Dream Journal
presented in reverse-chronological order for your reading pleasure*
November 14, 2019
I can't remember the whole thing. I was unpacking some boxes of very old stuff that was mine when I was a kid. I was trudging through deep snow with a long line of stalled cars on a freeway adjacent. I was nervous about jumping over a fence because there were a bunch of dogs there. The fenced-in area was some kind of campground, in miniature almost - it had some trees and some grass and shrubs, but the whole thing was contained within an about 75 foot square enclosure, and the environment inside the fence was completely different from the outside surroundings, where it was snowy.
There was also a second dream where I was in a dark room that reminded me of one from when I was very young, and everyone in the house was asleep. There was a woman who was saying something but standing just far enough away htat I couldn't see what she looked like. I don't remember what she was talking about. She left eventually. Something about the room didn't feel safe, and fnially when I started to walk away, around a large piece of furniture, something pressed against my head and pushed me down to the floor where I couldn't move. It was talking to me like I was its pet, right directly in my ear, and though the things it was saying weren't threatening and seemed to imply that it was fond of me, the experience was very upsetting and I woke up.
May 23, 2019
Can't remember a whole lot. I visit a thrift store in a small, dirty, industrial building. It's right alongside a very long road, and surrounded on all sides by tall green hay fields. It's dark and there's no moon out. I'm looking at the VHS tapes, they're on a set of shelves that's white and dusty and far taller than it is wide, there's a bunch of strange movies I don't recognize.
Later, back out where the car was parked (the parking space is empty now), there's an old woman. She says something I can't remember and walks around the empty space where the car would be, and sits in mid-air where the driver's seat would be. She says something else I can't remember. I try to sit in the apparently invisible but still extant passenger's seat but fall onto the gravel below.
Something else happens, I can't remember what. I'm in some kind of maze. It goes on forever, the walls are smooth and brown and extend up so high I can't see the ceiling, assuming there's a ceiling. There isn't a floor either, just water, which is just as deep as the walls are high. I'm lost for a long time swimming around the maze.
I come to an alcove with a little plastic window. There's a plain white votive candle, a small wooden stick, a bit of paper, and probably something else I can't remember just behind the window, and a tiny hole just big enough that you can grab the stick and pull it out. It reminds me of those puzzles they make for crows to solve. Next to the window is a sign that says something about lighting the candle. There's a dropdown menu like in a web browser on the sign where one of the words is. I pick one of the words arbitrarily.
Suddenly, there's a loud sound, far away in the maze, a kind of pulsating sound. It sounds a little bit like a machine and a little bit like some kind of organic, watery sound. It repeats continously and I feel like whatever it is that's making it is dangerous and drawing closer.
After a relatively short time agonizing about what to do, the sound is much much closer and I see a faint orange glow on one of the walls somewhere in the maze. From around a corner, slowly, the source of the sound is revealed: it's a little demon or something, it has that brimstoney look like the balrog in lord of the rings. It has wings, and it's flying at a speed which doesn't match its movement, just above the water level. In fact, it looks like a video game model almost, a model meant to be much larger but scaled down, moving from one point to another perfectly linearly, its flight animation looping unnaturally.
Writing this now it sounds absurd, but at the time something about it was very frightening. I wake up just before it can reach me.
February 1, 2019
I'm climbing a tree. No, before that, I'm in a classroom. It's not a classroom I know but it feels familiar anyway. Some people are having a conversation about something, and suddenly one of them asks my opinion. The instructor comes over to the table, having overheard our conversation, and he takes a position contrary to my own. I pull the tablecloth off the table where we're sitting and drape it over my head. I lean backwards in my chair.
I close my eyes and when they're opened again, it's years and years ago. I'm in a different classroom, I'm in 9th grade. I see my reflection in a glass door and i'm whateverteen again, i have my awful haircut and that awful jacket i used to wear all the time. I remember everything from the past several years, i'm not sure if i can go back or if i'll have to live all these years over again.
The classroom is full of brightly colored posters of math concepts. The teacher is my old math teacher, she's doing something at her desk. I get up from my chair and leave the room, because I've realized there might be something important I have to do now that I've been transplanted back into this point in my life. The hallways of the building are unfamiliar to me, now, writing this out, but during the dream I had the impression that they were very specific places I distinctly remember occupying when I was that age.
I walk out a front door of some sort and I'm at the front of the school. It's around noon, sunny but brisk, and there's pale yellow grass across the street. The road is gravel, it's more like a walking trail. I turn to the right from the building's exit and walk down the trail a ways. To my right after a few hundred meters there's a huge tree that I intuitively know how to climb. It's growing right up against a clay cliff face that's about 60 feet tall. The tree doesn't have any bark.
I start climbing the tree, and about 80 percent of the way up I come across some people. They're also climbing the tree, but they don't know what they're doing. I try to explain what they should do, but I can't describe it accurately enough. I come to a point on the tree where, if some of these people weren't struggling awkwardly, I'd be able to squeeze between two branches and step directly onto a walkably-flat part of the cliff wall.
I get fed up with all this. I climb down the tree a bit and turn on noclip mode. As I'm heading down the trunk I see one of the people from before, in shadow from a large clump of branches. They're dead, dangling limply from an arm stuck between two branches.
In noclip mode, I fly through the cliffside and across a valley. There's a city nestled between wide swaths of trees with a lot of buildings. I fly into the roof of one of them - inside, it's night, in a room resembling a bedroom I had once. Outside the window there's nothing but black. I fly through one of the walls, and I'm in another familiar-looking room.
This goes on for a while. Every surface I fly through leads me to another completely different room, all of them at night, lit dimly by various lamps. There's always something familiar about the rooms - the sheets on a bed, the color of the walls, a piece of furniture - but they're never specific places I remember distinctly. At one point I begin to feel lost, so I fly upward through several ceilings in quick succession, but there's only more rooms. There's no single event that triggers the end of the dream, it just happens eventually.
I don't know when
I found this saved in the drafts on one of my tumblrs, i dont remember the dream but i remember writing this as soon as i woke up, i'm glad I found it.
Plan on going to an event old house stop by baby bag batteries, old game consoles, board game box open tiny dice from unfinished game a long time ago, cats look exactly like mine, but aren’t, living in ruins of this building, cobwebs, water damage, go to hotel. Get room, room 13, it’s a tiny walk in freezer. Put stuff away. Event is full of tons of weird characters. Don’t remember what happens next.
A man at the party has burst into flames several times in his life and he does it at the party. Fire is uncontrolled and several die. Everyone who survived is in a grassy field outside, an old woman in a lawn chair gives a tearful, haunting soliloquy about togetherness. We move up a long staircase to a long hallway of metal garage doors.someone opens one and it’s good for some reason. I start walking back to my freezer room but I hear a voice calling me from down the stairs- someone I knew , maybe. They make a farting noise with their mouth and make a weird arm gesture like it’s an in joke, I mostly don’t remember it so I pretend to laugh and continue downstairs to the hotel lobby.
The Secretary asks what happened and I explain in broad terms. A very large man with purplish skin walks past who’s wearing a sea captain hat and out the door. The person standing next to me whistles the first bit of the gilligans island theme. I turn to them and say “I was just about to do that exact same thing!”. I get the key to the room and walk down the hall and around a corner to the door. The door next to my room leads to a small tattoo studio which my new friend recognizes. I open the door of the freezer room and they’re very confused. I try to explain the baby bag, the fact it’s a freezer, and the tiny twisty noodles covering the entire floor. The man next door takes an interest. I finish grabbing the important stuff and apologize that I can’t stay to clean it up. I offer to pay for the cleaning but after a moment the man refuses and turns me away respectfully, closing the trunk of the car, noodles and all still inside.
Some time later, on the edge of town, my friend and someone else are atop a massive cliff with fishing poles. Watching from behind, I’m shocked when the man from the tattoo parlor breaks away the rock they’re sitting on and they plummet hundreds of feet to their death. I start running away, up a steep mountainside with pale reddish rock formations on either side. I get to the top and crest the hill to find a low, round building with round steps leading up to its front door, attended by a female robot painted solid black and stuck in a getting up and sitting down animation. She says something incoherent repeatedly. I tell her I need to see the mayor immediately, as the sheriff has gone mad and seeks to kill me and many others. I’m let into her office.
She’s a cat, styled like she’s from a mid-2000s PS2 game with an “edgy goth cartoon” art style. I explain the situation, but she’s reluctant to accept my explanations - the conversation is interrupted when we look to a security feed of the front room, where a nasty liquid is streaming from what was once the not-crushed head of the robot Secretary. He’s followed me! I hide under something and im suddenly riding in a self driving vehicle to the center of town, bundled under some stuff so the sheriff doesn’t see me through the window. But he does anyway. I run from the car, but he’s too fast. Cut to a third person view, in slow motion. The evil sheriff stabs me in the stomach and slashes my head off in one fluid motion. The blood moves like it’s underwater.
Cut to a long shot of a beach just off the road at the edge of town, people walking past, dead, most of them cut in half or decapitated, their separate pieces hovering next to each other as if they were still one piece, blood billowing out from them. I wake up.
March 11, 2017
A few bits and pieces. Installing an emulator of some really old computer. Closing browser tabs. Instead of a single flat panel for a screen the computer had a cube with screens on every side, constantly rotating. Finally, sand dunes. When I try to remember anything else all I can think of is sand dunes.
March 1, 2017
Don't remember most of it. But there was a bit where I was climbing the side of an ornate gothic building that was falling apart. It was almost like the climactic scene in a movie. After climbing the building there was some funny metal device that I had to squeeze little green jelly cubes into for some reason. Earlier in the dream, I was talking to my high school art teacher. (A note about him. In real life? A relllatively decent but generally misguided person, who I resented more back then than I do now. You see, despite being an art teacher, he had terrible opinions about art (complaining about things that were 'pretentious', at one point using the 'anyone could do this' line when I did a report on Mark Rothko), and he called himself a 'conservative', too, so I can only assume he was like some kind of weird libertarian. Anyway.)
He was in a glowy pink room, like a James Turrell room, his hands working on something I couldn't see because it was behind a wall. Myself and a bunch of other people were in an adjacent room, the art room from high school, observing him through a tiny square window. He could hear us fine. I don't remember what we were talking about, but eventually he mentioned something that I replied to by saying "If we weren't living under capitalism things would be so much better" or something like that. He laughed it off and went on about capitalism being cool and amazing and actually the answer to all our complaints. I don't know what happened after that, but I remember the majority of the people I was with agreeing with me.
I guess my brain wants me to feel some positive reinforcement. What a kindly gesture, brain, I very much appreciate it. Perhaps if you could tone down the "debilitating fear of social conflict" and "tendency toward bitter self-loathing" things I'd have reason to appreciate you more often.
January 11, 2017:
I check my steam downloads and a new deus ex game is 100% downloaded, which is surprising, since I don't remember buying it or initiating the download. I start the game, and it's the opening sequence, a conversation at a bar - people have low-poly faces like the cutscenes in the first Tomb Raider, but I adjust some settings and they change to regular, higher-res models but with a plain grey texture, a simple pixel face
(like the face of the old macintosh error message thing) wrapped to their faces. I adjust it again and they're finally just regular models. I'm having a conversation with the bartender. There are fancy high-society types all around. The bartender is blind. The mission for this level is, apparently, to sneak under the bar (which is also a table) without her or any of the partygoers (this is also a party) noticing.
I duck down from my chair, and I deal with some small puzzle involving a drink, a drawer, and a cupboard, somehow using the actions of others to make the drink fall down and break on the floor, as a distraction? I succeed, and duck under the table completely. I can see everyone's legs. Two people who are sitting across from each other are passing a napkin under the table, fumbling it between their feet instead of using their hands. Suddenly, it seems as though my cover is blown when a random person ducks under the table right next to me. It's a fancy-pants old lady, like the one fancy-pants old lady from the movie "rope" sort of. She chuckles and says "Don't worry, dear, I won't tell". Slowly, more people start coming under the table.
It seems as though my cover is completely blown and that I've failed the mission, but then I look around some more and it seems that everyone is under the table now, and everyone is laughing for some reason. The scene ends. It's after the party, and I go to the neighboring garage to talk to the old man who works/lives in this place. I tell him how we used to live here and stay overnight at the movie theater across the street on warm summer nights. He gets an idea, and we follow him outside. It's a warm summer night, just like before. We come to a tiny building only slightly larger than one of those microscopic coffee kiosk things, and it's the theater apparently. It's full of incredibly luminous blue and red neon lights.
At this point, I get a weird feeling in one of my teeth. It's loose. I tell the others to wait so i can go brush my teeth. I run past the theater and into the hills behind it, steep hills covered in douglas firs. At the top of the hill I can barely make out a beacon, my destination, a door with bright fluorescent white lighting inside. My tooth has completely fallen out at this point, it's hanging by a tiny thread like a baby tooth. I carefully keep it from being disturbed too much by holding my lips closed and my jaws open as I begin to climb. It's a narrow, steep mountain made of wet reddish brown clay, which I awkwardly jam/stab my fingers into to get a grip. I struggle up
higher and higher, until I come to the edge of a long, slightly less steep section of the mountain, extending up beyond my view and into darkness. A sled carrying a bunch of people shoots down the slope and off the side of the mountain at terrifying speed, nearly hitting me. It's such a long climb that there's absolutely no way to get up there without substantial risk of being killed by another out-of-nowhere mud-sled. There's a tiny red light hanging from a wire about 20 feet above the surface of the mountain that seems to warn when sleds are approaching, but it doesn't matter because at this point I wake up.
December 27, 2016:
Can't remember most of it, but there was a part where I was watching TV with some family members. There was an ad for this obscenely luxurious car, almost a parody of a luxury car, with ivory paint and actual gold trim that looked like fancy victorian moulding, red velvet interiors, stuff like that. Disgusting, I thought. Some of the people in the room were impressed by it, so I said something along the lines of "If I ever saw one of those I'd smash its windshield in with a baseball bat.". This remark is met with bemused glances, silence, and attempts to ignore that I just said it. That's what you get for being honest I guess.
December 11, 2016:
Bits and pieces. Woke up at three PM, so I had two dreams. The first was kind of muddled up by the second. Walking along the top of a tall wall, a void on my left, a forest on my right. Snakes. A society of people who are incredibly well-trained when it comes to throwing things at people's heads to decapitate them. Being far away from where I was before, a vast underground world with bizarre unreal hills and buildings, bright colors, long shadows. Climbing up and up and into a sort of elevated city. Come through a tangle of hallways and streets to the ceiling, a little book shop with some stairs leading up and out. It's like moe's tavern from the simpsons for some reason.
The second dream - I'm in some kind of live show. I have to perform for thousands of people in a huge stadium. I don't know why exactly. Something happens and I'm in the backstage area, which is actually outdoors. Someone tries to put this big white ghost-like costume over my head, and I fall over. Up in the sky, there's a UFO that unexpectedly flies above. It's made of a central, mirrored disc with dark purple rings spinning around its axis in a way where it's clear the rings are driving the craft forward. A second one approaches, and they engage some kind of beam, tearing some power lines out of the ground. They fly away. Suddenly, there are flames, there's a freeway onramp on one side of the backstage area. Jumping between chunks of burning rubble to get to a door with yellow light. I wake up.
Between December 11 and May 13: Lots I can't remember and didn't bother to write down
May 13, 2016:
Some kind of big space station where there's a whole lot of people stranded, two groups of people that aren't on good terms with each other. It seems like the station was built to accommodate this exact situation, since it's divided down the middle exactly into two essentially identical halves. The one on the left (and the one I'm a member of) is orange, and the one on the right is green.
In the middle of this arrangement there's a big spaceship that's apparently deactivated, with airlocks and cables and such attached to both sides of the station. It's also worth noting that the station itself isn't orbiting anything, it's literally just floating in space, an unfathomably long way from anywhere. The basic plot of the dream is that I go into the ship and try to figure it out, there's some kind of altercation with some people from the other side of the station, and I evade capture or something by ducking into a portion of the ship that I know is safe but they think is without oxygen. It's some kind of control room, with some science-fictiony holographic monitors. I get the impression that a long time ago, someone else was sitting here, just as I am, and they left without finishing what they were working on. In fact, it seems like the work that was going on on the monitors was just left sitting there untouched, partially complete. As I'm sitting there I come to some kind of realization and activate our half of the ship somehow.
Later, I (and someone else who I don't remember very well) travel to their side of the station, to tell them what I figured out: that the only way to escape the station is to do the cliche thing and put aside our meaningless differences to work together already. It's a strangely casual meeting for some reason. I come back to my side and tell them the same stuff. Then I wake up.
May 3, 2016:
I wrote this when I woke up, but I can't remember the details...: http://pastebin.com/6Lj1edZU
But wait actually I do remember. Me and some family members were in a car, driving, at night somewhere. It was cold and snowy and slushy. The car was really old and klunky and didn't work very well, and when whoever was driving realized it was about to go kaput we pulled into this lonely little place we thought was a rest area. It was this tiny little parking space with a single street lamp above it, next to a small concrete building, and all of it underneath of a huge looming overpass. We went inside the building and it was completely the opposite of what we expected: warm and cozy, with hardwood floors, nice warm lighting, and piles upon piles of typical house things, like books and kitchen supplies and couches and TVs. Essentially like a little house that was also a public place anyone could go.
There were also some car fixing things, which were quickly utilized. I remember carrying a big jug of warm pink liquid for something car-related. I decided to spend a bit of time just lounging around the building, when I saw that there were for whatever reason a whole bunch of old computers there, all hooked up and running. Stuff from as early as the mid-80s, ranging all the way to proper modern models. I fixated myself on a soft chair in front of this little computer running windows 95, I think it was, and was about to do stuff with it when there was some commotion from the other side of the room.
There were more people showing up, some huge obnoxious family, and they quickly flooded into the majority of the building. The details in this bit I'm not sure about: There was a moment when I went outside for some reason, and into this big area under the building - two of the four corners of the structure were held up by these big concrete beams, allowing quite a cavernous space in the area beneath. There was someone there, I think? I vaguely remember some kind of subplot with this creature that lived on the roof of the building who ascended into the sky, and this was some kind of ending to some story I didn't see the rest of. At some point I went to the second floor of the building, which was still empty for whatever reason. I remember it was a welcome respite.
When I went back downstairs, it wasn't the same place anymore. It was this big high-school style gymnasium, with loads of folding chairs and some kind of podium/stage with someone talking about something. The chairs were mostly empty, but there were still quite a few people there. The stairs I was walking on were really fancy and wide, with a bannister and everything. Also, the whole thing was suddenly inside a single big comic panel, which I didn't even register as being strange or anything. Also I'm pretty sure everyone was a cartoon.
April 15, 2016:
A lot of weird things in this one. Some kind of big shopping mall at night, I'm there with some people and one of them is I think my sister or something, even though she doesn't look anything like my actual sister. In fact I'm probably not even me, in the proper sense. It's the fourth of july, or some other fireworks-related occasion. We're standing at the edge of a building, and a car pulls sloppily and crashily into a parking space on the opposite side of the parking lot we're next to. It's a convertible loaded up with a bunch of obnoxious teenagers, and they're setting off a bunch of fireworks just for fun, but also in the faces of some people that were standing in the general vicinity of the place they pulled up, because they really like the idea of ruining other people's moods.
They have guns! Oh no! They're going to shoot us or something! But no, the guns just shoot sparks and confetti, even though they look almost exaclty like actual kills-people guns. One of the rapscallious ruffians of ill repute dashes over to my current entourage and sets a nearby box of something flammable on fire. This is stupid. He is stupid. I yell something at him angrily as he scurries away, and stomp out the fire. At least they aren't very persistent. When I first saw these people I was kind of worried they'd be all up in my business or whatever you'd say.
Earlier in the dream we were in another part of this shopping mall, and I was trying on some kind of pants for some reason. The issue, though, was that the shop we were in didn't have any dressing rooms, so I was just trying the pants on in the middle of the store, which I would never do in real life. (this is further evidence that the character in the dream isn't actually me, I think?). I turn around and that whole time I was standing right next to a window, apparently, with loads of traffic passing by at all times. How humiliating. The precise sequence of events in this dream eludes me, but the following things also happened at one point or another:
1: I buy a record in one of the shops. 2: We are at a restaurant. 3: I wipe my neck with a red napkin for some reason. 4: I find a big, awful swollen burn/blister on my neck I hadn't noticed before, presumably caused by the napkin somehow, and this distresses me less because it's going to be dangerous to my health and more because I'll look weird with a big swollen thing on my neck walking around this public place / have already been doing that for who knows how long before I noticed it. 5: A policeman walks over and harasses me for some reason, but doesn't actually do anything noteworthy despite my initial anxieties.
All of those things happen before the last thing: The gangs of ruffians, I realize, are a systemic problem somehow. They're roving about causing chaos, and said chaos must stop. Somehow, the kid who's actually only like 10 and is apparently my sister is the key to fixing this problem. We hurriedly make our way through various streets and alleys on foot until we reach a room that we've apparently all been staying in for some time, in a bed and breakfast type of place. The room is really bare, though, a bunch of plain walls and sheets, all quite bare. We have to make a movie to fix it all. Some kind of incredibly convincing documentary. There's a laptop computer sitting in the room, I guess it has editing software on it. Then I wake up.
April 5, 2016:
I was playing a video game, I think it might have been counter-strike. I was doing really really good. There was a red fox (like, REALLY red) sitting on a rock that I saw through a glass door. Its eyes were really weird.
Sometime in 2015:
Walking out of a big institutional-style building. Buses painted completely in pastel colors, over the windows and wheels and everything. A crooked old tree a few feet from the sidewalk, there's a hole filled with dead leaves and spiderwebs. Past that, there's a dirt path through a grassy field, heading perpendicularly from the sidewalk, going about 150 yards back into a wall of brambles and bushes.
I turn onto the dirt path, which breaks through the wall of brambles into a sort of trail with trees on either side, almost like a forest but not quite as dense. There's a white fog in the air, so thick that you can only see maybe 30 feet in front of you. There's a very slight breeze, and it's very very quiet.
After a minute or two walking down the trail, I hear some distant voices somewhere to my left. Some kids (making a ruckus, laughing, one of them perhaps carrying a stick) are walking down a parallel path on the other side of the trees. They head off their trail and start heading slightly towards me. This makes me kind of anxious, so I start walking faster than they are, and eventually off the edge of the trail into the forest.
I'm on a shallow hill with a bit of a clearing. As I walk up the hill, a ruined building emerges from behind the fog. It looks like it's been abandoned for decades - crumbled concrete walls, the roof fallen in, really just a massive pile of rubble with a few rectangular holes which used to be windows. Seeing this building, I become aware of the nature of the fog that's blanketing this forest: It's not fog, but smoke - and it came from this building when it was destroyed. Somehow, it's still hanging over this area after who knows how many years, like it's been glued to the ground. Not just by chance, either - something about what happened here forced the fog to stay.
The group of kids is back, a ways ahead. I guess they're more like teenagers. They see me and ask me to come with them. They're exploring the forest. There's a few more buildings up ahead. One of the kids ducks into one of the buildings, and I follow. He says it's not safe to stay inside for too long. We leave the building and continue forward.
There's another building, bigger this time, and more intact than the others. It's pitch black inside. Someone has a flashlight. It's damp and dark and at first it seems like there isn't anywhere to go, but at the far end of the room there's some stairs. The walls and the floor are made of this nasty dark wood, like the wood telephone poles are made from. The stairs wrap down the walls of a maybe 30-foot square room, and then another and another, and then we're at the bottom.
This room is much colder than the others, and seems to extend a good distance ahead. The floor is that sort of muddy dirt floor you get in basements in old houses. There's an old tire, part of a bicycle, and an old couch (fallen on its back) haphazardly scattered up ahead. Still so dark. I know something awful is going to happen, so I force myself to wake up.
Sometime before that time:
A parking garage that extends infinitely in all directions. There's a giant circular hole through the middle of the floor and the ceiling. Infinite floors just like this one in both directions.
Sometime waaaay before all of those times:
Creepy lady with a really wide face, black eyes (with white pupils), and sharp, sharp teeth stares at me. She has a pair of scissors.
* also so I don't have to scroll when updating this page I guess
presented in reverse-chronological order for your reading pleasure*
November 14, 2019
I can't remember the whole thing. I was unpacking some boxes of very old stuff that was mine when I was a kid. I was trudging through deep snow with a long line of stalled cars on a freeway adjacent. I was nervous about jumping over a fence because there were a bunch of dogs there. The fenced-in area was some kind of campground, in miniature almost - it had some trees and some grass and shrubs, but the whole thing was contained within an about 75 foot square enclosure, and the environment inside the fence was completely different from the outside surroundings, where it was snowy.
There was also a second dream where I was in a dark room that reminded me of one from when I was very young, and everyone in the house was asleep. There was a woman who was saying something but standing just far enough away htat I couldn't see what she looked like. I don't remember what she was talking about. She left eventually. Something about the room didn't feel safe, and fnially when I started to walk away, around a large piece of furniture, something pressed against my head and pushed me down to the floor where I couldn't move. It was talking to me like I was its pet, right directly in my ear, and though the things it was saying weren't threatening and seemed to imply that it was fond of me, the experience was very upsetting and I woke up.
May 23, 2019
Can't remember a whole lot. I visit a thrift store in a small, dirty, industrial building. It's right alongside a very long road, and surrounded on all sides by tall green hay fields. It's dark and there's no moon out. I'm looking at the VHS tapes, they're on a set of shelves that's white and dusty and far taller than it is wide, there's a bunch of strange movies I don't recognize.
Later, back out where the car was parked (the parking space is empty now), there's an old woman. She says something I can't remember and walks around the empty space where the car would be, and sits in mid-air where the driver's seat would be. She says something else I can't remember. I try to sit in the apparently invisible but still extant passenger's seat but fall onto the gravel below.
Something else happens, I can't remember what. I'm in some kind of maze. It goes on forever, the walls are smooth and brown and extend up so high I can't see the ceiling, assuming there's a ceiling. There isn't a floor either, just water, which is just as deep as the walls are high. I'm lost for a long time swimming around the maze.
I come to an alcove with a little plastic window. There's a plain white votive candle, a small wooden stick, a bit of paper, and probably something else I can't remember just behind the window, and a tiny hole just big enough that you can grab the stick and pull it out. It reminds me of those puzzles they make for crows to solve. Next to the window is a sign that says something about lighting the candle. There's a dropdown menu like in a web browser on the sign where one of the words is. I pick one of the words arbitrarily.
Suddenly, there's a loud sound, far away in the maze, a kind of pulsating sound. It sounds a little bit like a machine and a little bit like some kind of organic, watery sound. It repeats continously and I feel like whatever it is that's making it is dangerous and drawing closer.
After a relatively short time agonizing about what to do, the sound is much much closer and I see a faint orange glow on one of the walls somewhere in the maze. From around a corner, slowly, the source of the sound is revealed: it's a little demon or something, it has that brimstoney look like the balrog in lord of the rings. It has wings, and it's flying at a speed which doesn't match its movement, just above the water level. In fact, it looks like a video game model almost, a model meant to be much larger but scaled down, moving from one point to another perfectly linearly, its flight animation looping unnaturally.
Writing this now it sounds absurd, but at the time something about it was very frightening. I wake up just before it can reach me.
February 1, 2019
I'm climbing a tree. No, before that, I'm in a classroom. It's not a classroom I know but it feels familiar anyway. Some people are having a conversation about something, and suddenly one of them asks my opinion. The instructor comes over to the table, having overheard our conversation, and he takes a position contrary to my own. I pull the tablecloth off the table where we're sitting and drape it over my head. I lean backwards in my chair.
I close my eyes and when they're opened again, it's years and years ago. I'm in a different classroom, I'm in 9th grade. I see my reflection in a glass door and i'm whateverteen again, i have my awful haircut and that awful jacket i used to wear all the time. I remember everything from the past several years, i'm not sure if i can go back or if i'll have to live all these years over again.
The classroom is full of brightly colored posters of math concepts. The teacher is my old math teacher, she's doing something at her desk. I get up from my chair and leave the room, because I've realized there might be something important I have to do now that I've been transplanted back into this point in my life. The hallways of the building are unfamiliar to me, now, writing this out, but during the dream I had the impression that they were very specific places I distinctly remember occupying when I was that age.
I walk out a front door of some sort and I'm at the front of the school. It's around noon, sunny but brisk, and there's pale yellow grass across the street. The road is gravel, it's more like a walking trail. I turn to the right from the building's exit and walk down the trail a ways. To my right after a few hundred meters there's a huge tree that I intuitively know how to climb. It's growing right up against a clay cliff face that's about 60 feet tall. The tree doesn't have any bark.
I start climbing the tree, and about 80 percent of the way up I come across some people. They're also climbing the tree, but they don't know what they're doing. I try to explain what they should do, but I can't describe it accurately enough. I come to a point on the tree where, if some of these people weren't struggling awkwardly, I'd be able to squeeze between two branches and step directly onto a walkably-flat part of the cliff wall.
I get fed up with all this. I climb down the tree a bit and turn on noclip mode. As I'm heading down the trunk I see one of the people from before, in shadow from a large clump of branches. They're dead, dangling limply from an arm stuck between two branches.
In noclip mode, I fly through the cliffside and across a valley. There's a city nestled between wide swaths of trees with a lot of buildings. I fly into the roof of one of them - inside, it's night, in a room resembling a bedroom I had once. Outside the window there's nothing but black. I fly through one of the walls, and I'm in another familiar-looking room.
This goes on for a while. Every surface I fly through leads me to another completely different room, all of them at night, lit dimly by various lamps. There's always something familiar about the rooms - the sheets on a bed, the color of the walls, a piece of furniture - but they're never specific places I remember distinctly. At one point I begin to feel lost, so I fly upward through several ceilings in quick succession, but there's only more rooms. There's no single event that triggers the end of the dream, it just happens eventually.
I don't know when
I found this saved in the drafts on one of my tumblrs, i dont remember the dream but i remember writing this as soon as i woke up, i'm glad I found it.
Plan on going to an event old house stop by baby bag batteries, old game consoles, board game box open tiny dice from unfinished game a long time ago, cats look exactly like mine, but aren’t, living in ruins of this building, cobwebs, water damage, go to hotel. Get room, room 13, it’s a tiny walk in freezer. Put stuff away. Event is full of tons of weird characters. Don’t remember what happens next.
A man at the party has burst into flames several times in his life and he does it at the party. Fire is uncontrolled and several die. Everyone who survived is in a grassy field outside, an old woman in a lawn chair gives a tearful, haunting soliloquy about togetherness. We move up a long staircase to a long hallway of metal garage doors.someone opens one and it’s good for some reason. I start walking back to my freezer room but I hear a voice calling me from down the stairs- someone I knew , maybe. They make a farting noise with their mouth and make a weird arm gesture like it’s an in joke, I mostly don’t remember it so I pretend to laugh and continue downstairs to the hotel lobby.
The Secretary asks what happened and I explain in broad terms. A very large man with purplish skin walks past who’s wearing a sea captain hat and out the door. The person standing next to me whistles the first bit of the gilligans island theme. I turn to them and say “I was just about to do that exact same thing!”. I get the key to the room and walk down the hall and around a corner to the door. The door next to my room leads to a small tattoo studio which my new friend recognizes. I open the door of the freezer room and they’re very confused. I try to explain the baby bag, the fact it’s a freezer, and the tiny twisty noodles covering the entire floor. The man next door takes an interest. I finish grabbing the important stuff and apologize that I can’t stay to clean it up. I offer to pay for the cleaning but after a moment the man refuses and turns me away respectfully, closing the trunk of the car, noodles and all still inside.
Some time later, on the edge of town, my friend and someone else are atop a massive cliff with fishing poles. Watching from behind, I’m shocked when the man from the tattoo parlor breaks away the rock they’re sitting on and they plummet hundreds of feet to their death. I start running away, up a steep mountainside with pale reddish rock formations on either side. I get to the top and crest the hill to find a low, round building with round steps leading up to its front door, attended by a female robot painted solid black and stuck in a getting up and sitting down animation. She says something incoherent repeatedly. I tell her I need to see the mayor immediately, as the sheriff has gone mad and seeks to kill me and many others. I’m let into her office.
She’s a cat, styled like she’s from a mid-2000s PS2 game with an “edgy goth cartoon” art style. I explain the situation, but she’s reluctant to accept my explanations - the conversation is interrupted when we look to a security feed of the front room, where a nasty liquid is streaming from what was once the not-crushed head of the robot Secretary. He’s followed me! I hide under something and im suddenly riding in a self driving vehicle to the center of town, bundled under some stuff so the sheriff doesn’t see me through the window. But he does anyway. I run from the car, but he’s too fast. Cut to a third person view, in slow motion. The evil sheriff stabs me in the stomach and slashes my head off in one fluid motion. The blood moves like it’s underwater.
Cut to a long shot of a beach just off the road at the edge of town, people walking past, dead, most of them cut in half or decapitated, their separate pieces hovering next to each other as if they were still one piece, blood billowing out from them. I wake up.
March 11, 2017
A few bits and pieces. Installing an emulator of some really old computer. Closing browser tabs. Instead of a single flat panel for a screen the computer had a cube with screens on every side, constantly rotating. Finally, sand dunes. When I try to remember anything else all I can think of is sand dunes.
March 1, 2017
Don't remember most of it. But there was a bit where I was climbing the side of an ornate gothic building that was falling apart. It was almost like the climactic scene in a movie. After climbing the building there was some funny metal device that I had to squeeze little green jelly cubes into for some reason. Earlier in the dream, I was talking to my high school art teacher. (A note about him. In real life? A relllatively decent but generally misguided person, who I resented more back then than I do now. You see, despite being an art teacher, he had terrible opinions about art (complaining about things that were 'pretentious', at one point using the 'anyone could do this' line when I did a report on Mark Rothko), and he called himself a 'conservative', too, so I can only assume he was like some kind of weird libertarian. Anyway.)
He was in a glowy pink room, like a James Turrell room, his hands working on something I couldn't see because it was behind a wall. Myself and a bunch of other people were in an adjacent room, the art room from high school, observing him through a tiny square window. He could hear us fine. I don't remember what we were talking about, but eventually he mentioned something that I replied to by saying "If we weren't living under capitalism things would be so much better" or something like that. He laughed it off and went on about capitalism being cool and amazing and actually the answer to all our complaints. I don't know what happened after that, but I remember the majority of the people I was with agreeing with me.
I guess my brain wants me to feel some positive reinforcement. What a kindly gesture, brain, I very much appreciate it. Perhaps if you could tone down the "debilitating fear of social conflict" and "tendency toward bitter self-loathing" things I'd have reason to appreciate you more often.
January 11, 2017:
I check my steam downloads and a new deus ex game is 100% downloaded, which is surprising, since I don't remember buying it or initiating the download. I start the game, and it's the opening sequence, a conversation at a bar - people have low-poly faces like the cutscenes in the first Tomb Raider, but I adjust some settings and they change to regular, higher-res models but with a plain grey texture, a simple pixel face
(like the face of the old macintosh error message thing) wrapped to their faces. I adjust it again and they're finally just regular models. I'm having a conversation with the bartender. There are fancy high-society types all around. The bartender is blind. The mission for this level is, apparently, to sneak under the bar (which is also a table) without her or any of the partygoers (this is also a party) noticing.I duck down from my chair, and I deal with some small puzzle involving a drink, a drawer, and a cupboard, somehow using the actions of others to make the drink fall down and break on the floor, as a distraction? I succeed, and duck under the table completely. I can see everyone's legs. Two people who are sitting across from each other are passing a napkin under the table, fumbling it between their feet instead of using their hands. Suddenly, it seems as though my cover is blown when a random person ducks under the table right next to me. It's a fancy-pants old lady, like the one fancy-pants old lady from the movie "rope" sort of. She chuckles and says "Don't worry, dear, I won't tell". Slowly, more people start coming under the table.
It seems as though my cover is completely blown and that I've failed the mission, but then I look around some more and it seems that everyone is under the table now, and everyone is laughing for some reason. The scene ends. It's after the party, and I go to the neighboring garage to talk to the old man who works/lives in this place. I tell him how we used to live here and stay overnight at the movie theater across the street on warm summer nights. He gets an idea, and we follow him outside. It's a warm summer night, just like before. We come to a tiny building only slightly larger than one of those microscopic coffee kiosk things, and it's the theater apparently. It's full of incredibly luminous blue and red neon lights.
At this point, I get a weird feeling in one of my teeth. It's loose. I tell the others to wait so i can go brush my teeth. I run past the theater and into the hills behind it, steep hills covered in douglas firs. At the top of the hill I can barely make out a beacon, my destination, a door with bright fluorescent white lighting inside. My tooth has completely fallen out at this point, it's hanging by a tiny thread like a baby tooth. I carefully keep it from being disturbed too much by holding my lips closed and my jaws open as I begin to climb. It's a narrow, steep mountain made of wet reddish brown clay, which I awkwardly jam/stab my fingers into to get a grip. I struggle up
higher and higher, until I come to the edge of a long, slightly less steep section of the mountain, extending up beyond my view and into darkness. A sled carrying a bunch of people shoots down the slope and off the side of the mountain at terrifying speed, nearly hitting me. It's such a long climb that there's absolutely no way to get up there without substantial risk of being killed by another out-of-nowhere mud-sled. There's a tiny red light hanging from a wire about 20 feet above the surface of the mountain that seems to warn when sleds are approaching, but it doesn't matter because at this point I wake up.December 27, 2016:
Can't remember most of it, but there was a part where I was watching TV with some family members. There was an ad for this obscenely luxurious car, almost a parody of a luxury car, with ivory paint and actual gold trim that looked like fancy victorian moulding, red velvet interiors, stuff like that. Disgusting, I thought. Some of the people in the room were impressed by it, so I said something along the lines of "If I ever saw one of those I'd smash its windshield in with a baseball bat.". This remark is met with bemused glances, silence, and attempts to ignore that I just said it. That's what you get for being honest I guess.
December 11, 2016:
Bits and pieces. Woke up at three PM, so I had two dreams. The first was kind of muddled up by the second. Walking along the top of a tall wall, a void on my left, a forest on my right. Snakes. A society of people who are incredibly well-trained when it comes to throwing things at people's heads to decapitate them. Being far away from where I was before, a vast underground world with bizarre unreal hills and buildings, bright colors, long shadows. Climbing up and up and into a sort of elevated city. Come through a tangle of hallways and streets to the ceiling, a little book shop with some stairs leading up and out. It's like moe's tavern from the simpsons for some reason.
The second dream - I'm in some kind of live show. I have to perform for thousands of people in a huge stadium. I don't know why exactly. Something happens and I'm in the backstage area, which is actually outdoors. Someone tries to put this big white ghost-like costume over my head, and I fall over. Up in the sky, there's a UFO that unexpectedly flies above. It's made of a central, mirrored disc with dark purple rings spinning around its axis in a way where it's clear the rings are driving the craft forward. A second one approaches, and they engage some kind of beam, tearing some power lines out of the ground. They fly away. Suddenly, there are flames, there's a freeway onramp on one side of the backstage area. Jumping between chunks of burning rubble to get to a door with yellow light. I wake up.
Between December 11 and May 13: Lots I can't remember and didn't bother to write down
May 13, 2016:
Some kind of big space station where there's a whole lot of people stranded, two groups of people that aren't on good terms with each other. It seems like the station was built to accommodate this exact situation, since it's divided down the middle exactly into two essentially identical halves. The one on the left (and the one I'm a member of) is orange, and the one on the right is green.
In the middle of this arrangement there's a big spaceship that's apparently deactivated, with airlocks and cables and such attached to both sides of the station. It's also worth noting that the station itself isn't orbiting anything, it's literally just floating in space, an unfathomably long way from anywhere. The basic plot of the dream is that I go into the ship and try to figure it out, there's some kind of altercation with some people from the other side of the station, and I evade capture or something by ducking into a portion of the ship that I know is safe but they think is without oxygen. It's some kind of control room, with some science-fictiony holographic monitors. I get the impression that a long time ago, someone else was sitting here, just as I am, and they left without finishing what they were working on. In fact, it seems like the work that was going on on the monitors was just left sitting there untouched, partially complete. As I'm sitting there I come to some kind of realization and activate our half of the ship somehow.Later, I (and someone else who I don't remember very well) travel to their side of the station, to tell them what I figured out: that the only way to escape the station is to do the cliche thing and put aside our meaningless differences to work together already. It's a strangely casual meeting for some reason. I come back to my side and tell them the same stuff. Then I wake up.
May 3, 2016:
I wrote this when I woke up, but I can't remember the details...: http://pastebin.com/6Lj1edZU
But wait actually I do remember. Me and some family members were in a car, driving, at night somewhere. It was cold and snowy and slushy. The car was really old and klunky and didn't work very well, and when whoever was driving realized it was about to go kaput we pulled into this lonely little place we thought was a rest area. It was this tiny little parking space with a single street lamp above it, next to a small concrete building, and all of it underneath of a huge looming overpass. We went inside the building and it was completely the opposite of what we expected: warm and cozy, with hardwood floors, nice warm lighting, and piles upon piles of typical house things, like books and kitchen supplies and couches and TVs. Essentially like a little house that was also a public place anyone could go.
There were also some car fixing things, which were quickly utilized. I remember carrying a big jug of warm pink liquid for something car-related. I decided to spend a bit of time just lounging around the building, when I saw that there were for whatever reason a whole bunch of old computers there, all hooked up and running. Stuff from as early as the mid-80s, ranging all the way to proper modern models. I fixated myself on a soft chair in front of this little computer running windows 95, I think it was, and was about to do stuff with it when there was some commotion from the other side of the room.
There were more people showing up, some huge obnoxious family, and they quickly flooded into the majority of the building. The details in this bit I'm not sure about: There was a moment when I went outside for some reason, and into this big area under the building - two of the four corners of the structure were held up by these big concrete beams, allowing quite a cavernous space in the area beneath. There was someone there, I think? I vaguely remember some kind of subplot with this creature that lived on the roof of the building who ascended into the sky, and this was some kind of ending to some story I didn't see the rest of. At some point I went to the second floor of the building, which was still empty for whatever reason. I remember it was a welcome respite.When I went back downstairs, it wasn't the same place anymore. It was this big high-school style gymnasium, with loads of folding chairs and some kind of podium/stage with someone talking about something. The chairs were mostly empty, but there were still quite a few people there. The stairs I was walking on were really fancy and wide, with a bannister and everything. Also, the whole thing was suddenly inside a single big comic panel, which I didn't even register as being strange or anything. Also I'm pretty sure everyone was a cartoon.
April 15, 2016:
A lot of weird things in this one. Some kind of big shopping mall at night, I'm there with some people and one of them is I think my sister or something, even though she doesn't look anything like my actual sister. In fact I'm probably not even me, in the proper sense. It's the fourth of july, or some other fireworks-related occasion. We're standing at the edge of a building, and a car pulls sloppily and crashily into a parking space on the opposite side of the parking lot we're next to. It's a convertible loaded up with a bunch of obnoxious teenagers, and they're setting off a bunch of fireworks just for fun, but also in the faces of some people that were standing in the general vicinity of the place they pulled up, because they really like the idea of ruining other people's moods.
They have guns! Oh no! They're going to shoot us or something! But no, the guns just shoot sparks and confetti, even though they look almost exaclty like actual kills-people guns. One of the rapscallious ruffians of ill repute dashes over to my current entourage and sets a nearby box of something flammable on fire. This is stupid. He is stupid. I yell something at him angrily as he scurries away, and stomp out the fire. At least they aren't very persistent. When I first saw these people I was kind of worried they'd be all up in my business or whatever you'd say.Earlier in the dream we were in another part of this shopping mall, and I was trying on some kind of pants for some reason. The issue, though, was that the shop we were in didn't have any dressing rooms, so I was just trying the pants on in the middle of the store, which I would never do in real life. (this is further evidence that the character in the dream isn't actually me, I think?). I turn around and that whole time I was standing right next to a window, apparently, with loads of traffic passing by at all times. How humiliating. The precise sequence of events in this dream eludes me, but the following things also happened at one point or another:
1: I buy a record in one of the shops. 2: We are at a restaurant. 3: I wipe my neck with a red napkin for some reason. 4: I find a big, awful swollen burn/blister on my neck I hadn't noticed before, presumably caused by the napkin somehow, and this distresses me less because it's going to be dangerous to my health and more because I'll look weird with a big swollen thing on my neck walking around this public place / have already been doing that for who knows how long before I noticed it. 5: A policeman walks over and harasses me for some reason, but doesn't actually do anything noteworthy despite my initial anxieties.
All of those things happen before the last thing: The gangs of ruffians, I realize, are a systemic problem somehow. They're roving about causing chaos, and said chaos must stop. Somehow, the kid who's actually only like 10 and is apparently my sister is the key to fixing this problem. We hurriedly make our way through various streets and alleys on foot until we reach a room that we've apparently all been staying in for some time, in a bed and breakfast type of place. The room is really bare, though, a bunch of plain walls and sheets, all quite bare. We have to make a movie to fix it all. Some kind of incredibly convincing documentary. There's a laptop computer sitting in the room, I guess it has editing software on it. Then I wake up.
April 5, 2016:
I was playing a video game, I think it might have been counter-strike. I was doing really really good. There was a red fox (like, REALLY red) sitting on a rock that I saw through a glass door. Its eyes were really weird.
Sometime in 2015:
Walking out of a big institutional-style building. Buses painted completely in pastel colors, over the windows and wheels and everything. A crooked old tree a few feet from the sidewalk, there's a hole filled with dead leaves and spiderwebs. Past that, there's a dirt path through a grassy field, heading perpendicularly from the sidewalk, going about 150 yards back into a wall of brambles and bushes.
I turn onto the dirt path, which breaks through the wall of brambles into a sort of trail with trees on either side, almost like a forest but not quite as dense. There's a white fog in the air, so thick that you can only see maybe 30 feet in front of you. There's a very slight breeze, and it's very very quiet.
After a minute or two walking down the trail, I hear some distant voices somewhere to my left. Some kids (making a ruckus, laughing, one of them perhaps carrying a stick) are walking down a parallel path on the other side of the trees. They head off their trail and start heading slightly towards me. This makes me kind of anxious, so I start walking faster than they are, and eventually off the edge of the trail into the forest.I'm on a shallow hill with a bit of a clearing. As I walk up the hill, a ruined building emerges from behind the fog. It looks like it's been abandoned for decades - crumbled concrete walls, the roof fallen in, really just a massive pile of rubble with a few rectangular holes which used to be windows. Seeing this building, I become aware of the nature of the fog that's blanketing this forest: It's not fog, but smoke - and it came from this building when it was destroyed. Somehow, it's still hanging over this area after who knows how many years, like it's been glued to the ground. Not just by chance, either - something about what happened here forced the fog to stay.
The group of kids is back, a ways ahead. I guess they're more like teenagers. They see me and ask me to come with them. They're exploring the forest. There's a few more buildings up ahead. One of the kids ducks into one of the buildings, and I follow. He says it's not safe to stay inside for too long. We leave the building and continue forward.
There's another building, bigger this time, and more intact than the others. It's pitch black inside. Someone has a flashlight. It's damp and dark and at first it seems like there isn't anywhere to go, but at the far end of the room there's some stairs. The walls and the floor are made of this nasty dark wood, like the wood telephone poles are made from. The stairs wrap down the walls of a maybe 30-foot square room, and then another and another, and then we're at the bottom.This room is much colder than the others, and seems to extend a good distance ahead. The floor is that sort of muddy dirt floor you get in basements in old houses. There's an old tire, part of a bicycle, and an old couch (fallen on its back) haphazardly scattered up ahead. Still so dark. I know something awful is going to happen, so I force myself to wake up.
Sometime before that time:A parking garage that extends infinitely in all directions. There's a giant circular hole through the middle of the floor and the ceiling. Infinite floors just like this one in both directions.
Sometime waaaay before all of those times:
Creepy lady with a really wide face, black eyes (with white pupils), and sharp, sharp teeth stares at me. She has a pair of scissors.
* also so I don't have to scroll when updating this page I guess
