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.