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I drove with my family through my old neighborhood in Mission Hills. It was night, the whole town was on fire. I walked into my old house and slowly began gathering up my belongings. I lingered for a long time, as long as I could before it started to collapse.
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From 12/8:

• I was playing World of Warcraft again, this time in the physical company of a group of people supporting me. I ran around for a while.

I was standing on a ledge overlooking an expanse of ground. I could make out vaious figures below me.

I saw a snake approaching a sleeping form. I thought it was Gandalf; my entire party and I started yelling his name to wake him up. After a while, a projection of his face and hands appeared in the air in front of us. He was irritated we bothered him; he was not the sleeping figure.

• Someone I knew woke up at the bottom of a grassy ravine. He was stuck in some perilous fantasy world as a result of my actions.

He scrambled up the side of the ravine until he reached a patch of tall grasses. There was a baby gorilla staring at him from within the grass. They froze and considered each other. The man started talking soothingly to the gorilla and it started responding in a lilting, childlike voice.

The man asked it its name and it replied "Amber."

"[in an English accent] Amber! My friends know about you."

Amber made a comment about how gorillas discuss such matters as how best to open coconuts and then my phone range and woke me up.

• I was at Chin's [a Chinese restaurant by my house] with my parents. We finished eating and instead of boxing up the leftovers, the water allowed us to take our plates and silverware with us.

When we went to the register to pay, the cashier started boxing up our food. I was disappointed.

Outside, I was talking to someone about how Brent Spiner and LeVar Burton were discriminated against for their conservative views because they were newcomers to Star Trek. I emphatically agreed.


From last night:

• I don't remember if it was me or someone else recounting the story, but someone was talking about how they shot a mountain lion.

They were made to wait in a hole in the ground all night until it appeared. When it did, the mountain lion spotted him/me , grinned widely and said something threatening and nefarious. The person in the hole trained their laser-sighted shotgun on the lion and fired, killing it.

• I went to a church group on Sundays, where people gathered in a large building to visit and watch services.

Every Sunday, before the program began, I would bare-knuckle box another person on stage. I was undefeated and had a nickname like "The R---."

I had arrived with my mother an hour early. I was trying to prepare myself psychologically for my fight.

In the bathroom, I encountered my opponent. He was old, in his early fifties, but sour and mean-looking.

There was a gym within the church group's building. I was walking through and heard a group of middle-aged men discussing Scripps Ranch [the place where I grew up]. They were complaining that it was considered a backwater suburb with no political clout. I told them it was true and they were displeased.

I was browsing the church's website when I found summaries of many of my previous fights. I read them over briefly and with satisfaction; the writer commented on my "tiny hands."

It was time for me to change into my fighting clothes, which happened to be my workout clothes. I was pumping myself up, chanting my nickname and pacing around when a guy entered the room. He was a personal trainer, very affable, and I wondered why he never entered the fight.

The whole dream, I was in a strange limbo - I kept thinking to myself that I wasn't even very religious, but I was devoted to boxing. I went through the motions on autopilot.

The fight itself was not part of my dream.
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• I possessed a vial filled with water. In the water swam hundreds of cladocerans, small, aquatic invertebrates that look like pale, swimming dots. I was faced with some kind of crisis (I didn't write my dreams down this morning, the details are hazy) and received guidance that I should enter into the world of the cladocerans. Reducing myself to their rudimentary biological functions would strip me of my sense of identity, the thing that was impeding my ability to find a solution to my problem.

• I drove a car at breakneck speeds through nighttime streets, arriving at a dirt trail that led into the dark. I got out of the car and walked down the path, into a canyon and up onto a ridge overlooking the city. I sat on the ridge and watched fireworks being launched from a military base below as part of an experiment.

There were other people with me. We were in a kind of residence on the ridge, open on one side to the view and filled with various mismatched belongings that seemed like they were assembled from the backs of people's cupboards or the shelves of Goodwill. Sitting out on a counter was an open vial partially filled with a liquid that resembled egg nog. I realized it was alcohol, hesitated momentarily and decided to drink it. It tasted like egg nog. There was an assortment of different liquors placed around the residence and I drank as much as I could find, all of it sweet except for a glass of stinging vodka.
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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.
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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.
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• 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.
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• 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?
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• 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.
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• 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.
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• 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.
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I walked through the canyon with mom to find some kind of berry that looked like a cherry tomato. The canyon was notably more vegetated, with dense, thistly bushes on both sides of the path.

When I found the berry, I crushed it up and distilled some kind of hot drink from it that resembled hot chocolate. I sprinkled cinnamon in the cup and drank it.

I was then on a balcony in my house, overlooking the Smiths' [my next-door neighbors] yard. They were having a big Halloween party. I felt bad that I wasn't invited but then remembered that I was.
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I have been keeping a daily dream journal for about three spiral notebooks' worth of days. Most nights, I battle T-Rexes with guns that shoot toothpaste while naked babies do jumping-jacks in the background and that's that, but I will occasionally cull something especially strange or potent from the chaos. Then I will write it down, and transcribe it into this weblog.

Most mornings, I wake up, lay in bed for a couple of minutes and then write down everything I can remember about my dreams. I will present my scribblings unedited.

So, to begin, here are the highlights from the night before last.

• I was home. In my room, someone had reconstructed the bunkbed[I slept in the same wooden bunkbed for all of my childhood, up until about a year ago]. Immediately upon seeing it, I broke down in tears and wrapped my arms around it. It seemed very small and some of the planks were in the wrong places but it didn't matter.

The room was different, though I didn't realize it in the dream. The carpet was dark green with white blotches where someone had spilled bleach. The window was small and rectangular, the kind that lifts up. It was night and I was looking out the window. The house abutted the canyon, I was listening for Sasquatch.

• I was in a store with mom and Jason [my brother]. I was in a section that had computer games when I noticed that they were selling a new edition of Aliens vs. Predator. For some reason, I knew that this would enrage Jason, so I frantically tried to hide all the copies.

Afterwards, in the car, I remarked that the San Diego landscape - many steep hills shrouded in palms and mist - resembled Vietnam. No one seemed to agree.

Mom made a strange turn onto an abandoned-looking offramp that led up into a parking garage. There were people climbing down through this hole in the wall above our heads. Mom started speaking to them in Hebrew.

We kept driving and mom would occasionally interject strange non-sequiturs. I got really concerned and told her she wasn't fit to drive.

We ended up at the parking lot of Miramar Ranch [my elementary school], though we were on the upper field. Mom was driving perilously close to the parked cars and I started yelling. Then mom crashed into one of the cars. No one was hurt. We all got out and it was clear to me that mom was not mentally sound and Jason wasn't much better.

I had my bike and helmet with me, so I decided to ride back to the house to fetch dad.

The trip became a quest. After a while, I was biking across this narrow, rocky ledge that fell off into chaparral far below. There was a black guy walking his dog in the middle of the path. I tried to avoid him and turn around but ended up slipping, dropping the bike into the bushes below.

I climbed down to get the bike but was almost killed by the guy's dog; they were walking from a path through the chaparral. I scrambled to safety and apologized for antagonizing the dog. My retainers were in so I had a lisp. I got into some long discussion about philosophy with the guy before getting my bike back. I rode away thinking about how the trip was starting to resemble Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle.

My bike was different; all black and very simple. I was sitting on an empty Rockstar can for some reason.

I don't remember the rest.


And last night's:

• I was Batman. Robin and I were returning home from a gala event to find that our home had been penetrated. We rushed around, trying to ferret out the intruders.

This translated into a dream in which I was walking around the house in a t-shirt and underwear. Mom came home.

• I was driving dad and I up to Julian. I was steering from the back seat and almost went off the road a few times. We scaled a mountain and got out. It was dark and forested. The sky was a bank of gray. We slept in a cabin.