Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Coldfyre's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Thursday, August 27th, 2009
3:50 pm	Robots I just slept way, way too long, and had a really strange dream... I was in some kind of industrial setting, in a rectangular room with two doors on the short sides of the rectangle. I came in through one of them, which had two staircases, and they met the floor about halfway into the room, leaving the other half with these long machines to either side of the other door, separated off by railings. The floor was metal. And I was fighting some kind of evil robot that came in two parts... one was kind of like the Terminator, a metal skeleton with flesh over it, but it was also partly like one of those high school models of a molecule, with all the colorful spheres linked together by little sticks. The other was some kind of horrible spider-like thing made out of random pieces of metal. Both of them, I eventually came to realize, had my cats as their cores... as though sentient bits of the robots had built themselves around them, and were now controlling them, using them for power, as well as holding them hostage. I was fighting them both, and I don't remember a lot of details... I somehow knocked the Terminator one in one of the machine by the side of the room, and it stretched out his molecular model body and twisted it, until he looked like a strand of DNA... later I was up on one of the staircases and managed to push him off, and he fell hard onto the floor below... he should have shattered his skull, but he didn't. Also, he had a mustache. I think I eventually freed Jehauri from him, but I don't remember that... what I do remember is tearing the spider robot apart piece by piece, wrenching off its twitching, flailing legs, pushing its sharp-fanged body off of me before it could bite me, kicking it down the stairs and pinning it onto its back as it struggled. I had a screwdriver and was using it to pry bits of the thing off, until I saw Neena's grey fur underneath... before long, it was just Neena with a sort of metal shell around her back, and I remember the robot crying out, shrieking as I jammed the screwdriver between its fangs and bent them off one after the other... and at some point it stopped being a robot and became a lifeless shell of metal, and Neena was just Neena, free of its influence. Current Mood: okay (Comment on this)
Monday, August 17th, 2009
11:36 am	Dragonfly Queen I don't remember a whole lot about last night's dream, except that it was sort of RPG-ish... I was on a ship, sailing between very small islands and exploring each of them, and would occasionally get attacked by small dragonflies... eventually I discovered that there was a queen dragonfly who was mother to them all, and that if I could find her lair and defeat her, I could then summon her in battle or something. She was apparently a former movie star or something, now gone slightly mad from her failure to keep her career going, and would violently attack anyone who looked at her. So I found the entrance to her lair, and started going down this really narrow, dark stone stairway... it was so narrow that I had to turn slightly to the side to keep my shoulders from getting stuck, and I accidentally crushed all these little dragonflies clinging to the walls. Finally, in a small square chamber at the bottom, there was a box on the far end of the room, sort of a cross between the Ark of the Covenant and a jewelry box, and I could just see the tips of the queen's wings flexing back and forth. As soon as I got close enough to look in, she rose out of the box and flew at my face... and then my boss called and woke me up. Current Mood: awake (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
1:43 am	Hectic! I've been sleeping way too much... I don't know what's going on, why it's happening, but I'm having incredibly vivid, memorable dreams. I just had a very cinematic one that's very hard to describe... there was an evil woman shot from a low angle to make it look like she was at a storefront, but it turned out to be a ledge at the top of a skyscraper. She tossed a man and his dog down this enormously tall wood-paneled room to their deaths (presumably)... the room was just this enormous rectangle, maybe 70 feet square and hundreds of feet high, with no windows or features aside from brightly lit yellowish, laminated wood paneling- like the lanes at a bowling alley. Then there were three weird little creatures, two male and one female... they looked like gargoyle hobbits, with blue skin and tiny, sharp fangs, and were being made fun of by real gargoyles at the top of the building... I don't remember much, just that one of them was wounded, and then this... hammer guy was thrown off the building to get something. When I say hammer guy, I mean a man who is literally shaped like a hammer... like, his head was like an elongated cube, with a huge thick chin, distorted features, and a little tuft of hair on top where the handle of a hammer sometimes protrudes through the head. His body was like... just a 6 foot rod wearing a suit with no sleeves or legs. He just bounced when he hit the ground, and sort of landed upright, stumbling around and trying not to fall over, until he found what looked like a combination between a large round vault and a gong, in some concrete drainage ditch. He managed to fall over into it, knocking off the door and revealing a golden hand mirror and a tiny, dull brass horn... like, only a couple inches long, maybe. He was told to blow the horn, but it was bent, the flare of it dented in, presumbly from his smashing open the vault it was in. He blew it anyway, and it made this very loud, high-pitched noise that went on for a really, really long time... and then, as soon as it stopped, a massive building in the distance, maybe 15 storeys tall, began to make this low rumbling... in a matter of seconds, dust began to drift from its top floors, and then it just crumbled, falling down into a pile of rubble hidden by other buildings, only a massive cloud of dust and a lingering sound of crashing and breaking showing where it used to be. After a long pause, a nearby building started to do the same thing... that ominous, frightening rumbling returned, and dust and small bricks began to crumble away from the storefronts at the base of it. Then these colorful awnings started rolling down from the storefronts, and each time one came down, the rumbling on that section of the building faded away... when they all came down, they seemed to be an advertisement for how much The Doctor (like, from Dr. Who!) like Altoids, the "original tall mint". And everyone was cheering and clapping, and it was, like, apparently the season finale for a new season of Dr. Who or something. And THEN, it was a bunch of random shows starring Patrick Stewart. Like, in one he was blond (but still mostly bald) and had a completely different accent, and he was rowing a coffin down a murky bajou, dressed in a Miami Vice-style white linen coat... then he was, like, a cat burglar who got caught and pretended he was asking for donations, and the guy he was begging from said, "I think not, I'm (some celebrity name) from (some big website about collecting things)!" There were a bunch of other tiny snippits of potential shows starring him, always with a different personality and outfit in each, like some kind of weird collection of every parallel universe direction his acting career could have taken. And this was just one of my dreams. I've been having so many my mind can't keep up with them. The bad thing is, I'm having trouble staying awake for more than 6 hours at a time. Current Mood: weird (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, July 27th, 2009
5:44 am	Dreams Within Dreams I just had a series of dreams so varied and complex that they were more like spending a week in an alternate universe. Unfortunately, I can't remember anything specific because I actually had dreams in my dream and wrote them down in a dream, then let my mind forget them since it thought they were safely recorded already. Current Mood: weird (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
1:00 pm	Dream Machine Just had a dream where I went to Disneyland with Mark! Well, sort of. It was all weird dream layout, of course... it was like all the rides were elevated connected by interstate overpasses and we'd drive from one to the other. Then suddenly we were the only ones there (I think Kelly and Jake might have been there too), and I was saying we should go to the rides that are normally really busy and have a long line, to take advantage of our solitude before they close. Next thing I remember, Mark and I were at some kind of museum-ish exhibit about the Haunted Mansion, except they'd moved it, and now it was a haunted train depot or something. They had a little architectural miniature of it, and it looked very boring and drab, made of wood planks painted brown. There was also a bunch of old Ghostbusters 2 promotional material there, including these neon yellow shoelaces with words printed on them, and when you pulled them through this device, it made sounds, as though they were some kind of recording medium, and if you pulled it too fast or too slow, the sound would be distorted. Mark pulled one through at the right speed and it played the part of the movie where the spooky voice goes "WWWWIIIIIIIINNNNNNSTOOOOOOOONNNNNNN", which I thought was awesome. Just before the dream ended, Mark was looking at a calendar, which seemed kind of out of place... the art was all beautiful fantasy pictures of mermaids and centaurs and stuff. It was very large for a wall calendar, about 3 feet long, and when I looked closer, I saw that it was for the year 2166. The art seemed somehow futuristic, despite its theme, with strange colorful backgrounds that seemed as though they were created by an art style that didn't yet exist. I've been having other dreams, too. Earlier, over only two nights, I had the following dreams: A dream in which I discovered a tick on the back of my neck, and then was being chased by ticks that would actually leap several feet in the air to attach to a person. They were black and... crunchy... and nasty. A dream in which there was an entire tribe of people living on an island who would feed almost all of their food to their chieftess, making her literally a giant, with an enormous, very globe-shaped belly... in fact, I think it had the Earth painted or tattooed on it. The tribe would use her for a bed, yet revered her like a goddess. A dream in which I was riding on a train. I don't remember a whole lot about this one, but there were several people on the train with me, and one of them was a very suave, sort of aristocratic man. He was very pale, with hair so light blond it was almost white, and was tall and slender, wearing fancy clothes, like 1600s French royalty. He seemed sort of suspicious to me, and when we got off the train, I realized he had vanished, and everyone was asking about him, saying he didn't have a ticket. The station where the train stopped resembled an art museum, but all the paintings and statues looked as though they had just been taken out of (or were going into) storage, most of them stacked up and wrapped in white sheets. A dream in which I visited a middle-aged woman who lived with her cat. I don't remember much about this one either, except that to get to her apartment, I had to wander through a maze of narrow alleys and dark, seemingly abandoned staircases... it all seemed very lonely and forgotten, as well as sort of claustrophobic and unnatural. It reminded me of some of the building layouts in Silent Hill 4. The woman herself was, I think, a retired actress or something, I really can't quite recall. A dream in which I was in a medical laboratory made almost entirely of sci-fi looking interlocking slabs of some slate-blue metal. I was on a bed of some kind, but it wasn't raised, it was on the same level as the floor, in a corner. There were numerous mechanical arms with small syringes that would keep injecting me with some stuff that made me cooperative and docile, and a male and female doctor were in the room watching me and asking me questions. I don't remember what it was all about, just that the male doctor left and the female one was telling me that what she was doing was the only way I had any chance of surviving. I agreed, either because the drugs were making me submissive and suggestible, or because I really was so helpless that my only option was to cooperate and hope for the best. I don't remember exactly what she was doing, but have a vague memory of my limbs being attached to metal plates. Current Mood: awake (Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
6:20 am	Long, strange dream Now, that was weird. I was working in a funeral home of some kind, and dressing up bodies, except that there was no body, just the clothes, so I had to make them look as though there was a body underneath... after that I was in the middle of the ocean, doing some kind of work with creatures that were like sea otters, only they had shells like turtles. I rubbed a few of them on the belly, and was helping lug around this heavy underwater camera, trying to catch underwater drug runners hiding their stashes or something. Then later I was guarding some building, kind of looking out into the woods for anything suspicious. A bunch of murlocs ran out and threw dozens of newspapers at me, and while I was looking through them trying to find clues, some other bizarre creatures attacked... it was like a combination of a submarine, an airplane and three horrific, immense serpents, and I was stabbing them in their necks with an arrow, Shadow of the Colossus style, while they shrieked and tossed... I somehow managed to crash the airplane-like section of the monster, imbedding its propeller into the side of a canyon wall, and I think I killed at least one of the heads before I woke up. Current Mood: good (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
10:55 pm	Cookies I had a dream where I was on the old house on the mountain... been a while since I had one of those, or any dream I remember. It might be because I stayed up much later than usual, then fell into a very deep sleep, which Mark interrupted to show me a sleeping bag. I know the dream started after the interruption, and I've heard that waking up for a minute and then going back to sleep can cause dreams. I was in the kitchen of that house, with its large window looking out onto the driveway. I don't remember what I was doing at first... maybe just looking for something to eat. There was this odd whirring or engine noise, and I was vaguely aware of a shape passing back and forth outside, like a truck or van or something, but it was impossible to actually see it... it was like I was always catching a glance of it out of the corner of my eye, even if I looked directly at the window. There was a TV mounted in the corner above the fridge, and it started to flick on and off... clicking on by itself long enough to blare a few random words from a news broadcast, then shutting off with that quiet, crackling electricity noise. I wandered into the next room, to the pantry behind the door (one corner of our laundry room had a door leading into a hallway there, but we had blocked it off and put up a bunch of shelves in front of it to form an alcove we used as a pantry). I found some packages of Chips Ahoy and Oreos and got about 5 cookies from each, and a large glass of milk, and wandered upstairs to eat them... but then I passed Mom, who was for some reason using the middle bedroom instead of the master bedroom. (I guess it was because if she was in the master bedroom, I wouldn't have passed her on the way to mine?) I walked in to see her, and she saw my cookies and said something like, "Oh, no sugar, honey"... not because of dietary concerns, but because of the odd electrical stuff that was going on. Like if the electricity was going on and off, my milk wouldn't work or something, I don't know. It made sense in the dream... Current Mood: okay (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
12:57 pm	Clothes Remembered a couple more dreams after I got home from Oregon. In one, I got off a plane in Africa, and ended up in a department store instead of an airport. I was getting hired as a security guard or bodyguard or something (I think), and for some reason I had to change clothes. I think I found some kevlar armor or something for my upper half, but couldn't find anything for my lower half. So this little girl there (I think she might have been the daughter of the guy I was supposed to protect or something) offered me one of her spare skirts. I was in the store's bathroom, about to try on this tiny skirt, when taxus texted me and woke me up. Which is probably from the best, it was a weird and awkward dream. Last night's was worse. I was in a combination of PetCo and a regular grocery store, shelving stuff, naked for some reason, and getting yelled at by my manager... I finally went to put on my clothes, but they'd gotten kicked under some shelves and my shirt and slanks were horribly dusty and dirty. Um... that's pretty much it. I haven't had any truly interesting dreams in a while, but I figure I should write them down in hopes of remembering more of them in the future. Current Mood: bored (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
1:26 pm	Lumberjacking I seem to be getting worse and worse at remembering my dreams. I know I've been having a lot, but I seriously can't recall any except last night's, and then only partially. I kept accidentally playing World of Warcraft. I'd be logged in and running around, and then suddenly think, "Oh, wait! I quit that game." And then I'd close it down, and do some stuff on my computer, and a few minutes later open it up without thinking and start playing again. Then I was having a contest or battle or something with someone... I don't remember details, but we did a whole bunch of different things, and I fought as hard as I could, but it always ended up a stalemate. Then there was, um... something... that was big and ominous and distant and I ran away from it, and ended up in the forest, where there was this immense vertical cliff of logs, stacked in horizontal rows one atop the other, with numbers along them that probably measured the height, like a giant ruler running up along the side of this log cliff. This was the beginning of a series of lumberjack games. I had to climb up the cliff using just the thin space between the logs as handholds, then when I got to the top there were these precarious platforms, like the crow's nest of a ship, and I was supposed to cross from one to the other using things like a tightrope or a row of spinning logs, one after the other, spinning in alternating directions... each platform had a ladder leading up to an even higher one, and finally the last game was to throw a matchstick between the two platforms, jump out between them, land on the matchstick while it was in midair, and rebound off of it to reach the platform on the other side. That worked about as well as you'd expect it to work in real life. Current Mood: bored (Comment on this)
Monday, May 11th, 2009
8:37 am	Frightmare While I'm at it, I guess I'll update with a couple dreams. I haven't been remembering them very well lately, hence no dream updates, but I think I can recall a couple. Hopefully writing them down will make it easier to recall others in the future. I had a bad dream that was a combination of a college class and working at Petco. I walked in to pick up my last paycheck, and it was kind of this weird industrial classroom, half warehouse and half store, with desks lined up and employees sitting at them. It was like a combination of being late for work and having a class you didn't realize you had, and they wanted me to take a cockatiel home and take care of it, and give me a quiz or something. Blech. I had one last night where I was in some kind of cafeteria/anime convention dealer room or something similar. I don't remember much, except getting food for my Mom, and wandering around sampling things... I specifically remember picking up a roll at one point, but everything else is impossible to recall. I bought some candy or something at a dealer booth and then later realized I'd lost my credit card, but very clearly remembered the last place I used it, and was trying to think back and remember where I could have left it when I woke up. It's not very interesting when I write it down, but the place I was in had unusual architecture and style that's hard to describe, as is often the case with my dreams. Also, I'm leaving for Oregon for 3 weeks on May 19th! This would be more relevant if all my friends in Oregon didn't already know about it! Current Mood: naughty (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 10th, 2009
12:03 pm	Star Trek (spoilers!) I never update my LiveJournal anymore, because I know maybe 4 people on here (there are a lot more, but they're all inactive). I've noticed that very few people I've friended update either. This is the problem I have with blogging and that sort of thing... people on LJ don't have MySpace. People on Twitter don't have LJ. People on MySpace don't have either. A lot of people I know don't have ANY of those, and a lot of people who do never use them. If there were some way I could actually blog stuff and have it reach everyone in my circle of friends, instead of 3 or 5 people at the very most, I'd be all over it, but that seems to be impossible, and I've never understood people who keep a diary just for themselves... if there's nobody else to share it with, why bother writing it down? That said, I actually got a request to update my LJ regarding my opinion on the Star Trek movie, so here's my opinion, which I'm happy to share with one to five people. Okay, so I saw Star Trek on Friday. I thought it was good for the most part... I didn't feel cheated and angry like I did with Indiana Jones 4 or the Star Wars prequels. It was very entertaining, funny and a good action movie. It kind of dumbed down Star Trek- it didn't give you much to think about, or say anything profound about the future of humanity, or have a moral, or even provide a whole lot of insight into the characters or technology, but at the same time, it didn't feel like it was insulting your intelligence (except for maybe a couple scenes, but even then, it was nowhere near as bad as the movies mentioned above)... it was just tossing those things aside in favor of light-hearted fun and explosions. In a way, it was almost like a genre shift... it was still sci-fi, but a different kind of sci-fi. Imagine taking, say, Blade Runner, and making it a funny action movie instead of a thought-provoking, grim, moody movie, and having the result miraculously not suck. It's kind of like that. I've always felt that the morals, intelligence and compassion of Star Trek were an essential part of it- Wrath of Khan, for instance, was an awesome action movie, but it also had deeply emotional moments and a kind of dark mood, with the theme of dealing with growing old and facing the past. The original series had cool gadgets and crazy aliens, but it usually used them to tell a deeper story about humanity, or as a way of saying something about the time in which the show was made. This new Star Trek lacks that heart, so in a way, for me at least, it's not even actually Star Trek. But having this weird, parallel, genre-shifted version of Star Trek doesn't bother me. The original is still there to enjoy, and I'm looking forward to future installments of the new version. Why does Indiana Jones 4 bother the fuck out of me, while Star Trek doesn't? The sole reason is because they did Star Trek well. Considering how badly they could have messed this up, the fact that they pulled it off just amazes me. The characters are likeable, even Kirk, who is a total asshole for much of the movie, and they're very true to the original characters, without being exactly like them- they can even say catchphrases from the original series and have it sound natural. The set design is radically different from previous Star Trek, much more grounded in present-day styles, but manages to stay fairly attractive. Same thing with peoples' attitudes and behavior. I have mixed feelings about this- the original Star Trek was wildly optimistic, basically saying that humanity overcomes all its problems, solving war, hunger, disease, etc., at least within its own species, and the selfless, ultra-civilized behavior of people in Star Trek was (arguably) a good way of conveying that. The new Star Trek doesn't convey this very well, if it's even supposed to- it seems to say instead that humanity will remain pretty much the same, still fighting, making stupid decisions, getting sick from time to time, making the same old mistakes, just with cooler technology. That's probably more true to life, but it's kind of sad to have a world where a guy like Picard could never exist. But I think that whole perfect humanity angle had gone just about as far as it could anyway- the series and movies were growing increasingly more sucky and absurd, trying to bend the rules but not give them up totally, and it seemed like everyone had run out of ideas. Given the choice between this reboot and another film like Insurrection or Nemesis, I'm glad they went with something new and risky. So, what didn't I like about the movie? Well, the Romulans' time-travelling explains some changes from previous Star Trek, such as Kirk's more aggressive personality (since he grew up without the guidance of his father in this new timeline), but not the really major ones, like why everything looks totally different (think young Kirk's Enterprise will get a refit to look like the original series one by the time he's 30? I don't fucking think so). Now, as I see it, this is pretty much a parallel version of Star Trek as a whole, and the time-travelling is just part of the plot, not a serious attempt to tie the two Star Treks together, even if it does feature the original Leonard Nimoy Spock. What bothers me is the response of hardcore Star Trek fans who, desperate for some way to make this all one big coherent Star Trek universe, act as though it IS a way to tie them together, as though time-travelling Romulans killing Kirk's father neatly explains away the complete change in style and attitudes of the Federation and humanity as a whole. No, guys. There is no way this is the same universe as old Star Trek, just with an altered timeline. It doesn't have to be the same universe. There are two Star Treks now, just accept it. Mark did give me an interesting hypothesis for the differences after the movie, saying that maybe original Spock and the Romulans travelled not only through time, but to an alternate dimension, and I think that's about as reasonable as an attempt to tie the two Star Treks together could possibly be, but I don't think it's even necessary to tie them together at all. And then there are fans who seem to miss the boat completely, and ask why young Kirk is driving a car when the TOS episode "A Piece of the Action" clearly shows he has no experience driving automobiles. Apparently they didn't even notice that whole time travel plot. Or, even worse, people saying that it's stupid Kirk and Sulu parachuted down to that drill instead of just beaming down. You know, the drill they were trying to take out because it was interfering with their transporters. So, that's more a problem with the fans than the movie. One gripe I had with the movie itself was that the Romulans seemed pretty bland and boring, without much motivation, characterization or personality. Nero is pretty much just “I saw my planet die so I’m going to punish everyone even though they tried to help me and the people I’m killing haven’t even done anything yet and I could probably prevent my planet from dying in the first place by telling them it’s going to happen in the future.” Maybe he's supposed to be insane from seeing his planet implode, but he doesn't come across that way, he just seems like he's evil for the sake of being evil. There was also absolutely no cultural relevance to them being Romulan- they didn't have anything alien about them other than their weird-ass ship and pointy ears. They acted just like humans. Kirk becoming captain by the end of the movie was really a stretch- convoluted and ridiculously improbable. Consider that he starts off as a stowaway on academic probation- and yet, in a matter of days, he becomes the captain of the Enterprise, permanently. The movie did a good job of making me not care while I was watching this happen, but looking back on it, it's pretty hard to swallow. Also, kind of odd that Kirk just happens to run into the cave that old Spock is in, and they just happen to be on the same planet as Scotty. Also, I thought the scene with tiny Kirk driving around in the car listening to the Beastie Boys was kind of stupid, but I really, really liked the Iowa cop's uniform, so I don't care. I also found it highly amusing that Kirk's motorcycle was just a normal-looking motorcycle that made Jetsons noises. And, one last little thing- Uhura's earpiece. It looked like the one from the original series. That is to say, it looked like a big honking silver satellite dish sticking out of her ear. It seemed really out of place to have that one single thing the same as the original series when everything else is different, especially since that's one area that current technology is quite advanced in. The fact that she had that big metal thing instead of a little Bluetooth-looking dealie with a blinking light or something just seems... wrong. And that's pretty much it. I didn't have a whole lot to complain about. I think they could have done better with the villains, but considering everything else they did well, against all my expectations, I really enjoyed it. Current Mood: good (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 16th, 2009
3:07 pm	Mall Race Had a dream. I was in a mall, running a race through a bunch of different shops... my opponents were a bunch of anime girls, I think most of them were from Azumanga Daioh. I was trying really hard, dashing through all these aisles and avoiding things... and for some reason there were the barrels of gummy snacks at each checkpoint (which were basically just the exits to the stores), and I was grabbing a handful and eating them as I ran. There were a lot of odd stores you don't usually find in malls, like an oriental grocery store, and a big hardware store with a really high, warehouse-like ceiling. It ended at a fancy hotel with a huge lobby, with a marble floor, crystal chandeliers and antique cherrywood furniture. There were a bunch of dogs who were running in the entrance and then sliding along the smooth marble floor on their butts... I ran in and sort of imitated them, going into a half-crouch, but lost my balance and fell down, and kind of slid and spun under a bench by one of the side walls... some matronly old lady in a pillbox hat gave me a confused, amused smile, and I pushed myself back out and hopped to my feet. I don't think I won, but I came in second or third. Current Mood: good (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 8th, 2009
5:10 pm	Ow, My Spine! (actually has nothing to do with my spine) So, last night I had a dream about a grocery store... actually, it was the Safeway near my condo, pretty much, but the little Starbucks inside was instead a circular counter with a person in the middle, surrounded by a trough filled with little multicolored plastic balls, kind of like the ones you get from vending machine for a quarter, that have little plastic ninjas or cheap crappy jewelry or silly putty inside. These were translucent plastic with small holes, and inside each was a tiny baby skunk, only a few inches long, still blind and helpless with only a thin covering of fur, pawing around... I think there were also some tiny gumballs or M&Ms, some kind of candy. Then later I was getting cash from a bank, but when I looked at it, it was counterfeit... like, really obviously counterfeit. Printed on real dollar paper, but the images were, like, garden gnomes and stuff, and there weren't even any numbers saying how much the bills were worth. That's not the only dream I had, though. A few night ago, I dreamed about a sandwich I'd bought, with the intention to eat at work the next day. In the dream, I plucked off the tomatoes that somebody had put on there under the mistaken impression that they were food, and in the sandwich's wrapper, there were lots of red onions to replace the tomatoes with, and the sandwich turned out really good. In real life the next day, the sandwich didn't have any onions, and even when the tomato was gone, it was actually pretty disappointing. Before that, I had a dream where there was an abusive boyfriend who beat on his girl, and was generally a complete psycho, attacking random people with a spiked leather glove, and I was trying to get him arrested while avoiding him noticing me, but that's about all I remember. Finally, I had one more dream where I was in an arcade... or maybe I was in an abandoned building, and I was able to look back in time, and it used to be an arcade. I know at some point I was able to look back in time as easily as blinking, to sort of walk around and simultaneously experience a place in both the present and the past, like... like I could see the present through one eye and the past through the other and the images sort of overlapped. I'm not sure if the dream started like that, though. Anyway, the arcade had a Sam and Max arcade game in it, somehow, on these really huge screens with a huge control area, like a DDR pad or something. Then, I was in another building, and it was really ancient and crumbling... it was dim and lifeless inside, just a kind of blue twilight to see by, and the floor was dusty and covered in debris. The broken remains of a plastic wizard were scattered in one area, a bit of plastic beard here, a green plastic eye there... it used to be some kind of fortune-telling machine, where you'd put in money, the wizard's eyes would glow and he'd give you a fortune, but now it was almost unrecognizable. In a corner of the old room, I found a tiny globule of something... it was very small, maybe half the size of a pea, a dark grey color, and sort of flexible, like rubber cement. When I squeezed it, it burst open on one end and a runny liquid came out, glowing as brightly as magnesium, a blinding white phosphorescense. Later, when I looked down, the globule was the size of a cherry, and no longer a rubbery sphere, but a blue-greyish, tiny birthday cake with the consistency of semi-dry clay, which crumbled apart in my hand. Later, I was in another building adjacent to the ancient, ruined one... this one resembled a parking garage, for the most part, and wasn't destroyed like the other one. I was by a door leading to a stairwell or elevator room or something when I saw, across the garage, a menacing, shambling form wandering up from one of the parking ramps. It looked just like a yeti (specifically, one of the Doctor Who yetis) and I quickly ran through the door, closing and locking it behind me... and then ran through ANOTHER door, and locked that. Then I started taking pictures of the yeti with my cell phone, since there were large windows in the walls separating us. The yeti didn't seem to be expecting this, and as it got closer, seemed annoyed and discouraged... when it got close enough, it seemed to resemble a more humanoid yeti, and it wasn't scary anymore... it looked like a guy in a gorilla suit, almost. When he got to the glass, he kind of just turned around a wandered off, and a guy in a black leather jacket came out from the edge of the window and walked with him, as though they were friends. And that's all I remember. Current Mood: hungry (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
6:39 am	Arcade Another dream! Haven't been remembering many lately... I took melatonin before bed last night. Maybe it helped? I was in an arcade... sort of like the ones in the 1980s, or at least the ones in ads and music videos of the 1980s, mostly black and shiny with neon signs everywhere. I remember there being a Star Wars game that had you actually climb into a full-sized X-wing... but the rest of the games were all broken. I found a vending machine and it was full of hamsters... they were climbing all over the outside, and through the window I could see them curled up in the slots where food would go, wiggling around in the slot at the base, and climbing up and down all over everything. I soon realized that it wasn't just the vending machine- the arcade machines had hamsters in them too, moving around in the wiring and occasionally hopping out of the maintenance doors on the sides of the cabinets. I went to complain, and found a much larger room with more arcade machines, like a warehouse, maybe 100 feet high with a distant catwalk around the top. I don't remember a whole lot, but I think there were a bunch of generic henchmen in black SWAT team-type equipment running around and I was in a shoot out with them (I watched Shoot 'Em Up right before bed). I think one of my sisters and a friend of hers were there too, and the friend got shot, but she was so far away up on the catwalk that the bullet just barely broke the skin and was kind of just stuck there, most of it visible, in her sternum. I don't remember much else, except that, even though I had to wake up early this morning, the dream seemed to last a very long time. Current Mood: sleepy (Comment on this)
Friday, December 5th, 2008
3:26 pm	Gargoyles I had another dream... I was in a larger mansion, or maybe a castle, several storeys high, with luxurious furnishings. One side of the building had lots of windows... like, almost every room had large windows along that wall, looking out over the landscape. I was in this mansion with several people (I'm not sure who they were), and we were panicking because we were about to be attacked by a massive swarm of gargoyle-like creatures. I could see them off in the distance through the windows, a cloud of winged shapes that drew closer and closer... I desperately tried to find a room without windows so I could hide, knowing that if they saw me through the glass, they would crash through to attack me, but if I could remain out of sight, they'd have no way of knowing where I was. I ran into several rooms, thinking I remembered one that wasn't so visible, but each time I dashed into a room, I was wrong... there was always a vast row of windows, and I could see the creatures getting closer and closer, individual shapes now visible... they were vicious little impish things, small but dangerous and very strong. Finally I discovered a bathroom or something that had only a few horizontal rows of glass bricks, and those were the wavy, distorted kind for privacy, so I hid there, lying on the floor below the lowest row of glass bricks, and tried not to move or make a sound. Then a little girl ran up, right in front of some windows in the next room, and started talking to me through the doorway. I tried to shush her and get her to come hide with me, but the gargoyle-things were already here, and one smashed through the window, trying to grab her... and of course since she was looking at me, they found me as well. I think I fought one or something, but that's all I remember. I remember the tension and fear I felt being very real and intense, as though I was really scared I might die, but somehow it wasn't a nightmare... just a dream. Current Mood: rejuvenated (Comment on this)
Friday, November 21st, 2008
4:45 pm	The New (Old) Car, and Kidnapped Kermit Some new dreams, finally. I had just gotten an antique, old-timey car from my grandfather, one that looked kind of like this one, except it was the size of a wheelchair and pedal-powered. I was riding it around Boulder on a sunny day, getting odd looks and questions, and eventually decided to use it on the highway... it got up to 60 mph, which actually seemed like a fairly slow pace in the dream, and I was keeping up with traffic, at least until three lanes narrowed to two. I got run off the road by some jerk in a regular blue car, who didn't even seem to care, just rolled down his window and asked "What the hell is that?" I wasn't hurt, though, I was just forced over onto the shoulder, which was made of soft green grass. I decided to get off the highway, and headed for Folsom for some reason, taking a shortcut through a residential area. Somehow I got lost, though, and though I have no idea how, I drove right into the dining room of a family as they were preparing to have dinner. There was an elderly lady there, and she welcomed me before I could apologize, and after a bit of friendly grandmotherly chatter, actually hugged me and called me by name, apparently recognizing me. I wondered how this was possible while she led me to a kind of den, which had a leather couch and two aquariums. Two of my male coworkers from Petco were there, relaxing on the couch and talking about insects... the aquarium across from the couch had a mix of lizards and large pale grasshoppers or crickets at the bottom, and one of them was discussing how the crickets were actually much better-adapted than the lizards, whose collagens or something were slowly breaking down under water... as he talked about this, I saw a cricket striking one of the lizards sharply, and the lizard snapped in half like a twig, bone fragments poking out, looking semi-transparent, like glass. This happened the rest of the time I was there, in the background. There was also another aquarium off to the left of the couch, and it had... well, it looked like a tiny mermaid, less than a foot long, except her lower half was that of an octopus, rather than a fish. She would slowly bob up and down, tentacles waving fluidly, and I glanced over at her frequently. Despite her human-like appearance, she never showed any awareness of anything outside her tank. Suddenly I realized how the elderly woman knew me- she must have been the wife of this guy, the chemistry professor from the Periodic Table of Videos, who, in the dream, taught a chemistry class I was in. Even though I was sure she was his wife, I could see a family resemblance, as she had the same fluffy white hair and features, as well as the glasses. I was proven right a little while later, when he came into the room and asked who was staying for dinner. My coworkers said they couldn't, and actually kissed each other pretty passionately, but I said I'd be happy to stay. He tried to get them to stay by excitedly promoting it as a "murder- no, date rape dinner mystery theater", but they pointed out that this seemed in bad taste. It's about at this point that I woke up. This is the most detailed and complete memory of a dream I've had in a long time... I was wearing earplugs while I slept (the neighbors had their bass up too high), and I wonder if that made a difference. I had another, shorter dream last week... I was in a hotel for a convention or something, and somebody was setting up a room for a Muppet guest appearance. One person was screwing a light onto a wall, and for some reason, was doing it through a hole in that same wall, his hand sheathed in a Kermit the frog puppet, so it looked like Kermit was screwing the light in with his mouth. I couldn't resist talking to it as though it were actually Kermit, and it responded politely as though it actually were, which was awesome. I was wandering around the hotel a bit later when someone shouted, and I saw a guy running with the Kermit puppet in his arms, clearly stolen, trying to make a getaway. I chased him as fast as I could, and managed to catch up to him, grabbing Kermit and pulling him back... it turned out the thief was my coworker, Tony, and after I told him how I thought he was better than that, he acted very ashamed and said he was sorry. And that was about it. Current Mood: rejuvenated (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
2:30 am	Other Stuff I'm still living with Mark in our new condo, and it's going fine. I'm still partly dependent on my parents, since my job pays for rent and nothing else, but it's not any worse than it was, and I enjoy living on my own. I've still been having dreams, but not as often... I think having a regular schedule sort of ruins the sleep patterns that were conducive to dreaming often, and now when I do remember a dream, I often have to go to work before I have time to write it down. It makes me sad, but I'm not sure what I can do about it. PetCo is still fine, aside from the pay... the only thing I really couldn't stand about it was the music, which was indescribably awful. You can imagine what you think it was like, and I can guarantee you it was infinitely, unforgivably worse. But that changed tonight, when, for the first time in months and months and months, they changed the soundtrack. It's nothing too special, but it sounds like it was selected by real human beings with functioning ears rather than cruel demons who exist only to torture PetCo employees, so I'm happy. And since it's not 95% Christmas songs (in fact, it seems to be 0%), I'm hoping it's not just a seasonal change. Also, WHOOPS, I let it slip that I work at PetCo specifically, rather than Generic Pet Shop. But, since I have nothing bad to say about any of my co-workers, I guess that's fine. I'm getting along well with all of them, and in fact got invited to a Halloween party with them... but that's another story, for some time when I don't have to go to work in three and a half hours. Current Mood: sleepy (Comment on this)
2:05 am	WIN There is, literally, dancing in the streets. I have work in the morning, but I found time to go down to the pub with Mark and celebrate a bit, and finally shoot off my confetti gun I'd been saving for this exact occasion. I listened to the results as they came in over a portable radio at work, and I'm so relieved that the full effect hasn't even sunk in yet. Everyone else is screaming and cheering and waving signs, and I'm sort of standing there quietly going "yaaaaaaay"... I'm just as happy as they are, but, whether because I can hardly believe America did something right for a change, or because the past 8 years have wounded me so much that it's hard to feel hopeful or excited, I'm having trouble expressing it. I'm hoping that things get better from here on, though, and that maybe those wounds will heal. I do feel a profound sense of relief, growing every hour, that Bush is no longer our president and never will be again. Surprisingly, McCain's speech when he lost was something I found very touching... for the first time, he seemed like a good person, despite still endorsing Sarah Palin, despite his followers booing every time he mentioned Obama's name, despite all I know about his homophobia, anti-science and pro-war policies. For just a brief shining moment, he seemed like a real person with real compassion and intelligence... maybe it was just a result of good acting and good speechwriters, but listening to him, I had actual respect for him. Obama's speech was inspiring, as I'm sure it was meant to be, and I was very happy that he didn't shy away from mentioning gays in it, as many politicians would. I never particularly liked Kerry, but I feel Obama is someone I'm actually glad to have as president- as though I'm not voting for the lesser of two evils, but an intelligent, competent candidate that actually cares about my views. I'm still disappointed in the lack of real change in the country- we should be switching to alternative energy sources, abolishing the electoral college, legalizing gay marriage in every state, moving away from the corrupt, two-party system to something that better resembles the ideas America was founded on, legalizing marijuana, a drug less harmful than alcohol, punishing the old administration for their war crimes, and so on and so on, but then I remember that I'm expecting too much from America, too quickly. This is a country dumb enough to vote for Bush twice, and here we are voting for a black president who is Bush's opposite, a mere 4 years later and only a few decades since the start of the civil rights movement. It may be far less than I could wish for, but it's also much better than I could have expected, and for the first time in 8 years (or maybe longer), I'm feeling a tiny twinge of pride for my country. Current Mood: ecstatic (Comment on this)
Friday, October 10th, 2008
1:12 am	Weather Equipment I just had a dream, the first I've remembered in a long time... I think my work/sleep schedule hasn't been very supportive of dream lately. Anyway, the first part I remember is being inside some ancient cave or something, with rusty railroad tracks. There were a bunch of other people there, and there was something about interviewing some older woman, someone's wife, who didn't really want to be interviewed, but reluctantly agreed. There was a whale poster like the ones I own next to her, sideways in a vertical plastic frame along with others that flipped like the pages of a book- basically the same sort of thing it was in before I bought it. After she finished speaking, we had to help her husband get somewhere very quickly, because something important depended on it, and we all grabbed some of the switches related to the railroad tracks, and started flicking them to make a small locomotive he was riding go down the correct path. It was like a puzzle game, but we solved it in about a minute. After that I got some "time off"... apparently that was my job or something. The boss wrote me a note encouraging me to have a good time with my girlfriends, even though they were no longer in town and I had requested the previous week to see them. The note also playfully implied that I had about 5 different girlfriends, and involved a... well, apparently a raunchy calculus equation about how to deal with all of them. I read this note, printed on a bright yellow card, while I wandered into a hardware store. The hardware store was oddly plain and vast, with a flat blank concrete floor, rust-colored red-painted square fencing separating sections instead of walls, and hardware stacked in neat rows, always between two vertical rows of rods jutting out of the walls, made of the same rust-red painted metal. The ceiling was made of milky white plastic, of the sort you might find in some greenhouses, slightly translucent and allowing a good amount of sunlight through, giving the entire building the feeling of a shed or greenhouse barely separated from the sunny day outside. I actually don't remember buying anything there, just the look of the building. Wait, scratch that. While writing the next paragraph, I remembered it, so I'm going back. I was buying glasses... they were kind of like 3-D glasses, the ones made of cardboard with the flimsy plastic lenses, but instead of being red and blue, the lenses were clear and made things look... well, weird, in a good way. I bought a bunch, and unfortunately ruined most of them because they were so flimsy that they tore when I was trying to separate them from each other. I also found some plastic, weird, futuristic-looking glasses, one yellow pair, one blue, that made things look really strange too (and hard to see), and bought them, for some reason feeling they were from the 70's. After this I was at some fast food place, designed similar to, yet unlike any real one. I looked around, eating a box of chocolate chip-flavored Teddy Grahams, and made some comments about them to employees that I don't remember... I think the people working there were my coworkers from earlier, or from a different job entirely, and afterwards, they all wanted a ride with me on my moped. Somehow they all climbed aboard, but as we were about to take off, a cop came and made me stop, for some reaching searching my cargo. He was clumsy though, and spilled open a small wooden crate of weather equipment. When questioned about having this, I said it was from my previous job as a delivery driver, and after my friends agreed and I said I should really get around to taking it where it belonged, he helped us all pick up the pieces. There was one piece in particular, a glass spiral with large bulbs on the ends and in the middle, that looked a lot like the hand bubblers I recently bought in reality. It was filled with blue and green, looking sort of like oil and water when stirred, mingled in blotchy pattens like a cow's spots, but not mixing. I notied it was leaking and put it in another thing, filled with water and plants like an squarium, but then made it bleed out into the water, and finally made the blue and green mix together rapid, becoming an odd, milky, fluctuating pale purple. And that's about all I remember. Current Mood: good (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 11th, 2008
3:16 am	Sick, Sleepy, Uncertain So, I'm sick and tired, but can't sleep, and am supposed to be up for work in 3 and a half hours. I think I'm going to call in sick for the first time, and hopefully I won't get in trouble for it, since I originally was supposed to have Thursday off anyway. I've been thinking a lot, and reading Dinosaur Comics, and the latter caught up to the former, mirroring almost exactly the same thoughts I'd been having about 10 minutes before. So, uh... I guess I'll write about a dream I had a few days ago and didn't get around to writing. I was working at Disneyland or something, and there were a bunch of dogs there who had escaped... so all the employees had to toss chew toys and bones and treats in a big pile near a doorway, then spray it with dog pheromones using one of those back-mounted slime sprayers from Ghostbusters 2. Then later I was in a dining area where there were big business conferences and stuff... there were a bunch of Yakuza there, and one of them ordered a drink and burned my hand with a lighter when I brought it to him. Finally, I was working in some swamp-themed area as a boat valet or something, and had to bring some guy his sailboat, which involved diving underwater and dragging along some chains connected to a track the boats were on. The water was pale, murky green and filled with the hazy shapes of broken and forgotten statues and animatronics from disused rides. I finally got the boat there, but my eyes were stinging, then burning terribly as if they were on fire... apparently, the water was treated with a chemical worse than chlorine, called rodine or something, and I couldn't keep working. My boss, some tubby bearded guy, was telling me I was lazy and that it was "just a job like any other". And that's all I remember. More later, if I get around to it. Current Mood: sleepy (Comment on this)