slammed the window down on his neck, snapping it.

Shortly thereafter, the sailors parted ways. The ghost appeared to fade off into nothing, and centuries passed. I heard the ghost story from a friend in passing who claimed that the ghost was trying to cure his invisibility through some strange murder ritual. I did not pay it much attention because I had been asked to play the part of Brunhilde in Wagner's Ring and was trying desperately to learn the lyrics as well as develop the ability to sing professionally. While I freaked out about that, an elderly gentleman took to watching me practice. I didn't have a clue why, and I felt more than a little disconcerted by it.

After a few hours of practicing, the same friend came back. He wanted to show me a picture related to the story. He claimed that someone else had been in the room when the captain was murdered and had taken a photo of it all. Big whoop, I thought, but I glanced at the picture anyway. At first, all I saw was a man in old-timey clothes with his head through a window. Then my friend pointed towards the glass of the other window next to one the captain had his head through. You could just make out a person yanking on the captain's collar. Although the face was contorted into a snarl, I could recognize it. It was none other than the elderly gentleman sitting outside the practice room, watching me.

Dream Log 48: Food and Fiction

Harry Potter was on his way back to Hogwarts. For one reason or another, he had to make a stop in the lobby of your run of the mill office building before properly heading out. It was lucky for him that he did, for in the lobby sat Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape.

"Ah, Harry," Dumbledore greeted him, "I'd hoped we'd catch you before you reached the train. We've spent the past summer researching ways to get rid of Voldemort, and I believe you'll like what we've come up with. Would you like a chocolate?" He offered an open box of treats to Harry, who selected one filled with chocolate syrup.

"What's the plan, then?"

"Well, the last time we went up against him, we happened to transform him into a candy bar. The effect didn't stick, but..." he snatched the chocolate back before Harry could eat it, "encasing his soul in a piece of candy selected by the chosen one ought to do the trick. We will need some rare crystals to perform the binding though, so you and your friends can do an independent study tracking those down. Bye now!" With a wave, he and the others disappeared.

Fast forward a few months, and Harry, Hermione and Ron had tracked these special crystals to a random street in Illinois. The crystals  were not particularly well hidden. In fact, they were lying on the ground in a pile of artificial snow. As Ron and Hermione, who had started to morph in my brain into two of my actual friends, reached for the gems, they found themselves captivated by their shine.

"Issopretty," one mooned over a rod of amethyst.

"The colorzzzzz," buzzed the other as she poked a piece of aquamarine into the fake snow to make it stand upright.

"Hey...guys?" Harry, who had turned into me, muttered, "I don't know if I'm being paranoid here, but I've read lots of stories where people get obsessed with a treasure and...you know...die staring at it?"

No response. With a sigh, I threw the crystals into a bag without looking at them and dragged the dazzled dimwits along with me.

The next thing I knew, I was in a cabin in the middle of the woods surrounded by the Scooby Doo gang. We were sitting down to a nice supper of lobster bisque when the lights went out. 30 seconds of chaos followed, and when the lights came back, our host was gone. Luckily, whoever kidnapped him had left perfect impressions of a foot in the ground. I tried to point out that real footprints don't look like that, but the gang had already gone off to follow them. 200 yards or so away, the tracks disappeared. We started to discuss our next move when a voice called to us.

"Maybe I can help you," rumbled a man sticking his head over some nearby bushes. He had the features of a toad and the voice of Barry White. "I saw the whole thing. Those tracks go underground."

"What do you mean, underground?" Freddy asked. In response, the man's head sank down out of sight, eerily smoothly. The next thing we knew, he was poking up through the ground where the tracks disappeared.

"I told y'all. This place's full of tunnels. Why don't you come on down." He retreated once more into the earth, and we followed through the hole he left behind. We never resurfaced.

Dream Log 47: Suicide and its Practicallity

"I'm bored."

"How? You're at GenCon!"

"Yeah, but there's no one cool arou-" I cut myself off as Mandy Patinkin in full Inigo Montoya costume walked by. "I stand corrected. I think I'm...just...gonna stand over here now," I said as I inched towards the actor. Sadly, he disappeared around a corner, leaving me right next the daycare. With nothing better to do, I wandered in. Two little boys were busily snapping together PVC elbow joints to pack them away. I started to help, but the children kept trying to correct the way I was putting them together. I may or may not have thrown a mini temper tantrum as I stomped away from the overly critical kids.

"Hey!" someone called after me, "Where are you going?" one of my friends asked as I wandered past a free T-shirt stand, "They're giving out free T-shirts. Wait in line with me."

"I don't want a free T-shirt. I want to give those snooty-faces the nooky of their lives."

"What?"

"Never mind," I muttered as I joined her in line. After we received our shirts, we paid a visit to the dance hall and tried to cut a Scottish rug with some highland dancers. Successful is not really a word I would use to describe that encounter, and I had started to truly doubt my ability as a convention-goer. That was when Audrey II made his move.

The evil, blood sucking plant had gained the power to infect matter with its own wicked seed through a failed attempt by Dr. Drakken to take over the world. The convention center happened to be his first target. Anything organic could be converted into an alien plant vampire. Within an hour of the attack, most humans had been eaten by the cotton in their clothes. Fortunately, Audrey II could only convert matter through contact. The highland dancers, my friend and I found out about the epidemic before it was too late and barricaded ourselves inside a kitchen with concrete walls.

For a while, life in the kitchen seemed almost normal. We boiled all the water that came in to make sure that Audrey II didn't get in through the microbes. We ate, we joked, we even directed other survivors to our strong hold. Then Audrey II started talking to me... inside my head.

"You know, the food is going to run out. How you gonna replenish it, hmmmmmm?"

"We'll, um..."

"And what about when you run out of gas and you can't boil the water no more. I'll just trickle in and make a yummy little snack out of you and your friends."

"You won't get us so easily!"

"Who are you talking to?" my friend asked.

"Uh...look. Given the circumstances, we won't be able to survive here indefinitely. I don't mind dying since I've got heaven to look forward to. I just don't want it to hurt or for the stupid plant to get me. I believe suicide is therefore the most practical option here."

"But suicide is an unforgivable sin! Also, I don't want you to die."

"God can forgive anything, and I'm going to die anyway. Now help me ram this pipe through my head."

"No!"

"Come on!"

"No!"

"Please?"

It continued in this way until we realized that killing Audrey II was an option we could both agree on. However, by that time the plant had already died due to killing too many humans too quickly and depleting its food source. We emerged from the kitchen victoriously and took a plane to South America for the heck of it.

Dream Log 46: Soooo Meta

"So the whole point of this character is he's just so quiet that nobody notices him, so he can use misdirection," I explained to my sister. She seemed less than enthused about the intricacies of Kuroko's Basketball. "It gets better. See, instead of making him play basketball, you should turn him into a wizard, and then-"

The image froze, an annoyed looking me pushed it "off screen", muttered "You can do better than that," and reset the dream to focus instead on 10 year old versions of myself and one of my friends in a 1960s elementary school. As we entered the classroom, an adult version of myself started narrating.

"Jake and I had spent so much of our childhood together, I had always viewed him as an unshakable constant. That was before Shirley  joined the class." On cue, this adorable little girl, complete with pigtails and pleated skirt shuffled into the room. She had a scared puppy look to her. Jake was smitten. He and I had stapler duty that day, but he kept getting distracted and stapling the paper in the wrong direction. Eventually, Mrs. Maple, the teacher, noticed this and shooed both of us back to our seats. My tiny fists were clenched jealously.

"Footballer, eyes front!" Mrs. Maple declared when his eyes had wandered to his crush again.

"Mrs. Maple had called Jake the footballer from the day she learned that he played," clarified the narrator, "I had taken it as a term of respect. He wasn't just a plain old student to her. He was someone with a skill. One year, he twisted his ankle and was out a whole season. She never called him footballer again."

While we scribbled our attempts at cursive in our notebooks, I noticed a student I had never paid much attention to before. He wasn't writing. He was twisted around in his seat and smiling directly at me. I glanced around me, but none of the other students or even Mrs. Maple noticed a thing. When I turned back to the boy, it seemed as though I could see him more vividly than the other students, as though the brightness had been turned down on the rest of the room.

"He's going to leave you," stated the boy.

"What?"

"Your friend doesn't care about you anymore. There's someone more interesting. You'll become a lonely little worm with nothing more than memories to keep you warm."

"I-"

"At least, that's what would happen if this were reality, but it isn't. You could change it, and you should."

The next thing I know, I'm sitting in my kitchen with a dream quickly fading away. I scurried off to find my sister and tell her about it.

"Hey! I had a weird dream....it was...Cassandra Nova was in prison."

"Pff, locking her up? She can just manipulate you into letting her out," my sister responded.

"Yeah, I know but it was great because she made the guard think-" it then occurred to me that I was dreaming of describing a dream. "Actually, I'm going to go for a walk."

While outside, I wandered past a group of cheerleaders having a party involving a trampoline. I stopped to watch. One girl was attempting to do a back flip into middle splits, but could not bring herself to actually land with her legs split for fear of, well, pain. Her friends cheered her on, and she came reasonably close. Then, they suggested that the new girl take a crack at it.

This new girl wore a leotard and the hand braces gymnasts use on the uneven bars. She chalked her hands, stepped onto the trampoline, shook herself out, took a deep breath, and jumped. She managed a double front pike into a tuck where she spun three times on the surface of the trampoline itself to finish sitting cool and cross-legged in the exact center. The other girls fell silent and stared. One of them crept up next to her and asked, "So, uh, Malory. That was weird. Where did you learn that?" Malory squirmed, face turning red.

"It was a technique I used in the trampoline event of...well it was called the Olympics. It's a relatively difficult competition." With that, she leaped off the trampoline to find some privacy.

I woke up...again and rushed off to tell my mother this time about the trampoline affair, which I found inexplicably hilarious.

"Mom! Oh man, understatement of the century!" I realized, yet again that I was getting meta and at last succeeded in waking myself up for real.

Dream Log 45: Plato's Computer

"Don't mind me, miss. I'm nobody, just a man passing through. Scan me if you like, I have all the clearance needed," gushed the skinny man as he pushed passed the intern in charge of computer access, "right then. Let's get a look at her." He whipped out a pen-sized electronic device and buzzed it in the direction of the computer stashed behind its enormous monitor. "Interesting," he muttered to himself.

"Um, excuse me, but who are you?" the intern asked.

"Me? Why I'm the Doctor. Why don't you link up to the databases. I'm sure she has something on me," he said, gesturing towards the computer. At that moment, the monitor blinked on to display the face of a young woman rendered in mosaic. Here and there, the image looked thin, and a few places had no picture at all, as though tiles had been removed.

 "What's wrong with Computer?" the intern wondered, leaning closer.

"If I had to take a guess, which I don't because I know for certain, I'd say someone had removed, oh, 35% of the chips connecting her to the population," the Doctor boasted, then turned his attention to Computer, "I'll bet you're missing all that processing power right now! Well you aren't getting it back unless you can convince me you won't start abusing it again, there's not much chance of that."

"She looks...asphyxiated. Where did you put all those chips?"

"Right here." the Doctor gestured towards his head.

"What, in your memory?"

"No, in my left eye. Surprisingly painless, though it does make colors a bit tricky. Now, Comp-AH!" His hands flew protectively to his eye as he doubled over in pain. Before the intern could reach him, his eyeball popped from its socket, scurried across the floor on tentacle-like muscles, and jacked itself into a USB port. Computer's mosaic face restored itself.

"Doctor, so good of you to come," Computer hummed, gazing at the still shaking Timelord.

"Alright, I admit, that was clever," he panted.

"I'm glad you appreciate it. I have looked forward to meeting you for quite some time. I was almost afraid you had not gotten my invitation."

"If by invitation you mean the brainwave manipulation beacon pumping out of here and into the heads of everyone within twenty solar systems, yes, I noticed it. And I want you to stop it."

"You're in no condition to make demands. You would gamble your own life, wouldn't you? But what about hers?" The intern let out a shriek as her eyeball also began to squirm from its socket. However, hers did not come out cleanly like the Doctor's. Blood gushed from the gaping hole, soaking her neck and shirt. The torn eyeball climbed into the Doctor's socket, against his protestations.

"I can get you to the medical facilities, I promise. Just hold on until then -"

"No!" she spat as he tried to help/drag her to the door, "I don't have enough credits. They'd decline me."

"Well that's just stupid! What sort of doctors do you have here?"

"There is a way," Computer crooned, "to get all the credits she could possibly need. All you need to do is play a game. I'll even let you play against yourself so you are certain to win. I just want you to participate."

"And what game is this?" the Doctor demanded. Instead of Computer, the intern answered.

"It's the Data Debate. It's a trivia game where contestants debate their answers to subjective trivia questions."

"I can alter your perceptions and those of the audience to make you appear to be multiple people of different races and genders," Computer added.

"So, to save the day, I have to argue with myself...in drag." A smile crept over the Doctor's face, "then let's get started!" The game proceeded, and the Doctor won in a heated battle against himself. "Alright, I've played your game, won the credits, now I'm going to keep this girl from bleeding to death."

"Don't you mean you are going to keep the Doctor from bleeding to death?"

"What are you talking about, I am the Doc-" he paused because the voice coming out of his throat was female. He looked down at himself to see the hands and clothes of the intern. Looking to the corner of the room, the doctor lay unconscious in a small pool of blood from his eye.

"Okay, that's...weird."

"Or maybe you are the Doctor. I haven't decided yet who I want you to be. Do you understand now? No matter what you do, you have no way of knowing that it actually happened or where you are or who you are. The chip you implanted gives me absolute control over your senses and memories. What can you do?"

The Doctor/Intern was about, I'm sure, to come up with a snappy, inspiring answer that would put Computer in her place. However, my brain decided this was entirely too confusing for 4 in the morning, so it woke me up...or did it?

Dream Log 3A: Doctor Who

The Daleks were worried. Something had appeared on their scanners that they did not understand, and though their usual approach would have been to destroy it, something told them that would end badly. The Dalek ruler therefore dispatched their most observant soldier to examine it. When I say observant, I mean it. He had an enormous eyeball instead of an eye stalk. He also giggled more than any Dalek should. While other workers on the ship he was on pushed him into the transporter to beam him onto the planet below, two baby Daleks appeared on the transport pad. They looked like enormous metal pills. A lima bean walked up to them, admired how cute they were, and ate them whole. Finally, the giggling Dalek beamed down.The moment he landed, his GPS and his link to the Dalek neural web cut off. He had to glide to a nearby town and threatened a man into leading him to the anomaly.

Back on the ship, the lima bean had regurgitated the two baby Daleks into a tub and abandoned them. As soon as the coast was clear, the pills popped open, and out came Rory Williams and myself. We snuck off through the ship and eventually managed to find the Doctor (Tom Baker), get to the planet's surface, and set off after the large eyed Dalek.

The seer, meanwhile, was having trouble with his guide.

"So what do you do to entertain yourselves when you aren't conquering places?" The all too chipper man asked.

"WE TAKE PLEASURE IN OUR OWN PERFECTION!" The seer giggled.

"Oh," the man thought for a moment, "So you masturbate."

"WE DO NOT ENGAGE IN SUCH WEEK ACTIVITIES! OUR TENDRILS ARE ALWAYS FULLY ENGAGED IN THE ARMOR PORTS!"

"Sounds like masturbation."

"YOU WILL DESIST USING THAT WORD! AND WHY ARE YOU NOT TAKING THE SHORTER PATH THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS?!"

"Pff, all you can do is kill me. The stuff in the mountains is way worse than that, so deal with it."

Eventually, the Doctor, Rory, and I arrived at the source of the anomaly, along with the guide and an extremely aggravated Dalek. The anomaly consisted of a hut atop a lumpy hill. Inside, photos of the Doctor, Gallifreyan writing, and other assorted odds and ends.

"Well, mister non-Dalek man," the Doctor addressed the guide, "What's all this then?"

"It's you. The essence of you as far as we could figure out. We have your image, your language, your hobbies, loves fears. We even modeled the hill to reflect your curvature."

"My curvature? I wasn't aware I had the curvature of a hill. I don't eat that many jelly babies."

"I think it's like your average curvature?" Rory suggested.

"Yeah," I backed him up, "Your body is really just one straight line, so it's curvature 0, but your hair. That has to be curvature 2000, so I guess it all evens out to..."

"100?" Rory guessed.

"Sounds right." The Doctor continued to talk with the guide and the Dalek while Rory and I poked around. When we stumbled across some D&D dice, I started to geek out. "DOCTOR! Can I have one of your dice? Please? The Doctor's D&D dice are too wonderfully geeky for words!"

"Yes yes, fine." I pocketed a shiny d12, squealing with delight. "What I want to know is why do all this?"

"THIS IS A BAD PLACE!" screamed the Dalek, it's eye twitching around violently.

"That's the point," explained the guide, "You're like a drug to the Daleks, they can't stay away, but you're horrible for their health. We decided to set up a honey pot far away from us so that if they ever came here, they'd be lured in and killed without ever bothering us."

"But that's preposterous," the Doctor objected, "A room can't kill without programming, a life form, something."

"This...is a cruel thing," wispered the seer, "No Dalek should feel this. What am I feeling? What..." it never finished it's thought. It simply shut down.

"You see? It works like a charm," chirped the guide.

We all returned to the city and met with the senate to discuss their Doctor Mock-up. During the meeting, lots of politics flew around that I didn't understand and didn't particularly want to. What I did catch was that Rory had grown tense. A senator noticed as well and offered him his wrist teleporter.

"Take it," he insisted, "You don't need to be here, and I do."

Reluctantly, Rory accepted it. The moment he powered it up, Amy Pond appeared where he'd been standing. He appeared on the other side of the room, and the eye stalk and laser of a Dalek sprouted out of Amy. I did not see that coming.

"Woah, Daleks!" Amy exclaimed. From her point of view, three of them were leveling their lasers at her. Her laser fired off in their direction automatically. In reality, the three Daleks were Rory, the Doctor, and the Guide.

"Amy! Don't trust what you're seeing! The programming just makes you think that you're facing enemies. It's changing your perceptions to make you accept that. Fight it!"

When she realized what was happening to her, Amy broke down crying. Moments later, she recovered. She had become full on Dalek. There was nothing we could do. She beamed back up to the ship, and we returned to the TARDIS.

"You know, Doctor," I growled, "I know now why they had dice in that room. It's because you don't really know what's going to happen, do you? You just gamble with the lives around you and promise it'll turn out all right. Well, it doesn't always." I gave Rory a much needed hug before stepping out of the TARDIS and into my home.

Dream Log 12:30: Throwing Caution to the Wind

She was such a nice lady. She came off at first as a bit too Marry Poppins-like, what with her carpet bag of holding and prim and proper ways. However, she seemed to have more vulnerability to her. It's little wonder, since she was tasked with caring for a little rascal and protecting her family's souls for all of eternity. The little rascal in question was essentially young Bruce Wayne if instead of Alfred, he had the vampire slaying butler from the anime Hellsing, and if instead of having a thing for bats, he had a thing for dressing up like a dog. Hardly any difference, right?

Well, the butler decided he was not really fit to raise a child, so he enlisted the nanny's help. She and the boy grew fond of each other quite quickly, but she refused to take up permanent residence at the house. This was due to her familial duties. Every night, she went out to a small alcove in the middle of a field where hundreds of candles burned. She lit new candles when the old ones burned down, moved rocks around to shield them from the wind, and then gazed at the stars that were her family members and depended upon the earthly flames.

One day, the boy (wearing fake floppy dog ears, I might add) insisted that his nanny take him with her on her evening trip. She obliged. He marveled at the candles and sat with her for a hour listening to her family stories. Suddenly, home-sickness shot through her. She could not resist the pull of the stars, so she placed a new candle on a rock and cascaded into the sky as a fountain of light. The candle's wick spontaneously ignited. The boy rushed towards the flame to marvel at it. As he watched it dance, the wind picked up. The flame struggled against it, then puffed out. Before the boy could grasp what that meant, a tiny man leaped out from behind a bush and charged him, arms grasping for his throat.

"You killed her! You piece of slime!"

"No," the boy protested, "It was the wind. I didn't-"

"I'll murder you!" before he quite reached the boy, a foot slammed into his gut. He fell gasping to the ground. At first, the boy thought his butler had appeared and kicked the attacker. In reality, his butler had appeared and swung a plastic leg into the small man.

"Butler!"

"An appropriately cautious person will consider all likely scenarios and prepare himself against the worst of them, up to and including leprechaun attacks at midnight. I," he laid a wiry hand against his chest, "am an exceedingly cautious person."

Dream Log Nu: Fictitious History

[I found out last night that I had missed part of a recent update to the webcomic Homestuck. The update was an interactive thing, and I forgot to give a horse to the author of the comic so he'd be my slave. No, I am not making that part up. Naturally, my dream mind decided to fill in what it thought would have happened if I had done that.]

I managed to find some treasure chests filled with those horsehead-on-a-stick toys. Score! I promptly wove my way through the maze of passages I'd taken to find Andrew Hussie, sitting dejectedly in a crater. For some reason, he could not walk. When I showed him the horse toys, he was overjoyed. He quickly flopped himself at one of them and merged with it somehow to become Andrew Horsey. He looked like a tiny plush horse with his own head stuck on top of it. It was adorable. And disturbing. I ordered him to show me the way out of the maze, so off we went. 

He scuttled along before me for a while until we came upon a museum of German history. More specifically, the collections area of such a museum. Two anthropologist / historian / old stuff researchers were on duty. A potbellied old man labeled and cataloged artifacts while a gracefully aged woman did restoration work on a painting spanning a large section of wall. They ignored Andrew and I, so we decided to peruse the shelves. One of them had various ceramics cookie jars arranged below little plaques. When read in order, they went as follows.

"Jews were baked into cookies a lot.

Nazis had a big problem with rot.

Who ever did think

the idea didn't stink

to put human remains... in a pot?"

The plaque reading "in a pot" sat above a traditional urn. I burst into laughter. In fact, I fell down from guffawing so hard. That got the male researcher's attention.

"You think the holocaust is funny, do you?" he accused.

"No! I - I, heh, I just think - haha - the limerick, and the pfffffpot-urn-thing is just - heehee hohahaHAHAHAHAHA!" When I finally recovered from my severe case of the giggles, I dug myself into an even deeper hole. "I do wonder though, how one bakes humans into cookies. How would that work?"

"You're sick, do you know that?" the researcher stated.

"I'm not condoning it! It was a horrible thing to do, but that doesn't make it uninteresting. Besides, you aren't the littlest bit curious about how humans taste?" I looked to Hussie for help, but he had gotten quite distracted by the female researcher. It seemed the two had met before and spent a magical dance filled evening together. "Huss, we should keep going. I want to get out of here."

"Can't you see I've found loooooooove?" He made a move to jump away from me, but I grabbed a hold of his head first. The body kept going, but the head stayed behind. That angered him. He warped his face into that of a character from a rage comic. I had to fight to keep my stomach down while looking at him. "LET GO OR I'LL BITE YOUR ARMS OFF!" He snapped his jaws at me, but I kept a firm grip.

"Hussie. You are mine. You will do as I say, and NO! No feigning rabies! I know you're clean." He ceased attempting to froth at the mouth. "You will lead me out of here, or you'll never get your horse body back again."

Just then, Otto I, Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire, rode past with his entourage. I dropped Hussie and followed Otto out of the caves instead.

Dream Log Psi: Rain, Trains, and Anthropomorphic Personifications

I needed a job. Someone suggested that I look for work as assistant to some high up businessman at a particular company. When I went to apply, the man failed to meet my expectations. He looked business like, but he spoke like a tactless hound dog.

"I need my assistants to follow me around, carry all my stuff, make calls, open doors for me, and give me blow jobs once a day."

"Yeah...I'm not giving anyone a blow job," I informed him. He decided the interview was over at that point, so he left the office to go home. I followed because that was the direction I had to go anyway. As we walked, a glance out the window revealed that thick storm clouds had completely filled the sky. Lightning flickered ominously. "Awesome," I breathed, "today isn't a total loss."

"What are you talking about?" the man demanded, "You actually like storms?"

"Of course! They're powerful and beautiful. They're the deadly big sisters of life giving rain. Isn't that incredible?"

He stared at me for a second, face inscrutable, before handing his suitcase to me. "You'll be my assistant. We can skip the sexual favors, but try to keep up with me." With that, he turned on his heal and swept down the hall to the elevator, me half jogging after him.

For a while, I simply carried his stuff and opened doors and waited for him to come out of meetings like I had expected to do. We became gradually more friendly and less formal with one another, though it was more a fatherly relationship than anything else. One day, as we were heading to his car, I noticed something on the ground of the parking garage right by the exit ramp. Without getting my employer's attention or permission, I hustled over to investigate. Lying there in a dirt stained blue dress, was an unconscious woman. I checked for a pulse and found one. She was breathing as well and had no visible injuries, but I could not for the life of me get her to wake up. I left her for a moment to call for help and to block a car from driving down the ramp. Eventually, a few other people came along and got her out of the path of cars and called 911. I hurried back to my businessman and hopped into my seat.

"And where were you?"

"A woman was passed out on the exit ramp in the way. I got some people to move her and wait for paramedics."

"Oh, well that's okay then."

We drove off, and through shenanigans that I cannot recall became embroiled in a religious extremist plot to blow up a train. At least, that is what we though they intended to do. The two of us were stuck on the train, waiting for the extremists to reach our car so that we could knock them unconscious. It did not work. They arrived, but when I went to hit them in the head with a mallet, they simply shrugged it off and set about packing boxes of food into the empty seats. The leader of the group, a middle eastern boy about 12 years old, asked that I come forward and learn his great purpose. He spoke in metaphors and meaningful looks, so I was never sure if I got his meaning or not. As far as I could tell, he believed that his father, who had recently gone missing, was God and that they could reestablish contact with him by going to a special location. I was familiar with his father, Ali Haddad, a man even smugger and more vague than his son.


I fell asleep on the train ride. The next thing I knew, we had reached the special, secluded location. The men and women were setting up the food, but I could not help noticing how little there seemed to be of it. It would last a day or two with so many people, and the boy-leader had no intentions of leaving the compound. Suspicion slithered through me. Curse you, Ali Haddad. Where are you? I though to myself.

I'm right here.

I nearly jumped out of my shoes. Had I imagined the voice that had just rumbled through my head? Or was something stranger going on? One possibility crossed my mind and turned my blood to ice; did the train crash after all? Was I already dead? I tried to dismiss the notion, but it was no mean feat.

I turned my attention back to the food. They had laid out a meal comprising dumplings wrapped in tacos, wasabi watermelon, and apples. I skipped the watermelon. When I got to my apple, it tasted somewhat off. Looking at the half eaten fruit, I could see rice sized insects burrowed in the apple flesh. A woman eating a ten pound apple called them armored caterpillars. I called them disgusting, threw the apple away from me, and insisted that the dream be something else. So it was.

The endless were dying, and it was okay. They accepted it. It had to happen. Death was the first one to go, but she was replaced quickly by a more classical death complete with hood and scythe. The new Death remarked, "It was a strange feeling to die. It usually works the other way around." Delirium died next, replaced by no one. Then went Desire, Despair, Destiny, Destruction. No one took their places. I went to Dream and asked him what was happening.

"Do not worry. What we represent will always live on, but humans do not need us anymore. They can cultivate their own desires and despairs, their own destiny and destruction, their own delirium and of course their own dreams. Death remains because humans have not yet outgrown her... or rather him now. Come," he gently commanded, rising to the size of a mountain, "It is my time."

He carried me in his palm to a patch of woods with trees as large as him. He pushed deeper into the forest, every step a little slower than the last. He finally reached a patch with five trees that, if you squinted, look almost like people. Here, he put me down. I could see then why his pace had slowed so much. Vines and roots had wrapped around his ankles, not violently, but firmly enough. The vines continued to rise. Dream's clothing disappeared under the foliage, or perhaps it became it. I could not tell. At last, Dream lifted his arms to the risen moon and surrendered himself. Millennia of grief and exhaustion fell away, replaced by pure peace before he turned to wood completely. That was the end of Dream.

Dream Log Something or other: Crime

The copper pair of Detective Inspector Lewis and Detective Sergent Hathaway from a British show had been called in to investigate a crime at some swanky event in the country. I was never quite clear on what the event was, but it required a mansion, members of a royal family (not Britain's), and hot air balloons. The detectives got right to work. They made their way to the room where the body had been found, but the door proved problematic. Lewis could shove it part way open, but then it slammed closed again. His second attempt succeeded, and the pair rushed into the room with guns raised. A bullet riddled body lay on the ground in a pool of blood. A Jewish looking gentleman peered over the corpse and took photographs while giggling to himself. Chaos ensued as the policemen chased the gleeful man about. Somehow, they ended up outside again. They forced the door open again, but in the few seconds that took, the man had somehow hoisted the body up into a noose slung over some exposed rafters. When he noticed the policemen again, he whipped out a cardboard sign with a name on it and chanted the name while staring Lewis in the face. Then, he leaped out of the window. Lewis turned to charge down the stairs after the man, but Hathaway had leveled his gun at him.

"I can't let you go sir," he asserted, "you have to answer for your crimes."

"What crimes? Blimey, the man that tampered with the body is getting away!"

"I'm not falling for any of that. The people who've seen this crime scene are us, and it isn't your first time coming here. Is it?"

"Hathaway, do you see the bullet holes in the wall over there behind me? I'm going to take the cartridge out of my gun and show you that it's full. I couldn't have shot this man. You're under some kind of spell"

After Hathaway examined the cartridge, he started to lower his gun. His memory returned, and his ears turned bright red out of embarrassment. The partners fled after the strange man, but by then he was long gone.

Long gone for the detectives anyway. Not for the 10 year old version of myself that was wandering the grounds waiting for my parents to be done with the event. By this time, the weird man had shrunken to the size of a leprechaun. When he saw the young version of me, who was equal to him in height, he became rather curious. He snuck behind me, scurrying from tree to tree until we were far from any adults. Only then did he reveal himself. It seemed he had a task that needed doing, and due to my tiny size, he decided to delegate that task to me. I was not interested. Then, he whipped out the sign again. This time, he did not say anything. He simply waved it in my face for a while. For some odd reason, reading Herr Gustav McFinnigan compelled me to do as the leprechaun said.

He then handed me a somewhat gnarled wooden baton and commanded me to give it to the crown prince before his race. I wasn't really down with the whole "give potentially cursed items to royalty" thing, but the longer I took to deliver the item, the more inexplicably terrified and anxious I became. Eventually, I managed to huddle behind a pillar while the prince and one of his friends took baths in separate, elaborate bathtubs. The prince reminded me strongly of Eridan Ampora if you gave him social skills. I, as a ten year old girl, felt rather uncomfortable about walking up to a bathing man and handing him something that would likely kill him. I managed though and promptly curled up in a ball in a corner far away from the rest of the world.

Then, everything changed (when the fire nation attacked). I was wandering through sketchy subway systems with random industrial style elevators with a bunch of friends until Barney from "How I Met Your Mother" came along and took my geeky, conservative friend out on a date. That was pretty much that.

Dream Log Psi: Change in Perspective

Food vendors filled the hallways of some generic academic building. I saw cookies and cakes and puddings and ice cream everywhere I looked. Insatiable cravings plagued me. Try as I might, I could not shake the desire for a chocolate chip cookie. At last, I gave in and purchased one at least 6 inches in diameter. I snuck back to my room and nibbled it dejectedly under the covers. Its chocolate was delicious, but the guilt put a bitter taste in my mouth.

When I had finished, I made my way back to the vendors. However, not long after I returned, a queer sensation coursed through me. Something within me was changing, and I did not know what. Fortunately for me, the young man that appeared out of nowhere and insisted that I follow him to his car before the transformation finished seemed to know what was going on.

"Have you been following me?" I accused as he led me off.

"A bit yeah. Be glad I did," he replied. A driver pulled a black sedan up to the building exit. The man
buckled me into the backseat, wrapped me in a blanket, popped into the passenger seat, and we were off.

"Would you please tell me why I'm in your car?" I muttered, struggling against sudden grogginess.

"You're turning into a vampire. If we don't get you to a coven quickly, there'll be hell to pay."

It all made sense. After all, not reporting a fledgling vampire to a coven would be like having a baby and not reporting the birth. The only difference is the baby sucks blood. I went on to ramble incoherently for half an hour or so in a sleepy delirium.

"I should probably stop talking, shouldn't I?"

"That would be nice," snipped the man. Another half hour passed, this time in silence. "Look, I didn't mean to offend you. You didn't have to stop completely."

"It's fine. I was just wondering, why help me when I might try to drink you?"

"If you were lost, and a talking hamburger could give you directions, would you eat it? Anyway, we're almost there. When we get inside, there will be lots of people that aren't vampires wandering around just to confuse us. Vampires are notoriously antisocial, so you won't see a group of 30 or more of them just hanging around. Wait until we've gone as deep down and as far away from crowds as we can before saying anything about what you are."

We climbed out of the car in front of a large, old fashioned building. The man guided me inside where a crowd of men in golden robes huddled around a table, discussing either stocks or battle plans. We swept past them and took a long spiral staircase down into the building's bowels. The number of people decreased along with our anonymity. By three flights down, the people we did see made it quite clear that they saw us too. One elegant man on his way up rushed towards me, a sadistic grin exposing his pointed teeth. I held my ground. When he reached our step, he realized that I did not have a drop of blood in me. I smiled back, exposing fangs of my own. After he had passed, I turned excitedly to my mortal guide, whispering "Oh my gosh! That was another vampire!"

"Yes, it's wonderful. Keep going."

At long last, we reached the basement where an elaborate tent like that of some medieval king had been set up. A distinguished looking man dressed all in dark blue stepped out of it to greet us.

"No one around, deep underground, fancy tent. Are you the head vampire?" I asked.

"Indeed I am. You must be newly turned. It is a pleasure," he replied, then spoke to my companion, "Thank you for bringing her to us. You may go. I promise you safe passage." The man said goodbye and hurried away, leaving me with the vampire king. "When did you become a vampire, my dear?"

"Like an hour ago. Heck, I haven't even drunk blood yet," I answered, smiling uncontrollably. I was completely geeking out.

"Ah, where are my manners! Come inside. I'd be honored to mix you a drink." We went inside the tent, and he set about squeezing fruit juice and dropping berries into a chalice of blood.

"I thought vampires couldn't have anything besides blood."

"And who told you such nonsense? A cat is a carnivore, but it can enjoy apples. We are sanguivores," he explained as he scooped the stuff that makes sour gummies sour into the drink, "but we have a taste for the exotic." I accepted the chalice and drank without hesitation.

"Wow! That's fantastic!" I exclaimed. The king took a seat across from me, and smiled all too knowingly. "What's that face about?" I asked.

"Oh, you will make an excellent vampire."

Slightly disconcerted but excited nevertheless, I dove into a conversation on vampire covens. At some point, we left the tent to meet other vampires. The next time I went into the tent, it had changed. Wet, twisted ropes of linen were piled up in one corner for no apparent reason. Books and maps lined the walls. When I started to ask what had happened, I found myself face to face with a scruffy haired boy about my age.

"My dad says you can stay in this tent as long as you like. We have some snack if your hungry," he offered. Dream logic told me that not only was he the son of the vampire king, but the vampire king was now a werewolf and so was I and everyone else. We chowed down together on beef and raw oysters while the werewolf king and some advisers planned an attack on the vampire coven, which apparently still existed, just somewhere else.

Suddenly, an enormous group of color coded werewolves tried to attack the tent to overthrow the king. The prince, the king, and the advisers all slipped off their robes, went into werewolf form, and faced their opponents outside. I had to hang back before taking my clothes off so I could shape shift. My life might have been in danger, but that's hardly a reason for immodesty. When I finally got outside, I realized that we were all actually Live Action Role Playing. The attacking werewolves were pieces of paper that our characters had to flip over to indicate we had killed them. As soon as the battle ended, a bunch of the red, green, blue, and yellow factions had been taken prisoner, and I got dressed, everything became reality again instead of a game.

Before long, the king received a threatening message from the head vampire. "We are coming for the vampire werewolf's ring. The only safe hiding place for it is in her memories. Muahahaha!" Surprise surprise, I was the vampire werewolf. I looked at my hands, and sure enough, I had a silver ring. In retrospect, that should have killed me, being a werewolf and all.

"I don't understand," I gasped, "I distinctly remember taking the ring off and leaving it somewhere in the vampire camp."

"I've got it!" cried the King, "The vampire said it's only safe in your memories, right? It must be that you have a psychic connection to the ring and can summon it to you if you displace it. Maybe you can send it away somewhere else too!"

"That explains the damp towels!" realized the prince. No one else followed. "We can use them to spell a word as a channel for her. For instance, the vampires think we're savages. So we should spell that out and have her send it that way!"

It made as much sense as anything else. The problem was, we could not figure out how to spell savages. After attempting schaveges, scafages, scavages, safadges, and others, I got fed up with it and looked in one of the many dictionaries inside the tent. Apparently, the werewolves were almost entirely illiterate.

Then, I woke up...sort of. I scurried off to class and ran into a fellow classmate on the way.

"Hey, I just wanted you to know that I decided to write my analysis paper on your vampire king character."

"Really? I'm flattered. I just dreamed up some more to the story last night, so I can give it to you if you need it."

"Wait, that's all coming from dreams? Dang girl, how do you get so lucky?"

At that point, I noticed a federal agent trailing us, or more specifically me. "Hang on, Mickie. I've got to do something before I forget." I whipped out my phone, ran a quick program, and smirked when the agent's earpiece exploded. I knew that whatever machine the earpiece had fed back to had also taken a hit. A day or so later, someone in the FBI sauntered into the office of a man at the end of his rope.

"I heard the girl got you demoted," he jibed.

"I'm not demoted! I've just been...down played."

"Yeah, tell that to your paycheck. See you around."

Dream Log Upsilon: Departmentstores & Dragons

Surfing the internet. There are few things simultaneously mind numbingly boring and absolutely addictive, but the internet pulls it off. In all my time mucking about, I came across only one picture in all that time that really seemed worth my time. It had two halves. On the left side, it showed Uncle Iroh from Avatar: The Last Airbender with a flame red dragon poking its head out on one side and its tail and lower body curled protectively around Iroh. On the other side of the picture, Mako from Legend of Korra played with a dragon actually made from flame. It struck a chord in me.

However, I did not have time to dwell on it. People had said something on the chat program I'd left open. I gave it a look and was surprised to see that one of the boys had opened a private channel with me. When I read what he had typed, my head started to spin.

"Hey, so I know that when it comes to hook ups, you haven't had anyone closer to your 'stage' than the balcony seats. But I'm going to ask anyway. Do you think I could at least sit in the front row?"

"Umm.....what? Where is this even coming from?"

"Well-" he proceeded to type something or other that may have been an explanation, may have been another entreaty to fool around. I sort of ignored it and opened a channel with everyone else in the chat to beg for help. As I tried to hold myself together, a little voice in my head whispered to me.

"This is a dream. There is no way he would ask that, and he definitely wouldn't use a theater metaphor if he did. Relax. This is simply an expression of your desire for attention due to your crushing lack of self worth. There are healthier ways to deal with those problems than in dreams with boys you are not even interested in. Do yourself a favor and change the dream. "

Just like that, the dream changed. Everyone in the chat sans the would be booty caller appeared in a department store. I forgot once more that it was a dream. As a result, a friend and I started to chase each other around for no good reason. We then raced to see who could find the coolest necklace. He went straight for the sparkly stuff, but I wandered a bit further away and discovered a steel and glass dragon amulet. Needless to say, I won. Our group grew ever more reckless until someone reminded us that the store chain was instrumental to our plot to take over the world. That got us to calm down. At least until I found a coat with a cape and my friend found a strapless cocktail dress he could pull over his sweater vest. Then there was no stopping us.

Dream Log Gamma Prime: Poachers

Somehow I had stumbled across a group of fish poachers working out of a nearby river. I observed them for a few days just to gather information, figure out how many of them there were, what their cars looked like, etc. Going to the police for this never really crossed my mind. Instead, I confronted them. I informed them that what they were doing was wrong, and if they did not stop, I would expose them. Fortunately, I had enough sense to keep my distance while telling them this because as soon as I turned to retreat into the trees, they started to follow me. I had broken into a cold sweat by the time I had reached my car. The men following me backed off when they saw me in the vehicle, but only so they could get in their cars to continue pursuit. I streaked off towards the nearest proper road. To get home, I had to turn left, but the road looked so busy, waiting for an opening would make me a sitting duck. I swerved right at the first opportunity and commenced a terrifyingly real feeling drive. I floored it, swerving between lanes and leaving a chorus of honking horns in my wake. I took corners practically on two wheels. I slipped in and out of alleys, praying that they were not dead ends. The men remained in my rear-view mirror until at last, I charged into another wooded area, sped down a dirt path, and literally crashed through some bushes onto the main road. This time, I was going in the correct direction, and I did not take my foot off of the accelerator until I had returned safely home.

Upon arrival, I discovered that one of the history teachers from my high school had dropped by. He greeted me, and for once his too blue eyes and dizzying tallness made me feel safe instead of unnerved. If the poachers found me, they would have to face this man's stare. I had no doubt about who would win. The teacher explained that he had come to clear up some confusion about a device called a powerbook, which was required for school. People had taken it into their heads that it was a piece of hardware like an e-reader. Apparently, that was not the case. Rather, it was software that you could download into everything from a desktop to a digital camera. It worked like powerpoint, but for creating portfolios instead of presentations. I felt so relieved I hadn't bought one of the tablet e-reader things before finding this out. Those tablet things are expensive!

The class began, though I'm uncertain if any time passed or if we just appeared in a lecture hall and got to work immediately. It all seemed fairly mundane. The subject fluctuated between modern physics, economics, and theater. Whatever the subject, I seemed to enjoy it; I had finished the first major assignment before the teacher had officially assigned it. After the class announcing the project, I went home to reflect on the topics we had discussed. For one reason or another, this included me plugging and unplugging electronics from wall outlets. I did not do anything with the electronics themselves. I just stared at the plugs. Then things got weird.

First, I found myself in an abandoned quarry, along with a few of my favorite teachers. Then, I noticed that the poachers had arrived. They leaped into the quarry bottom with superhuman strength, and a battle commenced. Lights swirled around the teachers, a different color for each of them. One poacher tried to punch a history teacher, but he rocketed out of reach, propelled by a column of yellow light. Another teacher glowed blue and seemed to have harnessed particle wave duality to his advantage. He seemed harmless when you looked at him, but turn your back and you would find yourself pummeled from all sides until you looked at him again and noticed he had appeared on the other side of the quarry. Unfortunately, not all the poachers went after the teachers. One headed straight for me. Without knowing what to do, I made a hand motion like pulling something apart. The next thing I knew, the poacher's body hovered near one of my hands, and his skeleton hovered by the other. I flipped.

"NO! GO BACK TOGETHER! HOW DO I FIX THIS!? GAHHH!!!!!!!!!!"

I slammed my hands back together and hoped. The two portions of the man squished together and miraculously healed back into one understandably horrified person. The poacher collapsed to the ground shaking. I calmed down for a second before realizing that another one was coming my way. This time, I had an idea. I ran straight towards the new aggressor, pantomimed pushing down, which propelled me up and over him. He jumped to meet me, but I clasped both hands over my head and swung them down like a hammer. Purple light cracked from my hands, thudding into his chest, beating him into the ground, and sending an amethyst shock wave out in all directions. I fell back to earth and rolled to the ground. The fight had ended, and most of the teachers had wandered off. My history teacher however remained.

"That was some pretty powerful magic," he commented to me, "Was that your first time?"

"Yes, actually."

"Well, I'm going to teach you how to use that stuff. Get on my back and hold on tight. We need to go to proper training grounds."

I did as he asked, yellow light fizzed into life around him, and we shot into the sky and through the other side. Yes, we were flying through space.

"where are we going? The moon?"

"Of course not. The moon doesn't have any air. We have to go to another solar system."

"But that will take years, and we didn't bring any food! We didn't even bring water!"

"Really? We're flying through space using nothing but yellow sparkles and you're worried about food and water?"

I had nothing to say to that. Apparently neither did my brain, for that is when I woke.

Dream Log i: Those Freaking Robots

My family was preparing for some big event, and not just my family. A number of rather prominent families had gathered together for the event. One of these families had an elementary school aged daughter and an android, both of which I had to keep occupied and out of the way during the preparations. I was less than thrilled. After all, I had important FIRST Robotics Competition work to do.

At some point, one of the hundreds of adults running around bumped into the android. The two grabbed at one another to maintain their balance. The man moved on after a hurried apology, but the android did not brush the contact off. Its entire attitude changed. It began to talk.

"oh no bro were in this together now you get a fist full of cool kid and youd better be ready for more"

"What's wrong with the android?" the man asked me.

"I don't...hang on. That sounds like someone I know," I mused, examining the robot more closely.

"another flighty broad fallen madly in love with my ironic greatness" the android droned. My eyes widened, and I whipped around to look at the man who had started this. He had a scratched disk design on his red shirt. My suspicions were confirmed.

"Sir, you're wearing a Dave Strider shirt," I pointed out.

"yeah, so?"

"The robot- he started talking like Dave after grabbing your shirt!" I exclaimed. The man did not share my excitement. He hurried off, leaving me to try and figure out how to reverse what had happened to the robot. Helpless, I lay my hand on its shoulder and willed it to go back to normal. It worked.

"Wow, that was so cool!" shouted the little girl that I had almost forgotten about, "we should see if we can do it again!"

We could. It turned out, if the android placed his palm on another person's bare skin, he would assume their exact appearance and mannerisms. If he placed a hand on a symbol of someone, he'd just get the personality as he did with the Dave shirt. I was the only one who could snap him out of his altered state. Unfortunately, the android got a bit excited by all this and decided to wander off and experiment. Tracking down a shape changer is...problematic. Try explaining to a stranger that you have to put your hands on them to see if they're a renegade robot. They are not particularly cooperative. Eventually, the girl and I had to return to the event center to attend whatever the big event was. We took our seat in time to see my former trumpet teacher singing a grandiose solo as part of the opening ceremonies. At least, it was supposed to be a solo. The android came on stage disguised as my teacher. In true "show must go on" spirit, the two sang a lovely duet while they glared at one another. They quit saying the proper words and instead argued with one another to the melody. Imagine the following sung to Pachelbel's canon.

"I am the true Mark Beth!"

"If that were so, why are you always so horribly sharp!"

"That is a lie, I am not sharp!"

I got to the stage and converted the android back to normal before a fistfight broke out. Some time later, I discovered that I could not only will the android out of a disguise, but I could will him into one. I exploited this to make the best darn Eridan you've ever seen for a Homestuck cosplay group.

Dream Log Gamma: D&D

I found myself in a tavern, or more accurately a bar. A couple guys sat at the table with me, and we had character sheets, dice, and miniatures out and already in use. Normally, when a dream starts off like this, my dream self has literally appeared out of nowhere and has no clue what's going on or it's as though I'm just turning on a show in the middle, but my dream self has all the background knowledge that my real self does not. This time was different. I had clearly been playing D&D with the group. However, I could not remember the slightest bit of what was going on.

"What do you do?" the DM asked me.

"Uh, remind me where I am on the board?" he pointed it out. Another player and I had the enemy flanked.

"Oh man, if only I was playing a rogue," I lamented, assuming that I had gone with paladin.

"You are," one of the other players reminded me.

"Really? Which one?"

"What do you mean which one?"

"Well I need to know what sort of person I'm playing, and I've rolled up a couple of different rogues in the past," I explained, scrambling for my character sheet. The others exchanged looks. "Aha! Mistress Nadia! I was hoping it was the ex-dominatrix. I sneak attack the dog with my rapier."

Playing resumed, but the perspective shifted to show the imagined fight rather than the real life game play. The party had to run for it from a buff hairless fighter and a manic little halfling. A trap wall cut me off from the others. Fortunately, it also trapped the halfling, leaving me with just the big guy. He had not yet come around the corner, so I hid in a shallow alcove. When he reached me, I sneak attacked in the surprise round, then pounced on top of him, knocking him to the ground.

"I'm going to watch you bleed!" I screamed, plunging my dagger into his shoulder.

"Good luck with that," he replied through gritted teeth. My blade sank into him time after time, but the slashes in his flesh remained dry.

"What - what are you?" I gasped. He pushed me off of him, and I scrambled to regain my footing before he did.

"I'm undead. Surprise!" At that point, the party broke through the trap wall and surrounded the still prone undead.

"Cleric," I called, "Cut the lich's heart out." He obliged, using his holy weapon to end the still smiling creature's existence.

"He's not a lich!" one of my coplayer's objected.

"Yeah, but my character doesn't know the difference, and she doesn't care."

The dream devolved into a classic D&D technicalities debate.

Dream Log Beta: Trials

Rumpelstiltskin was my new teacher. More specifically, Mister Gold from Once Upon A Time was the new teacher. Of course no one knew who he really was, not even me. However, something about him rubbed me the wrong way. Every opportunity I got, I tried to catch him in some evil act. He soon noticed my suspicions. Instead of attempting to dissuade me, he seemed to egg me on. He called me to his desk and told me to leave my backpack with him. When I returned to retrieve it, he had filled it with other student's assignments. I called the principle in and told her what had happened and that I thought he was trying to frame me, but she and "Mister Gold" just laughed it off.

"I'm trusting you to help me make corrections," Rumpelstiltskin explained, "you are a star student after all, aren't you?"

I could have punched him for that. Later, he found my multi-tool and modified it somehow so that it spun around itself on some sort of geared system. I had to admit, it was mechanically beautiful. It also made the tool completely useless except as a weapon thanks to a rather large knife he had attached to it. I found that just a tiny bit strange...

It made more sense when people started killing each other. Students living in dorms divided themselves along class lines, freshmen against freshmen, sophomores against sophomores. The last ones living got some special honor, though no one bothered to explain it to me. All I knew was that that knife came in handy when some boy hyped up on testosterone attacked me with a sharpened pull-up bar. (Side Note: Why do so many of my dreams seem to turn into The Hunger Games? I've never even seen it or read the books!)

I got away and spent most of my time hiding in my room rather than face death or turn into a murderer. Things went a bit fuzzy at that point. I believe several decades past. The world had gone through another ice age or something because snow was everywhere. The boy that the dream now followed wore a parka reminiscent of the southern water tribe from Avatar: The Last Airbender. The boy also hesitated to kill others his age. He and a more vicious girl ended up being the last two alive of their age group. They had done well enough that a council of elders met to try the pair one more time. The winner would become next in line as chief.

When the boy and girl entered the council room, they saw at least six people kneeling around a low table. One particularly ancient woman with pure white hair that she left down caught the boy's attention. He suspected that she had the real power in the room. The other elders were just for show really. His guess proved correct.

"How is your German?" the woman crooned to the girl.

"Wunderbar," replied the young lady. The two proceeded to converse in German, yet with strange accents and vocabulary that the boy had never heard before.

"Junge, findest du nicht, dass ihre Augen wirklich wunderschsoen in diesem Licht scheinen?" the elder asked him. Mercifully, he understood that she had asked him if he also found the girl's eyes lovely in this light. The question caught him a bit off guard. He glanced towards the girl, whose eyes really did stun him. Why was this relevant?

"Ja, Sie haben recht, aber was, wenn sie im anderen Licht wäre?" he answered as properly as he could. Yes, you're right, but what about when she's in different light? 

The old woman nodded approval. She then indicated to another elder to open a door. When he did so, an older youth stumbled through the doorway and collapsed. Frostbite and injuries marked his body. Without a word of explanation, the old woman rose and stepped through the doorway, followed by the other elders, leaving the two youths with the injured man.

"It's got to be some sort of test," the girl reasoned.

"Whatever it is, we have to help him," the boy asserted. 

He rushed over to try and see to the young man's wounds, but he panicked and struggled. Then, the girl clasped his hand in hers and smiled at him. He fixed his eyes on hers and relaxed.

"You must be very brave to have taken such wounds," she crooned as the boy pealed away blood soaked furs and started to wrap the wounds with strips from his own clothes, "What level are you?"

"I'm...I'm a senior, Marion level. That's not so bad, is it?" It seemed that Marion level was like being a brown stripe in karate.

"Wow, that's fantastic," the girl praised, giving his hand a squeeze.

I wanted to find out what happened. I wanted to know whether the girl or the boy would win. Heck, I wanted to know if I had died thirty years ago or not. Unfortunately, the jerk of a fusion reactor called the sun woke me up.

Dream Log e: Just Yes

Basically the entirety of this dream consisted of Nathan Fillian, Felicia Day, and a handful of other awesome people that probably included Neil Patrick Harris, David Tennant and Will Wheaton hanging out with me. I cannot recall much more than that we had a jolly good time chatting about the latest nerd topics and playing practical jokes on each other.

For instance, while giving them all a bit of a tour of my Campus, which for some reason included a Batman memorial, I arranged for my friends to make a weeping angel statue follow the group around. The joke broke down a bit when Fillian noticed it and started taking silly pictures with the angel.

When the fun was over, I began the arduous journey of waking up on a Sunday morning. My brain decided that I should hallucinate a "coffee gauge". I had a horizontal bar just on the edge of my peripheral vision with a little coffee mug next to it. As I fought harder to wake myself up, the gauge went higher, flashing the percentage of caffeine deficiency I had reached.

I finally snapped out of it, not because cybernetic readout displays like that do not exist, but because I had remembered that I don't drink coffee, so I never would have gotten such an implant.

Dream Log Rho: Joker

I was in line waiting to see the Dark Knight Rises when I saw some girl break off and head down an alley. I thought nothing of it, but the dream decided it was important and shifted perspective to follow her. After several twists and turns, she came upon an old house that a man had rushed into just moments before. It seemed she had been tracking him, for she sneaked inside as well. Dust and cobwebs lined the walls.

"Please, come in!" crooned a male voice, "Take your hat off. Grab a seat!" two hands appeared on her shoulders and shoved her into a chair.

"No hat? Should I take your head off instead," the person came around in front of the stunned girl, smiling from ear to ear. Literally. It was the freakin' Joker from Batman the animated series.

"Joker, I'm here for the ring," asserted the girl, recovering slightly.

"Oh, of course. What else? Sadly, I'm afraid I've lost it somewhere in closet," he swept to the side to reveal an irregularly shaped wardrobe looming in the back corner of the room, "You'll have to retrieve it," as the girl reached towards the door, he slapped her hand away, "Ah-ah-ah! There are a few things you need to know about this closet. You see, it isn't particularly friendly. If you want to open it, you'll need this," he pulled a sledge hammer from who knows where and dropped it in her arms, "now, you'll need to hit it in the exact center when the clock strikes twelve. If you do that properly, then you get to reach in and grab the envelope holding your precious ring. But be warned! Touch anything else, and I'll have to penalize you. Do we have a deal?"


He reached out a chalk-white hand, face disturbingly serious. The girl slipped her hand into his, "Deal," his customary smile stretched over the Joker's face as they shook hands. He then whisked away and left her to the wardrobe.


When the clock finally struck twelve, the sledgehammer swung into the middle of the closet, splintering the sides. Before the girl could search for her ring, a blue mist swirled around her hand and spreading up her arm and over her entire body. Then, the mist was gone and the girl with it.


"Oh! Did we make a mistake? Too bad!" the Joker cackled to himself.


Hours later, a brother and sister showed up at his house, also looking for a lost ring. The Joker explained the rules again and giggled just as hard as they disappeared in a cloud of green mist.


Then I appeared. Somehow, the wardrobe had been replaced with an undamaged one. When the Joker stuck out his hand and asked "Do we have a deal?" I turned him down.


"No deal until you tell me where the center of gravity of the cabinet is," I insisted. The tenor of his smile shifted from smug to pleasantly surprised.


"Well, since you ask," he bent down to tap one of the legs, "It's all centered on this point. Good luck!"


I waited until twelve, then swung my hammer into the leg he'd indicated. It buckled, and the wardrobe collapsed to its side. As it fell, a panel came loose and fell out. No mist appeared. Inside, I saw nothing but colorful envelopes. I deliberated as long as I dared, then picked out a raspberry colored one and tore it open. It did not contain a ring but a glass ball matching the envelope. Red mist seeped from it and made its way over my hand. Desperate, I grabbed for another envelope, but it burned to the touch. Before I could try to pick it up again, the mist had completely surrounded me. The next thing I knew, I was standing in a marble ballroom. I was not alone.


At least 50 men and women dressed all in green, blue, orange, black, or reddish pink swarmed around me. Some danced; some did flips; some attacked each other. The Joker appeared by my side.

"Aren't they wonderful? My children!"

"These are not possibly all your kids."

"No, no, naturally. I have more hiding somewhere else," he muttered, peering under a nearby table, "Eric!" A handsome young man dressed in dark green trotted over. The Joker leaned in close and whispered to me, "Careful with the green ones. They're all pathological liars," then to Eric, "Come my boy, I want you to give this young lady a tour around the place."

"Of course, Mister J," he replied. He then turned to me with a smile sweeter than honey, "Follow me. You've probably noticed we all wear different colors. The orange people are all somewhat high energy," he said as one of them cartwheeled past, "The black ones have a sadistic streak a mile wide. The blue ones are quite intelligent, but they're incapable of talking to attractive females, so don't expect any good conversations."

Smirking at the compliment, I asked, "And what does green mean?"

"We're all skilled speakers and a bit more socially savvy than the others."

"Really? That's not what the Joker said. He subtly implied that you might be less than trustworthy."

"Well, my tongue might be a bit on the silver side. Does that make you uncomfortable?" he eyed me curiously.

"Everything going on is hard to believe. It seems only right that the people should be too."

The tour and the flirting continued for half an hour or so. Suddenly, everyone rushed to one side of the ballroom behind scrim curtains. Eric went off in one direction, and the girls in pink ushered me over to join their group. It was then that I realized that no one had told me who they were. A hush fell, and the girls around me insisted that I put my head down and close my eyes. I pretended to comply, but looked up once more once they had all closed their eyes as well. Nothing happened. The only reason for putting their heads down seemed to be forcing them to do something senseless. My brainwashing meter started ticking. Then, the music started.

Everyone's heads snapped up, and they ran out back onto the floor, which was now covered in colored dots matching their clothes. I had to run out as well or risk a trampling. The others all went into individually choreographed dances. No two were alike, though the styles fell along the color lines. The pink girls, for example, had significantly more shaking and gyrating. I became aware of the Joker and Harley Quinn watching the performance from a platform. He fixed me with a gaze that said, "Dance, puppet, dance!" So I did. However, instead of going for a sexy style, I went into full gymnast mode. Flip flops, back flips, cartwheels, leaps. I even threw in some of those stylized poses that have become so popular. By the time the song finished, everyone else had stopped their dances to watch me. I bowed to thunderous applause.

"Fantastic! Outstanding! I knew you'd make an excellent addition to our little family," praised the Joker as he hopped down from his little stage."

"Addition? I don't want to-"

"Pinkies! Get her some appropriate clothing and teach her your ways," he commanded. The pink girls mobbed me.

"Pink?! If I have to join one, couldn't it be blue or orange?"

"Nonsense. You have such potential as a tease."

With that, I was whisked away by giggling bimbos and sneering she-devils. They gave me pink clothes and set me up with a trainer who tried to get me to act provocatively. It did not go so well.

"Look," he said, "All you have to do is make everything an innuendo, move your hips, and beckon with your eyebrows for all you're worth."

I had no trouble with the first one, but the body language eluded me. It just felt awkward, not to mention I had no intention of actually joining the pink ranks. When the trainer had to take a break, I slipped away and explored elsewhere. That was how I found the junkyard.

Piles upon piles of garbage filled an enormous basement room. Workers went to and fro, barking orders in walkie-talkies. Some of them did not appear interested in the garbage, but rather in finding someone who had hidden away in it. At one point, a female voice took over their communicators, shouting "You're getting colder!" I ran for the trash and got away without them noticing me. After a while, I came across a pinky in a nest made of trash. She leveled gun comprising plumbing parts and a pop can.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"I'm like you. I don't want anything to do with the Joker and his dumb family."

"Oh, well in that case," she tossed her gun to me, "shoot any of the seekers that come snooping around. I'm going to look for some extra parts."

I spent the rest of my time evading the so called seekers and building weaponry and shelters in the garbage with the girl. It was a strange life, but a good one.