I was in a road movie. A punk road movie, to be precise.

I was in an old boat of a car with two or three other people. The trunk was full of cocaine cut with an explosive. It may have been irradiated, as well. We had to get it across the country.

To make matters more complicated, we wanted to do this fast. Because we wanted to catch up with the friends who’d ditched me and wreak vengeance upon them.

The whole thing was all kinda Repo Man.

I dreamed I helped thwart an invasion from a parallel reality. They were infiltrating our world because of the draconian copyright laws of theirs; anything remotely like anything else got sued, so their culture was at a standstill. Especially their music; I got to hear some and it all sounded like keyboard demos.

Huh. That was an interesting dream. I was a student in a magic school, slowly discovering its dark secrets. I was up on the third floor where I shouldn’t have been, and woke up the long-preserved young man who’d founded the school. He wanted me to take him to the headmaster’s office to confront him about what the school had turned into: a place that brainwashed young magicians to be weapons for the State, rather than training them to their full potential.

Then there was some kind of narrative discontinuity and I was trying to acquire the names of the technicians who worked there. Everyone, teachers and students alike, just referred to them by their position. All I had to write on was a book with things already written in it, so my notes kept vanishing into the text. Eventually I turned to a page with the cast list on it, and was like “oho! I’ll just use the playbill to get the right spellings for everyone’s names!”.

It was about then that I woke up, thanks to my calendar alarm going off to remind me to exercise.

Huh. I had my wing tattoo in a dream. There was something about there being big slashes of sunburnt skin across it, with the unburnt skin making patterns. And then the burn faded quickly.

Also there was something about organizing stuff on shelves, and a minor bit of time travel. I dunno, my dreams have been fading fast for the past month or so; that’s why there’s been the sharp decline in the dream posts.

I found this tiny fragment to be notable because it’s dreaming of a personal alteration that’s very new. It took a LOT longer for my gender change to show up in dreams. Of course, it also took a lot longer for that to HAPPEN.

I was in the bottom floor of a high-security building. Maybe a mall, maybe some kind of Le Corbusieresque arcology. But the cyborg zombies had gotten in and infected the staff. Me and the rest of the party with the Eleventh Doctor were immune, but the cyborg zombies had us outnumbered.

It should be noted that these were very intelligent for zombies; they could talk just fine and didn’t have parts rotting off or anything. But their flesh had gone grey, and they had bits of metal festooning and controlling them. Basically the Borg I guess? Except all kind of sneeringly malign. And with a wider variety of clothes.

A little earlier, I’d walked right into this with another woman. Not like we really had a choice; we were surrounded and herded in to where the other uninfected people were. Nobody told us where to go once we were in, so we kept walking down the wide corridor, hoping to make it to a corner and vanish. Walking so as not to attract attention was excruciatingly tense, but we made it – and there was the stairs AND an elevator! The other woman hopped into the elevator, but I was too slow. Then there were a couple scenes of her pushing the highest button available (29 I think, though I knew the building was MUCH higher – I guess there was a sky lobby up there or something), and then it being explained by the Doctor that sadly she only had papers authorizing her to go up to floor 4. This would result in her being reconstituted from her DNA records when she got to her destination floor, and sadly, the records of her had her infected with the cyborg zombie disease. Good thing for me I was too slow to catch the elevator, I guess!

I’m not sure why I didn’t take the stairs. I guess the cyborg zombies caught me, and politely escorted me over to where the Doctor was being kept.

When the fat male cyborg zombie who was keeping me down on the floor started leching on me, I got pissed. Cyborg zombies, sure, I could handle that, but forced cyborg zombie sex? NO WAY. So I turned to the female cyborg zombie in a fake nurse’s outfit (she’d been working at a theatre whose uniforms had that vibe) and pulled out a weapon I didn’t know I had on me. It was a small blade on an extending pole, and it slid unerringly into her mouth, buzzsawing it’s way through the metal flaps at the back, and into her brain. Sawblade mandibles sprouted from the sides of her mouth as I did this, but my weapon was too fast – she was dead before she could get them into my hands.

The male cyborg zombie looked at me sadly, and gouged the tops of my feet open with his own razor-sized vibrating blades. It didn’t hurt. I suspect it would have soon. But then I woke up with my ankles crossed and slightly complaining about this.

Tonight: a long dream about… a long quest, I think.

We’d walked through the mirrors into a room. We knew how to get out: just walk through a mirror into room 15. Except the mirrors would change, and would reflect the wrong rooms. We were trapped in this room until we figured out how to get out.

Eventually I did: I drew a schematic for an organic gun, with 15 written backwards. Then the mirror just showed room 15 while reflecting that, and my companions and me could step through it to continue on our quest. Which was coming full circle since we were entering the part of the corridor that had water falling from the ceiling; we were hauling a hose up, to pump water out when we got to the proper room in the corridor not too far above. Someone explained this to me, that the audience might know (as it had been a long time since the beginning of the story), but I knew this already.

There was a lot more before and some after but it’s fading.

So instead here’s one from the night before that won’t fade.

There is a plush dragon that sits atop a hanging light fixture in my studio. His name is Gravity, and he watches the studio to keep it real when I’m not around. This is entirely a joke, not an actual intended majgickqhawockqalghl function. He also has an understudy, an orange plush triceratops named Sylvia. She sits on my bureau, doing the same for my bedroom. Both of them have this quizzical look to them, with their heads tilted perpetually to one side. Gravity’s made of bronzeish fake fur, with golden wings and underbelly – very much a metallic kind of dragon.

Gravity had been falling from his perch for a couple days, so I decided that he must want a sabbatical. I put him in the bedroom, and put Sylvia in the studio. She ended up sitting by the window on my bike’s seat, because she wouldn’t fit on the light. Unsurprising, it’s not like triceratopseri are known for their flying.

With my comedy plush guardians of reality thus rearranged, I went to sleep.

And dreamed. I was out there in the studio, lit by the moonlight. I didn’t have my glasses on. Sylvia was where I’d put her, but she was made of flesh, and just sitting there quivering fearfully. Obviously she was not ready for this; I’d have to put Gravity back on the job. So I picked her up, petting her behind her shield (which was unaccountably floppy) and set out for my bedroom. Halfway there, I felt something pulling me back to where I keep the watching plush in the studio; I ended up on the ground, crawling, to get enough purchase against this force. I picked up Gravity from Sylvia’s usual spot, put her there, and went back out to put Gravity where he belongs.

I bumbled around in the dark. There was now a table in there with something on it, which i knocked over as I tried to get Gravity up on the light. Then I turned it on and discovered that the walls in this corner were covered with hordes of action figures, all held to the wall by little clamps. It’s like they were on display. The table had a bunch of sculptures of dragons, some of which I’d knocked over.

Gravity was now for some reason on the end of a long, stiff pole, held up by wire. If there was enough room I could have swung him around in big circles, making him “fly”. I tried in the limited space I had available, making him do a bit of a curve around, then a downwards loop over the table. Maybe I was trying to do a downwards Immleman. I lost control, and he fell onto the table; when I lifted the pole, I got a new plush dragon. This one was black, with lots of sequins on its body to make it gleam.

Then I woke up (fully, not a dream “waking”), pulled on my robe, and picked up Gravity. He sat comfortably atop the light fixture the first time I tried putting him there. (It’s a shade hanging from the ceiling, so it’s slanted. Sometimes he slips off, sometimes he gets knocked off by a careless hand whilst putting on a coat.) I took Sylvia, put her back in her usual place, and went back to sleep.

I don’t think I’ve EVER needed my glasses in a dream before.

—-

Other fragments, meanwhile, from tonight’s dream.

I was sitting in a room talking with a man I did not entirely trust. He had a mirror universe goatee. Outside was blurry, but dark and rainy. I was verbally fencing with him about some kind of deal, and taking occasional notes in super-shaky penmanship with a pen that was running low on ink. Then he left to deal with something, and I was staring at a book, trying to memorize the first page – but I woke up, and it evaporated within seconds.

There was something about a book in last night’s dream too, in fact. After the black sequin dragon, as I was coming up into consciousness. With a complex sigil in the lower left I was trying to make sense of and a place for me to sign. Which I didn’t. I’m glad to know that dream-me isn’t making any contracts for me!

There was a large room with a corridor running in a circle around it. Two ten foot tall people in fursuits were in it; they’d sewn them together at the back so there were one four-legged, two-headed Janus-beast. Which was a parody of a sequence earlier in the dream where there was a similar situation with a monster that looked somewhat like that.

I was in a wheelchair? I think? There was a sensation of moving while sitting, at least. Going counterclockwise around the corridor, trying to lure the people playing the part of this monster, just as I’d lured the real one earlier. Then it cross faded into me going in a circle around some tables floating in darkness – clockwise this time – and looping past a woman taking notes and arranging cards. I dropped a card from the man with the goatee onto her desk, and moved some of the other ones around. I really have to wonder if this is related to me doing Nanowrimo, what with a lot of Drowning City existing on index cards.

Also there is someone playing a flute somewhere outside. Or listening to music involving a flute. At 2:30 in the morning.

I was in my bedroom in the house I grew up in. I looked out the window and saw a huge menacing hand in the sky made of stormclouds, slowly approaching.

So I went to my computer and opened up some new special storm software. It was a virtual disc with a few things on it, including a chat app that auto-launched. This was a very silly chat app, with the ability to do things like make fireworks show up on everyone’s screen, which distracted me as I typed up something about this approaching storm-hand. Which apparently was approaching Seattle. Despite the house I grew up in having been in New Orleans.

Then I dug under my bed and pulled out my phone and its charging cradle. I think I was thinking something about how I’d need these things soon.

Then I looked back out the window. And I saw a piece of the storm approaching: a few shiny black rocks, floating in a configuration that recalled a human torso with one arm. No head, no lower body, but it had this feeling of intent to it. It slowly drifted towards the house, aiming for the window of my parents’ bedroom. But it veered off at the last minute, drifting back and to the side. It then started towards my window. As it got closer, I sunk down out of sight – it seemed to be very important that these hovering rocks not see me. I was crouching against the wall, looking up; I could just see the underside of the stone thing’s upper bits as it slowed, and veered off again. Then it reoriented towards my other bedroom window (there were two windows side-by-side in my childhood bedroom) and cruised right on through, with majestic slowness.

I stood up and said something. And reached out, quite confidently, to touch it. And then it was gone; it rapidly moved far away while still staying in the same place. Which I know makes no sense in three dimensions; the best way I can describe it is that it was moving rapidly in a fourth spatial dimension while remaining in the same place, and still visible, in the three familiar ones.

Then I woke up, rather cold and really kind of stressed out. It was something like 3AM. I cuddled against Nick (who was spending the night) and told him about this dream. I got pettings.

And then I got up, took Gravity out of the living room, and put him back at his usual perch atop a dangling ceiling fixture in the studio/kitchen nook. The inner Magician insisted that this was important.

(Gravity is a plush dragon who I jokingly claim watches my apartment to make sure it stays real while I’m away. He’d fallen from his usual perch earlier yesterday, and ended up coming to the living room with me and Nick.)

Oddly enough, I really kinda feel like this had nothing to do with Hurricane Sandy hitting the East Coast yesterday. I really wasn’t stressing about it very much.

Daft Punk had come out with a new EP. I heard about it when the friend I was getting a ride from stopped his motorcycle in the middle of the highway to fiddle with his helmet and download it.

I was annoyed that I hadn’t heard about it, as I was on their mailing list. My other friend had had it for weeks and said it was awesome.

On waking up, I checked their discography. No awesome new EP.

Well. I’ve never had a dream end by having everything go pixelly, then bring up a LIVES REMAINING: 2 screen.

So let’s rewind. How’d I get there?

I was riding my hovering cardboard tube through a narrow, dimly-lit underground tunnel. My three companions were all clustered on one tube ahead of me, urging me to move fast. I got hung up with navigating the obstacles, in part because I wasn’t anywhere near as skilled with riding a hovering cardboard tube (they could stand on it like a skateboard, I was sitting on it with my legs dangling off the sides), so they pulled ahead and vanished round a turn. Then the lights came up and there was a mass of children screaming from above (or at least I was told it was children, I couldn’t see them at all) and an absolute rain of little wrapped-up candies. I pressed forwards through this, ducking to get under some of the stone arches that made the passage more complicated.

Then the water rose. It was black and cold. Evidently my tube hovered at a modest height above the GROUND not any surface, as I was now waist-deep in water. And the lights went down, replaced by guttering candles above me. I slowly came to a stop because, well, freezing. And my viewpoint lifted up to third person. Which evidently now was of a squat little cartoon character. Who kinda reminded me of Cerberus the Aardvark, so I will call this character that.

There was cheesy hair metal playing in the background. I recognized it but didn’t like it.

Cerberus looked up at one of the candles and it started to go pixelly. Then this amorphous low-res black blob reached out for him, surrounded him, and drew him up off the submerged hovering cardboard tube. I said, “Elk-elf! Come back into the panel!” – and then everything went black, except for the low-res text with the lives remaining counter.

And then I woke up.

—-

Before that things had been much more fun. There had been, in reverse order, zooming through the city on these hovering cardboard tubes with a cute nerdy lady and two cute guys, there had been lying on a couch tangled up with said lady and flirting with her (and examining her huge, intricate in-progress tattoo – it was going across the back of her neck and shoulders, and was this complex thing with heavy blacks and bright colors, kind of abstract shapes with jungle cats emerging from them). There was an advertisement for some projection rig that covered about 180° of the room in front of you, though only a couple of the games for the video game system plugged into it could use that whole display. There was a movie I was going to see that was advertised as combining some philosopher with cute animated antics; for a bit I was running around trying to avoid its hummingbird-winged main character, who was pursuing me trying to give me an advertising pitch. It was perfectly polite when it finally caught up with me despite me swatting at it with a book.

Also at some point (I think before I went in to see the movie, with the woman I would later be flirting with being one of two people behind the ticket counter) I was emptying out my purse. Which held about four times as much stuff as should fit in it, including an ELECTRIC DRILL that ran even though it had a long cord that was plugged into nothing. When they saw that they took me down to the special MAKER LOUNGE instead of the movie.

I kinda want to go back to sleep and see if I can get back to flirting with the lady in the blue dress and the abstract jungle tattoo, but last night I told myself that I was going to quit sleeping all damn morning like I’ve been doing for a while. It’s almost eight so I guess I’m gonna get up.