I was staying in a cabin on the coast, surrounded by woods. It was a summer camp or something; I was there with lots of people.

I had been bitten by a poisonous snake and to counteract the venom, I had to aggrevate a giant, foot-long brown scorpion into stinging me. In the process I killed the scorpion and someone had to grab the stinger and jab it through my clothes [there was no pain].

Inside, I was sitting in the dark; it was night. I would look up to briefly see things moving on the periphery of the woods.

Then, in a haze, I got up and confronted some entities that were in the room with me. I was face-to-face with a [man-shaped] shadow that I sensed was my doppleganger. I questioned it about the nature of identity, though the content of the discussion is lost to me.

I just changed the settings of this blog so that anyone can leave comments. I apologize, I didn't realize it was set up that way.

• I was swimming in a large tank of silvery liquid. The atmosphere was dark and otherworldly.

I climbed up onto a platform on which were mounted two guns. Myself and another guy were defending the pool from invaders. My gun, when fired, slowly disintegrated whatever it was aimed at. I was disintegrating Rush Limbaugh and various other people [though I took no pleasure in it and watched what I was doing with detached curiosity].

As I was killing these people, they seemed more irritated and confused than defensive. Everything moved with ethereal deliberacy. I explained to them as they were dying that the silver liquid was pure life energy, and because we were all composed of the same life energy, dying and becoming part of the pool constituted a return to the fundamental state of existence. To demonstrate, I spit into the pool; my saliva was the same silvery liquid.

• I was with a big group of people, laughing and joking. A guy made a leukemia joke and I immediately became confrontational, telling him that my grandmother had leukemia [she doesn't in real life]. He was silent.

• I boarded a plane bound for San Diego to come home for a holiday. We taxied onto the freeway, where we accelerated until we hit an incline and took off. The whole time, the pilot was giving us an authoritarian lecture on the perils of becoming too emotionally involved in the affairs of George Bush and the government.

The plane barely stayed off the ground. The pilot told us he had to land the plane again, then continued lecturing.

In the airport, we were told that the flight would recommence in half an hour. I left the building and walked around. I saw a girl hitch-hiking on a traffic island.

When I came back, the flight had left without me. I was distraught, though I then saw my dad walking through the airport. I consulted him and he told me to take a later flight. I booked another flight, though the only way for me to get on the plane was to become a spider monkey.

At home, I walked up into some loft where my college friends were sitting around. I was alternatingly a spider monkey and a robot constructed out of plush cushions.

Afterwards, I was laying on a car out in the street when a giant, blue bird landed nearby. It was very strange-looking. Instead of feathers, it had what looked like hundreds of beaks hanging off its body. It landed right next to me then started climbing on me, coming all the way up to my face and looking at me.

Kim [my neighbor] drove down her driveway in her SUV like she was picking me up for school, though I was already in my car, frantically preparing for my return journey to the airport. Somehow, I ended up in Kim's car and had to jump out while it was moving because she was so reluctant to let me out.


Is anyone reading this?

• I was writing a speech for my commencement from 9th grade to 10th. I think I was as old as I am now, with a healthy contempt for the administration's sense of morality.

I wrote my speech about how much cooler orcas are than dolphins. I said it was cool that bottlenose dolphins could levitate stuff with their minds, but orcas could destroy them.

Then I started talking about some strange specie of dolphin that had silver and red metal plating all over its body. It had a patch of teeth on the top of its head that it used to navigate and migrated in large numbers to Detroit every year.

I don't know if I ever read my speech.

• I was in a grocery store, telling Jason [my brother] a long-winded, meandering story about being in a grocery store. As I was telling it, a guy who looked to be fifteen or twenty feet tall squeezed his way through the doors. My story ended with a giant coming into the grocery store.

• I was going to college in the tropical rainforest. I had just gotten a new roommate, who wore a shirt depicting a guy vomiting. Needless to say, he was slovenly.

The dorm room was dark and cave-like.

I was outside, enjoying the forest while I could (there was some impending trip that would take me away for some time), watching hummingbirds zip around. I wondered if there were any Sasquatch in the forest. Immediately, I spotted a group of them in the distance, far below me. I took out my camera and started to video tape them. At first they looked computer-animated, then they looked like little brown and yellow dogs.

• I was with Jake [a friend], ambling through an estuary full of people. IT was a cheery scene: blue sky, yellow sand, clear water. It resembled an archipelago, with strips of sand bordered by channels of water. In these channels could be seen huge, cruising sharks.

I told Jake that I had once seen a massive Great White sitting in a pool of water just big enough to contain it. I thought this was funny.

We swam across the channels. When we did so, the water turned murky when I opened my eyes underwater. There were schools of fish that would swim by, always to be sabotaged by a shark that slammed into them at about sixty miles an hour. The sharks always passed me over, but it was still frightening.

• I was sitting in my dorm when I heard a faint alarm. Erring on the side of caution, I ran outside. The few of us who paid attention to the alarm saw that the building really was on fire. We ran around, screaming for everyone to get out.

There was a posh restaurant next door to the dorm. I ran through, yelling for everyone to evacuate. They all looked at me petulantly and continued to eat their food.

Gandalf appeared outside of the dorm. Standing in front of the flames, he commanded them to enter his staff. As he issued booming commands and chanted magic words, the air darkened and he physically grew. It was an incredible display of power.

He wasn't successful in capturing the whole fire, though he said he would be able to shoot fireballs for at least a couple weeks.

• My dad was president of the United States. One day, he was summoned to the underground headquarters of a secret order of assassins that ran the government and superceded the president's power. The order was run by a charismatic man in a red gas mask.

My dad was not cooperating, so they assassinated him.

I was on the playground of Miramar Ranch when mom called to tell me. I was distraught and furious. For some reason, no one seemed to appreciate why my father dying was so upsetting and no one made overtures to console me. I screamed in their faces and later apologized.

• There was a Republican senator who was entertaining a small child by being completely drunk. All of a sudden, twenty-some ninjas appeared out of nowhere, brandishing plastic swords. The leader of the ninjas - I think it was Jon Lovitz - made some speech about how the senator had interfered in their plans for too long. The ninjas fell upon the senator in a flurry of flashing plastic and he was dead.

The ninjas then tried to lure an ex-classmate who had published a novel out of his room. He was smarter than the senator. He and I were somehow able to overpower all of the ninjas with our plastic sword fighting skills.

• I was participating in a scientific survey of the eating habits of alligators. We would cling to poles about fifteen feet from the water ("That's plenty hihgh, at least in Winter!") and watch them swim through a big tank.

We would occasionally drop into the water, where we would be attacked. Whenever this happened to me, I would see myself from third-person. It didn't hurt.

• Dennis [a friend] had taken up a casual hobby of genetic engineering. He accidentally bred a horrible virus that reduced him to a vomiting wreck. I was afraid of getting it.