sanity is relative

(Ganked from chat logs again, and apologies I haven't posted much lately and have used very lazy formatting on most of my recent posts... there are ongoing issues I don't wanna get into here.)

I had a vaguely interesting dream that got killed by my damned [alarm]... something about being pushed forward in time from like the 80s, in a parking lot where... something went down, some big fight but the details are fuzzy now O.o

and like, time ended up being somewhere between that and now, and some time-fixing lady showed up and was like "oh, you're out of sync, let's just push you all the way to the present" ...so boom there I am in modern day (apparently "the present" is [2020] even for time-fixer-whatever people lol) recognizing some buildings but not others and I decided I should go find a newspaper company or something to tell my story to and try to get help or something

and I had a brief glimpse that the reporter I was gonna talk to would be [cast as] Denzel Washington... and then I woke up D:

I don't remember the name of the guy who the dream cast with Leonardo DiCaprio, so we'll call him Leo. He's a rising star business mogul who lands a pretty, blonde trophy wife and is making money hand over fist. They have two kids (one boy, one girl). One day when Leo is off at work, the wife is teaching the kids to cook while someone is visiting (it felt like an interview almost but I'm not sure on that detail now). The kids are using sharp knives but the wife insists she's taught them well.

The little girl goes, "Ouch mommy, I cut myself!" and has a bleeding finger but it's not super-bad. The mom starts looking at it but suddenly her own nose is bleeding and she's getting kind of out of it. I have no idea where the visitor went but the mother ends up sitting on the floor leaning against the fridge with her two kids sitting with her and she's half out of it saying weird stuff (I don't remember what she said anymore). The kids just seemed to be sitting there listening to her quietly.

Later on, Leo is writing a love letter of some sort about how he feels like he hasn't spent enough time with his wife lately and he wants to make that right. She comes in while he's writing and finds a half-finished, rejected version of the letter on the desk where he was initially writing (he's moved to another part of the room and hasn't noticed her come in). She goes over to him and seduces him, not like that wasn't kinda the whole idea anyways. But it really felt more like she was seducing him than responding to his written overtures.

The next scene is the family on a four-person swing (each person sitting side-by-side) that is set up to have a really nice view at a place like a botanical gardens. I think Leo and his wife were talking about something but I don't remember what anymore. The only thing I really remember thinking was wondering if that chain would snap. But it didn't, so I think the scene was mostly there to imply things were supposed to be going somewhat properly with the family again, but it still had a sense of foreboding.

The next part is years later, the little girl is now a teenager going to the beach with her mother. Everyone is in bathing suits and the daughter is smokin' hot. The dream perspective switches to her, so I'm the daughter now. We spot someone we know who sells makeup, and rush up to her excitedly. The lady sets out things on the sandy/rocky ground where she is. I see a couple of just-released sample boxes and pick one up, asking if I can have it and the lady says yes. I say I'll definitely be placing an order but I'll be right back.

I hurry off along the beach on my own. I think the idea was I was going to talk to some friends further along, but I end up finding a few guys my age who I sort of know. They're hanging out in a rockier area with my uncle Nick (who is Nicolas Cage). While I'm talking to the other boys, Nick asks me if I'm still dating that one guy and I say something like, "No, we broke up." He goes, "Awww, maaan!" with a tone that doesn't mean he's sad about the breakup but that he's wishing we weren't related because now I'm available. Way to be obvious about it, Uncle. xP

Anyways I'm still talking to the other guys and they're telling me about an incident I vaguely remember hearing about, where a boat got wrecked in a storm a while back. I remember mentioning during the conversation that I had a boat myself, and couldn't understand why someone would leave theirs unmoored to get trashed like that. Turns out the boys had been in that storm and something had attacked the boat. And my mother had subpoena'd the boys for the chunk of the creature they'd managed to keep. This made me double-take, that my mother had anything to do with it, and what the heck do they mean by creature? I was trying to ask them more about this creature, and got the impression of a goopy purple thing with a few tentacles. It didn't sound like an octopus, but the sort of thing that suddenly made me think there was something supernatural going on.

Here dream logic really messes with things because I'm trying to hear what the guys are saying but they're all suddenly very tiny and wet sand is almost covering them up. I call to them and say I can't hear them, and then I say something like, "My mother must be blocking you!" I look down the beach and I think she was down that way somewhere, probably coming my way, but that's kinda fuzzy. I decide to head out into the water to swim away and find somewhere further around some rocky outcroppings where I can stop and try to think about what the heck is going on.

The makeup sample thing I had has vanished to forgotten-plot-element-land, but hey, it's cool, I have a huge crab pet now magically, who seems to understand when I talk to him and squeaks back all cute-like. I tell him we're gonna go for a swim, and while the actual swimming part makes very little sense, the crab also decides to have a piggy-back ride on my shoulders while I'm swimming. He's heavy, but I keep going anyways.

Then I woke up.

I was sitting in a dream-randomized apartment that was supposed to be mine, on a couch (that I don't actually own) with my computer in front of me on an Ikea desk-table (that I do actually own). I was playing Torchlight while talking to my friend on the phone. I had her on speakerphone and the phone was sitting next to me on the couch, and she was busy doing something else that wasn't a video game (can't remember what).

We were talking about MMOs specifically, and I said, "You know what I'd really like to see? An MMO that doesn't come out with an expansion every ten seconds. Doesn't Call Of Cthulhu only have like, one still?" And then I thought about it a little harder and said, "Was there some reason why we couldn't play Call of Cthulhu?" My crappy memory was vaguely hinting that either it hadn't liked her computer or mine, or there was some distinct issue that had made us stop playing pretty much right off, like mechanics or general aesthetics (Neverwinter, I'm looking at you).

She said, "No, no reason I can think of. We should try that sometime." Ah, so we hadn't even played it yet! I was starting to get excited.

Then the dream shifted into something that I think was supposed to be the trailer to the Call of Cthulhu MMO (which does not exist, for anyone wondering and reading this... but man if it was done right, I'd want to play that sooo hard). A man and his maybe pre-teen daughter were going to New England on vacation, but for some reason the small house they showed up at was very definitely of Japanese architecture. It was daytime, and I only remember trees in the distance behind the house.

The idea was that if the characters put on special red-colored glasses with thick black frames that looked extremely dorky, they could see things related to the area being haunted. I remember a shot out of a high window that showed the edge of the porch roof above, and the heads of several people all hung off the same rope by the neck, in the corner of the roof.

Now the game had something much more like a single-player feel, ala Silent Hill meets Fatal Frame. And it was becoming reality, and I was the father character. I was thinking we should get used to wearing the red glasses, even if we might see shocking things, because clearly there was a mystery going on here and it would be a shame to miss any clues. I was inside, looking at a simple, low table with various objects on it, while my daughter was wandering outside nearby.

We both ended up looking onto this weird little side-porch thing at the same time, me from inside via a window right by the porch, and her from out on the grass (the side porch did not meet the front porch, it almost looked like an empty wood pallet set right next to the house but I think it was supposed to be legit construction). On that little porch a girl was lying, in what I would call cutesy anime winter-wear. I remember specifically that the fairly-short skirt was pink and had a band of white fluffy trim around the bottom hem. She was just sprawled lying there, no blood or anything, but I had the distinct impression she was dead.

I heard my daughter gasp, and I felt fear creep into my heart as I lifted the lower-left edge of my glasses just enough to realize it wasn't a vision of the past. I said, "She's real! Come inside, quickly!" and my daughter rushed inside. I had crouched down because I was too afraid of the scene outside, and said something about calling the police. Suddenly I heard movement outside, like someone scuffling around a bit on that porch thing.

I got up and looked out the window again, and the body was gone. I yelled something like, "Bring her back, we're going to find you!"

I heard a very quiet, gruff male voice hiss, "We'd love to see you."

I think I kept yelling stuff for a moment, but there wasn't anyone visible outside still. It now seemed like whatever had been there had gone away, and now my daughter and I were left with this cryptic and disturbing piece of information. I asked her if she had heard the voice. She said no.

Then I woke up.

(from a chat transcript which pretty much sums it up well)

tirsden: I had a vaguely interesting if badly-logic-broken dream... I was a teenage girl character and some guy was chasing me through a warehouse. I thiiink he was a security guard or possibly cop/FBI O.o

tirsden: I climbed up into the ceiling which was somewhat finished (aka I couldn't be seen from below) but he followed me. I made it out of the building first and was running off and I could see movie-style he was gonna shoot me (...in the back. guess he was serious about not letting me go O.o;; ) and I'm all like "well I totally just changed into a bulletproof vest while he couldn't see me as I left the building" ...logic, what is this? who needs it. XD

tirsden: so he shot once and I kept running, and he shot again and I still kept running, and by that time it was too late for him to try and shoot my legs cuz I was too far away XD

tirsden: and that's more or less where that ended cuz shit got even weirder after that

I'm not sure how this started, but I knew there was some kind of evil coming to the world. It was daytime, and I was on the side of a hill near some houses in an area that still had a lot of woods around, and a bit of grassland too. Then I saw this big monster thing sitting on the hillside not all that far away. He was probably at least 20 feet tall if he stood up, and had a somewhat spindly body made of creepy exposed flesh. He had long wicked blade-like bones or something similar as the extensions of his arms (one on each arm).

He was talking to... I'm not really sure who. I think possibly some people, maybe some smaller nasty critters too, underlings of a sort. There was a guy standing with me who I think was my random dream-created friend, and we were working on solving the mystery of the dark happenings together. The big monster looked over and said something to us, the only thing I remember about what he was saying was that it was obvious he thought we couldn't do anything now and he was just sorta verbally toying with us before intending to kill us off.

I somehow knew otherwise, that while escaping over land would be futile, nearby beside one of the houses was a very long underground wooden chute that if we could only get into it, we could slide down to some sort of secret base deep underground. So my friend and I booked it down the hillside and around the house where I knew the trapdoors to the chute were on the far side. I had a little trouble opening the two doors while we could hear the monster getting closer and taunting us about how we were about to die.

With the doors properly opened, I dropped down into the chute which was made at just the right angle to keep you sliding very quickly and not get stuck. And yet... somewhere along the line I had to push myself along a bit, although I still made good progress. Then, weirdly enough, the chute opened not into the underground base but out the side of the bottom of a very tall hill. A construction site had blundered into the side of the chute and destroyed part of it.

I remember a lot of grey-white mud around, it was very wet around here for some reason like they'd been spraying the area down. I wandered around trying to find the foreman to figure out what was going on... and somehow logic had died well enough at this point that it was like the chute was supposed to lead to this area and this was the place we were going to try and hide out and solve the puzzle of whatever was going on. Also, at this point I have no idea what happened to my friend, it's like he fell out of the plot and I just kept wandering around half-lost and unsure what was going on anymore.

Then I woke up.

I have a doll on layaway that I should be paying off in April. He's a beautiful work of art, a 1/4 scale (if he were a real person) flower with a human face and body, with long delicate petal arms and petals on his head. For some reason I dreamed he arrived home last night, though it was daytime in the dream. I think someone was over, either my kid brother or Nightweaver (or possibly switched between one and the other at some point).

I got him out of the box and although the resin style of his body didn't make sense (it made so little sense I can't really even describe it), I thought it was normal in the dream. But as I held him, he started cracking in tiny fissures like spreading earthquake lines. I remember thinking, "Oh no, I'm going to have to tell MoC and get him replaced!" but I was most confused over how on earth he was even breaking like that.

I don't remember the rest.

This started with other stuff but got interesting as I was standing in a parking lot outside of a tall building in the daytime. I saw a dog flying through the air like it was swimming happily through it, about ten feet off the ground. It was a golden retriever type of dog. Meanwhile, buh? I kept watching, knowing something incredible was going on, and as the dog got further away there appeared just above it a kind of black mist in a tight swirl. Jagged black lines or black lightning came down from the mist and totally disintegrated the dog, and the whole thing vanished. It gave me the impression that something had just deleted an anomaly, and I wasn't supposed to see any of it.

I remember seeing a gentleman in Victorian-era clothing off on a sidewalk a moment later, and I think there was something else odd about it but I can't remember what now. The black mist stuff appeared above him too and POOF bye mister whoever you were. There was something else too that made no sense and then black-mist-vanished, can't remember what it was, but at this point I looked up at the sky and noticed there were very dark clouds that were parting in a wide circle above the tall building near me. I could see the side of a building with a whole bunch of windows in kinda dated apartment style, and that was falling very slowly downwards.

I realized there must be some kind of instability between our dimension and one nearby, and that I probably had very little time to find somewhere safe from the impending crash of that building up above. I had no idea how big the thing even was, and had a feeling that running away wouldn't suffice. So I ran into the big building because I (somehow) knew it had a deep basement system. I ran inside and started yelling for anyone to hear that they had to get down under the ground as far as possible. Even if we ended up buried but alive we might have a chance to get out or get dug out, in the meantime I just yelled at random people to go downstairs as far as they could.

I found some people having a church service in one room as I was trying to find the stairs down, and they were having trouble believing me. Whatever, sucks to be them, I kept going until I found a way down. The dream setting started to shift to where I was now only in a house and there was a downstairs that was still unfortunately half-open to open ground (large windows filled one wall, it was like the house was built on the side of uneven ground so the front door upstairs was on one level of ground and the bottom opened out onto the lower ground).

I was now trying to get a bunch of kids to hide, and I remember ducking down almost behind one couch and then thinking as I sat there that this wasn't going to help. I ran back upstairs and found a closet that had a laundry machine in it and enough room for someone to be in there. Several someone's technically, another girl arrived and wanted to hide with me while a third thought she could find somewhere better. I tried to tell her otherwise but she ran off so we shut the door.

Then the crash hit, and logic went all to heck. It felt like the closet had somehow been separated from the house and catapulted straight upwards. The explosion outside was something now like a nuke going off, and as the other girl and I kept our feet against the door while sitting on the floor with our backs to the washing machine, the floor started getting really hot. There were random sheets of metal like extra-large cookie sheets and possibly a flat plywood section or something, I tried sticking one or two of those under us to keep from being fried as the floor took on a look that it was burning straight through (reminded me a bit of partly-cooled lava texture in video games).

I remember thinking that if we were flying through the air, at some point we'd come back down and I had no idea how we were supposed to survive the impact. The logic fell apart so much though that the dream began to change entirely, to the point that I think I was telling someone else about it in a new house in a new location that I thought was actually not a dream, knowing at that point that the other part was a dream. I think I believed it was a warning, though, and that something really bad was about to happen.

I remember the idea that something tipped me off, but I'm not sure what. I ran to the windows and looked out, and saw a whole bunch of ridiculously large metal cubes (like Borg ships but smoother) arriving in the sky very high up and hovering there. I said, "They're here," and I told everyone to hide. There were random children of various ages and one or two adults in this house that my dream-self knew, and one person from real life which was my little sister who the dream decided was about thirteen again.

So yes, I told everyone to hide and I told them not to move, no to try and run away. Just find a good place to hide inside the house and stay there. I grabbed my white down comforter (that I actually own in real life) and found a closet that was painted white inside with fairly large shelves, like you could stack three or four rolls of toilet paper on each one. There was actually packages of toilet paper in there and not much else, and there were really only about two of them though they were some of the bigger packages (12 rolls, 24 rolls). I scooted under the bottom shelf with the comforter, toilet paper, and a random box of a half-decent size. Right at that moment my sister showed up to stand outside the door.

She seemed unsure this was going to work but I told her again to go hide, it was our only chance. She disappeared and I finished making a fairly decent hiding spot if nobody pulled the stuff out of the way. I lay there perfectly still and closed my eyes, and for some reason by this point the dream had decided there hadn't been a door on the closet in the first place. The house got very quiet and I started feeling very sleepy. So sleepy that it was like I could fall asleep right there even knowing we were about to or quite possibly now currently being invaded by aliens. I remember thinking I hoped if I fell asleep I would remain still and would survive simply because I remained hidden even while sleeping.

Light started to grow brighter, but my eyes were still closed. There wasn't any sound. I kept my eyes shut, and the light got brighter and brighter. I had a bad feeling there was one of the aliens standing outside the closet door right now, quite possibly staring straight at my hideout. I'm not sure if it was my imagination or a sorta movie-like dream info bit that showed a smooth, slender humanoid figure of a very light cream color standing out in the hall with a very bright light thing in its hands that just sort of glowed from some kind of central point.

I hoped that it couldn't literally see through the stuff I had in the way, and I was very aware for a very long moment of trying not to move, of trying to breathe without moving as much as possible. Then the light went away finally, and fairly quickly, and I realized the thing hadn't found me after all. I waited a bit longer and then peeked out from my hiding spot, saw nothing, and crept out further. One of the children came up to me whimpering and I asked if some of the others had try to run away from the house itself and she said yes. It was the two other adults, they'd been taken by the aliens and only the kids who had hidden stayed free for now.

While everyone seemed to think that for the moment we were safe, I knew better. I told them I had a bad feeling this was just a preliminary check, something fast to get the majority of people who didn't see it coming or weren't smart enough to hide right off the bat. I told them the aliens probably had some kind of device that would detect us but was clunkier to haul around or whatever, and now we needed to get out of the house. I think I was trying to figure out where to go, I have vague memories of some kind of Army base being nearby (maybe not very close but worth trying to travel to on foot) or possibly another structure with some kind of underground that was abandoned or not used much, and would serve as a better place to hole up and figure out what the heck to do, meet and/or gather others who had stayed free thus far.

I don't know what my solution was in the end, though, because then I woke up.

I was outside somewhere near my randomly dream-created house, with my randomly dream-created parents. They were apparently Russian, while I was born in the US and had grown up here. Also, my husband was a modern-day version of Indiana Jones, at about age 40-45. He was back at the house as this started.

My parents were saying goodbye to me, as they were about to go out of the country for a while on vacation. My mother said something very strange, about the weather here and how it was too bad she would miss seeing me when it would be "17C" as in seventeen degrees Celsius. (In reality after waking up, I figured out via conversion website that this is just over 60 degrees Fahrenheit but that was way beyond the ability for dream logic to figure out.) I realized that she was talking about a very low temperature that matched exactly with nuclear winter. They were leaving by then, I don't remember how (car? charter plane? was there a dream-logic construed airport there for a few minutes? I seriously don't remember, but it seemed like once they were gone they were gone) so I just sort of pretended to say goodbye and right around then Indy showed up.

I suddenly proposed that we go on vacation, and I remember having a map out and wondering what the blast radius was for a nuclear bomb if it was aimed at our general location. I think we were kind of near a big city, I was trying to mentally juggle whether or not my parents were literally finding some way to nuke me specifically, and whatever else died by collateral damage... or if this was a threat to something major near us that they knew about and was just... convenient to their own desires. Why they wanted to kill me was anybody's guess.

I wanted to go north, and I remember thinking that we didn't really have to take anything with us as the whole point was to get the hell out as fast as we could. I can't remember if I told him why we had to get out of there... being worried that we might not have enough time to tell anyone else or we'd die too... I think I did tell him, but everything was getting really muddled up.

Then I woke up.

(Inspired by watching Annihilation Earth and Twilight Zone last night, definitely.)

I don't remember the first parts clearly, but this was a really long dream. There were several characters stuck on an island that was having major volcanic activity by surprise. Something had happened to mess up the entire island's geographic ecosystem. Also, there was a factor involved with live dinosaurs being in the park on the island, although it was not until later that the term Jurassic Park was used in conversation. I think maybe in this plot that original concept had failed and somebody else later had tried to "do it right."

The characters that survived the lava and earthquakes managed to get a large black jeep or SUV type vehicle to a complex where they were hoping to find an option for safety or communication or the like. At some point I became a young woman character amongst the others, and there was another lady older than me, a man and a teenage guy, and a little girl of about eight and a boy of maybe five at the most. Their parents were already dead at this point.

In the complex, we were discovering things like rows and rows of empty cubicles and lab rooms that were completely empty of staff and had stuff strewn all over the place. Somebody found a dead body, so we were afraid that something like raptors were loose in the building. The older guy with us had a gun, but was low on bullets. By this time we were realizing that being stuck inside was a bad choice, but had a bad feeling we couldn't go backwards and had no real idea now how deep we were inside the building.

We came across this odd hallway where it branched at a cross-ways, and straight ahead past the intersection there was a thick glass pane set like a wall and we could see very dark hallways beyond. In the hallway to the left, there was a door set into the wall on its right where maybe that weird dark hallway could be accessed through whatever room was inside the door. I told the others to wait, and the kids were all "no don't go, it's too dangerous!" but I went carefully into the mystery room. I don't remember anything specific about it, except that it did lead into that dark hallway, close to the far side of the glass.

I remember feeling very exposed in that hall, and walking back towards the glass to investigate if anything might be worth seeing there, there was a sudden flash of quick, white light somewhere behind me, probably from the ceiling. It reminded me of the speeding cameras at intersections, but it also spooked me and the kids on the far side of the glass were yelling at me to get out of there.

I made it back into the connecting room without incident even though I feared something would get me in that dark hallway. There's a bit of confusion to the dream plot/logic here as I'm not sure if what I saw next was in that connecting room, or in another room near the main hallway intersection. Either way, in whatever room I was in now, I saw a lady with a black evening dress on that had no shoulders, and a bodice made to look a bit like two black flower petals covering her chest.

I think the two kids were in this room with me now, but none of us thought this person was actually here to help us, and she started pulling the top of the dress down. Somehow the older guys out in the hall knew about this, and wanted to see, but the kids and I couldn't get out of that room fast enough. I had a baaad feeling that what was under that dress wasn't human (I remember thinking evil vine-plant-like monster) and from the sounds of gunfire I was correct as we fled down the main hallway (having gone right this time from the original direction we arrived, or in other words, putting the glass-walled dark area to our left in passing).

The other lady in the group had decided to stick back with the dudes even though we told her to run, so it was just me and the two children as we turned a corner left and found two sets of glass double doors side-by-side that we realized could be closed and locked. This doorway would also put us into hallways connecting to the dark area, and the little girl was upset because she said she saw a ghost in the hall with me when the light had flashed earlier. I couldn't figure out what she meant by "ghost" and if she had seen it on the glass or actually in the hall with me, but we were running out of time. I'd rather face a mysterious "ghost" that hadn't killed me the first time (to the point that I hadn't even known it had existed) than get eaten by something.

I told her it would be okay, that we at least knew there was danger where we had been before, including the dinosaurs we still assumed were around somewhere, and we needed to lock the door. We had no idea if the others were even alive at that point, and if we sat around and waited we'd all die. So we started working on the doors, which was really messed up by dream logic and required being closed juuuust so in order for the locks to catch, and of course the doors didn't want to stay shut properly. Then when they did, the locks had turned from more simple rotating latches to something more like the plastic belt connectors you see sometimes on backpacks or amusement park ride seatbelts.

We had just gotten the doors properly locked when the man and the lady arrived on the far side. The teenage boy wasn't anywhere to be seen. They told us to open the doors, and he was being really mean about it, not really pleading but demanding it. I had a really off feeling about him (and I already did from the stupid "hot" lady episode), and if I opened the door for the chick who was stupid enough to hang out with him, I'd be letting him through too. He felt like a danger right now about as bad as the other stuff. At least it seemed he was out of bullets, so they didn't have any real option to get through the door.

As I was debating for a moment, he suddenly made a sort of "boo" face at us through the glass, including spreading the fingers out on his hands next to his face. I realized at that point that my impression was correct, even more so... we had no value to this man. I shook my head, said, "...sorry..." and took off with the kids.

As we ran quickly through darkened hallways and rooms that had absolutely nothing in them, I held the girl's hand and she had her little brother's. I told the girl to hold onto her brother's hand like their lives depended on it (which technically they did), and that if I had to I would hold both their hands but it seemed like I needed one free right now. I was using it to open doors at this point, and we were making fast progress even though we had no real idea where we were going. At this point it was mostly just knowing we were getting away from previous problems.

Suddenly one of the doors led us into a room crammed with office supplies and other junk, but more importantly, there were windows around the back-right and back walls. Daylight! There were desks along the back wall (also piled with stuff) but with enough room to climb up and open the windows. I opened one, and found that there was only a simple window screen between us and freedom. I could see that we could make it to the ground below, as we were on the second floor, but we were going to be okay! I was thrilled, and somehow could even tell that the surrounding area was relatively safe... that's right, it was raining. There was something about rain making the environment safe, I can't remember why. The dinosaurs were allergic to rainwater? Who knows.

In the meantime, suddenly a gust of wind blew what seemed like a whole bunch of mosquitoes into the room. The kids freaked out and told me to close the window, and in confusion I remembered the screens and then noticed that the lower half had much larger, almost artistically-placed holes in the screenwork. (I think the dream was just trying hard to fill a plot hole on the fly.) Then I noticed where the breeze was whipping stuff outside past the other windows, and that it looked a whole lot like tiny fluffy-ended flower or tree seedlings gusting around.

I told the kids this, that it wasn't bugs, and that held in the logic and vanished from being a dream element. At this point we were preparing to get the heck out of there, and thinking maybe there were a few things that could be scavenged from the room (like rain jackets or plastic trash bags to use as such) although we weren't going to take more than a moment or two. For some reason I had taken my shoes and socks off to get up onto the desk, or so now the dream decided. So I was fishing around in the junk on the floor for my shoes and started putting my socks back on.

The girl told me she thought I should bring the (possibly Pokémon?) cards with me, as she said she had a feeling they would be on the mantle in the new place we would get when we got free of this. Suddenly the plot element was added that I had been carrying (...how?? lol) a pillowcase with the cards as well as other regular playing cards and something similar. The entire thing was a bit on the heavy side, so I asked about the other cards, and she giggled and said they weren't necessary or entirely optional.

I said something in agreement to that, I can't remember what, and I think I was about to clear the bag out so there were only the cards cute lil' miss possibly-psychic wanted to see in the future home we were apparently going to share... which did seem right, I'd built up a connection with these kids during the adventure...

Then I woke up.

I was standing on a sidewalk in a city somewhere, but the area I was in was really wide open. I looked up at the sky, and saw a huge flock of seagulls going by. I remember thinking that was bizarre, as we don't get seagulls here like ever. (So apparently, the city was local to me in Maryland.)

Then suddenly it was like every beak in that flock turned directly towards me, and all I could really see was a whole lot of pointy things lining up and I knew they were going to come after me. There was something next to me... a baby stroller or a shopping cart? Can't remember what exactly, but it had a blanket over part of it and I pulled the blanket off and hid under it.

This didn't work as well as it could have, as the birds arrived and started trying to jab at me through it. Owwww! I think someone else showed up and scared them off more by accident than actually trying, and I told them about the weirdness of the attack and that now I was paranoid all the birds were out to get me. They seemed to sort of half believe me.

The next part I remember was going to a warehouse by the water, a huge lake or river. I went inside and started preparing like 80's montage getting-dressed-in-super-hero-outfit style. Mind you, the end result was sort of steampunk anime goth and my weapon was a broom that had a broken part near the bristle end, yet still remained attached somehow almost like there was a rope inside it. This let the end of the broom swing around at the point where it was broken. And the finishing touch: a pair of dark sunglasses. Because nobody is truly cool without shades, man.

I went back outside and could see a ridiculous amount of birds flocking far over the water. I yelled some sort of challenge at them (probably something totally stellar, like, "Come get me, you assholes!"), and the flock started looking severely agitated and almost boiling with energy. Weirdly enough, the birds seemed to start almost melting together, merging into this weird almost digital-looking sphere-ish shape with white and purple 8-bit triangle patterns on it, that didn't really keep its shape very well but came flying over the water towards me.

Batter up! I swung my broom right into it as it arrived and... the broom kinda got stuck in it, like the thing was sticky. Trying to pull it out just made it suck in further... and then somehow the whole thing transformed into a short gay fashion-designer guy in a black suit and trendy short black haircut. He said he was sorry for the trouble and that things had been taken care of. So... I walked back towards the nearby house with him (that was apparently mine) and offered for him to come in and have drinks.

Then I woke up.