sanity is relative

I was part of an elite, armed investigative team going into an ocean-side science station to find out what had happened to it. Only the first part of the station was on land, the rest of which was located underwater, and it was connected by corridors, stairs, and elevators. The first section had bad lighting, papers and equipment scattered everywhere, and finally we started finding bodies as we went into the underwater sections.

The group was split up at some point, and one of the other smaller groups was attacked. A girl survived her initial injuries and we had her resting at the makeshift medical room we set up. My sub-group did some more exploring and had an encounter with another of the things that had attacked her, and they were freakish humanoid forms with weird delicate-seeming spikes and rings of almost barbed-wire shaped protrusions all over their faces.

I don't think I actually managed to kill it, but I was able to clear an area and noticed a map on the wall. It showed a side view of the complex with each area marked as a white rectangle with connections between each section. There were only about four or five sections and it didn't seem to go as far down as it could, more outwards into the ocean water. There was also a second floor section about half-way between the initial entry area and one of the sections out in the water, but I had a feeling the source of the problems was down and not up. I was trying to figure out how to get to the next section further into the water, but ended up going back to where the majority of our people were for the moment.

The girl in the medical room started showing signs of changing into one of the creatures. Stuff was beginning to grow out of her face and she started screaming as the changes became more severe. At some point she calmed down and dazedly suggested she go further into the complex alone, because maybe the creatures would leave her alone now that she was becoming like them. I had a bad feeling she was hurting so bad, she was in fact planning suicide by putting herself at the mercy of the enemy.

She became too disoriented to use for the plan, but one of our big marines was showing signs of changing too, yet he had not been bitten or injured. Did that mean the virulent creature DNA was somehow airborne? His changes weren't as severe, but he had a weird line of almost stitch-looking spines set flush into his skin, that traveled from roughly his chin up across his cheeks to his forehead on both sides of his face. He suggested he should try the plan for getting further into the complex without getting eaten.

My perspective shifted to the marine, and he had already made it much further and deeper into the complex. This area appeared to have been built into solid ground, the shallow end of the ocean floor. I could see a bunch of the creatures ahead, and as they started rushing towards me I thought the plan was going to fail after all. But they slowed down, and then started walking up the side of a ridge of nearby dirt. I had a headset on, and I said over the communications to the rest of the team, "I think they're trying to show me something."

The ridge of packed dirt was taller than me, so it took climbing it to see what lay beyond. I beheld a huge crater, so gigantic it nearly broke my brain and gave me vertigo. But I held my place and tried to figure out what had happened here. The shape of the crater almost made it feel like a ridiculously-huge sphere had once rested here, but really it must have been the end result of a huge excavation. I didn't remember seeing anything like this on the wall map, because a room this size would have dwarfed the scale used in that map. Thus, it was some kind of mega-secret project that had ended up killing a lot of people and turned the rest into aliens.

At the very bottom of the crater I could see what looked like a small exposed edge of dirty, beige-colored metal. Was that part of an alien craft? How come it had not been excavated fully? Had they found other pieces before reaching that one, or was the alien DNA so nasty that it had affected people almost immediately once they started uncovering that piece? Maybe it was some kind of space-microbe on the outside of a ship and nobody had even seen what else lay beneath the dirt.

Back at the command center the team had set up, there were lines of chat on a screen that had been sent from the marine (so much for the audio signal idea). The first two were something along the lines of "Here goes nothing." and "[soldier's name], signing off." Suddenly a new line appeared, in all caps, and it was maybe ten letters smooshed together that indicated the man was still conscious and still at least someone in charge of his own mind.

Then I was Mei in Overwatch, where I was using my ice-blast gun to freeze and kill the alien creatures and they gave experience points every time they died. I was keeping up with respawn so I only had to kill one or two at a time and not a whole room. And finally I woke up.


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Thoughts: I would have liked to have left the end off, but it just kind of shows how doofy the subconscious can be. I had a great, freaky, dark theme going on there, thanks dream! :P I really do wish I could remember what exactly the lines of text were, I almost think part of the last one was "IAMGOOD" but I'm not sure. I also vaguely remember something coming up about depressurization at one point but I am not sure where that fell into the dream and it was most likely one of the more messed up parts of dream logic.

(This is apparently what happens after I spend 3+ hours on Skype talking to someone I met via Cry's video game livestreams, before going to bed. That someone would be Hiro, who you will be seeing here shortly. O.o )


I was playing some kind of coop multiplayer Amnesia-like game with Hiro via both the game client and chatting with Skype, except that instead of normal Amnesia: The Dark Descent with its medieval castle interior, the concept was to run around a modern day mental hospital plagued with monsters (the zombie ones from the Amnesia game) and avoid being caught by them or the regular staff while looking for books. Hiro's character was an Asian boy in his early teens and I was a girl with long-ish blonde hair; I think I'd gone with Alice for my character's name.

The building's layout was bizarre for an actual hospital. Hallways were ridiculously skinny, had maze-like branches all over the place and interconnected rooms, and you couldn't do anything about the lights that were always on. Everything was painted white, so there was no real chance of hiding anywhere in the open. Not only would the monsters cause you to pass out if they caught you, but doctors and nurses also wandered the hall and any of them including the monsters catching you meant waking back up in your room. I can't remember if the rooms were locked by default, I just remember it being so much backtracking that you didn't want to get caught, plus there was a feeling of impending doom like something bad was going to happen if you couldn't escape the place in time.

The point of the books was that they somehow unlocked doors. The books were hardcover, red, and had gold filigree designs on the covers that were all the same. If I remember right, they all had a four digit number on the first page while the rest of the pages were blank, which had to do with how they opened the doors. Some books were fakes and only the right ones would actually open a door at all, and only the door they were meant to. The books could be found in closets or refrigerators that were otherwise empty of anything else, and if you had one that worked with you when you opened the right door, the door would just automatically unlock itself.

I remember being in a small room that had a fridge and two closets, and Hiro took a book out of the fridge while I grabbed one from a closet. At this point it was becoming real as opposed to a video game, although I still had some odd fuzzy concept of an inventory system so that I wasn't literally carrying the books around (I had several by now), they just vanished but I still "had them." I remember hearing a monster grumbling out in the hall right at that moment. The hall went around the room outside past two different doors on opposite ends. Hiro told me to go one way and he'd go the other and distract the monster.

I didn't like this idea but he was already out the one door so I ran through the other. I realized somehow that he'd been caught by the staff and I kept running, as for some reason they were assuming Hiro was the only patient not in his room. He'd bought me some time, but now I had to figure out how to put it to good use and if I stayed in the halls I still ran the risk of getting caught at random. I found a nurse's bathroom and hid under the sink. The idea was to burn some time so the staff would get complacent and maybe enough would go to sleep after-hours so I could finally escape.

Logic really started falling apart at this point (apparently if you stay in one place in a dream for too long, small constant changes start building up into ridiculousness). What started as a long counter with sinks in it and one big cupboard area underneath with several doors (my hiding spot was as far into the corner opposite the entry door by the far end of the sinks as possible), slowly turned into just a counter without the cupboard underneath, and then finally the counter had some kind of tablecloth which hid me better. I remember spending a lot of time trying to make sure I was as squeezed into the corner as it got, and that the white dress I was wearing was staying hidden with me instead of flared out partly so it was visible from beyond the counter.

This whole time I was dreading that someone would actually come into the bathroom, and yes, eventually a nurse and a nurse's assistant walked in, both women. For some reason, they had a bunch of dirty dishes on a two-tiered rolling metal cart. The assistant started shoving dishes under the counter and it was obvious she could see me, but I sat there and thought "You can't see me, you can't see me," over and over. At this point I vaguely understood that I was in a dream and that logic had broken enough she shouldn't have seen me right off the bat.

She didn't say anything to her superior who was blathering on about various gossip and directions for the next shift or something, and I realized it wasn't because I was desperately trying to insist in my head that she couldn't see me. The assistant wasn't evil, and knew this place was way more than just some honest asylum. She kept glancing at me but only crammed more dishes under the counter (I could hardly move for all the dishes). Suddenly the nurse in charge started saying really crazy things, like she was hallucinating and what she saw was no longer what anyone else in the room saw. The nurse stood still and started staring off at nothing as what she was saying rambled to a halt, and the assistant looked at me and mouthed the word, "Run."

I managed to extricate myself from the dishes without making any noise and ran out of the bathroom, not noticed at all by the crazy spaced-out nurse. I found a new hallway that led to a large closet, and inside the closet was a whole lot of hanging lab coats. I couldn't see the back of the closet, so I kept pushing through and the lab coats gave way to winter jackets and I found myself suddenly breaking out of a very thick display of such coats in a clothing store at a shopping mall.

There were tables just beyond, possibly for a cafe in this same store (logic, what is this concept? we don't do logic in dreams). There were randomly dream created family members there who recognized me and greeted me only like it was any old day, not like I'd been locked away in the funny farm. They didn't know, and I myself wasn't even sure how I'd gotten locked up there now. While they asked me mundane questions I said something to the effect of, "Listen, I've just escaped from a mental asylum up there on the hill," and pointed off in the general direction of where the hospital was (you couldn't see it from inside the mall).

They were all like, "Yeah right, very cute ha ha," and I said, "No, I'm serious, and I'm not even sure that I'm really out of there at all." I had a bad feeling that I was still somewhere in the asylum while hallucinating what I was seeing now, or somehow had my "spirit" split between the places and maybe I could actually tell these people something useful before waking back up in the asylum. I just hoped I was still hidden somewhere instead of stuck in my room again. I remember one dark-haired guy who was a random family friend looking off in the general direction of the hospital, he was starting to be convinced there was more to this.

Then I woke up.

I think I was the daughter of someone who worked for a large corporation, and the person in charge of the corporation was actually a boy somewhere around the age of twelve or thirteen. He was spoiled and demanding and there was something about a plot where the company was being called out on wrongdoings and of course they were denying it, but I somehow knew or guessed that it was the kid who was behind it. There were other key people in the system who were working secretively with him, but not everybody.

I had a bit of a run of the place since I lived in the actual corporate building on a floor where there were living quarters. My bedroom with simple bunk beds set into a wall alcove was on the far side of some very thick walls (like, 10 feet or more) of the rich kid's grand bedroom and living area. I remember looking for some way to spy on the situation, and pulled a vent cover off from high up a wall near my bed(s). I saw immediately that it was definitely too tiny for me to actually crawl into, it was rectangular shaped with the wide part horizontal and looked like nothing had been through there in years, all dusty and stuff.

The vent passage itself curved off to the left just a little first and then right almost out of sight where I could just barely see the opening that went into the kid's room. In about the middle of the passage on the left side was another branch of the vent, and I couldn't see where it went to. Logic was being weird at this point (okay, weirder) and decided that I was fairly convinced there had to be some kind of small people living in the building as well, though I didn't actually expect to see them. And we're talking small like two inches or less.

Suddenly I saw one of the tiny people, a girl, which failing dream logic represented with almost a living version of something like a Duplo figure. She seemed unsure about showing herself but also there was something about them needing to find out for sure if I was an ally by default if I was a hidden enemy of the bratty evil kid. I can't remember the exact conversation but I remember promising whatever I could do to help and she seemed to believe me.

Then she told me how to get into the vent somehow (this makes no sense, beyond dream logic failing again, the vent was magically wider all of a sudden) and I did, winding up in the left side area which was now bigger and I could lay there looking back in the direction of my room and talk some more. That was safer I guess while we did some planning. There was supposed to be something going down either the next day or possibly that night, so it wasn't too much longer before I needed to get back out of the vent and pretend to get ready for bed. Apparently someone would be checking on me at some point to make sure they thought I was falling asleep like a good girl. (I am seriously not sure what my age was supposed to be in this dream, I think it fluctuated but was around fifteen or sixteen.)

In order to get back out of the vent I ended up doing something of a forward roll and fall into my bed that was now directly under the vent, and was no longer a bunk bed but more like a twin. I was going to close up the vent and then I realized that there were more of the little people around who were apparently having trouble with falling out of the vent. For some reason. One of them was even one of their "warriors", a black guy who I think was inspired by a video game high-fantasy RPG character I can't place now. There were also some little kids.

I was worried they'd hurt themselves, especially the kids from such a long fall, but they were somehow resilient enough to be fine. They were also starting to get ridiculously small, but I helped pick them up while the warrior refused help and started climbing back up the bunk beds (yep, they're back). Weirdly enough, when I set the children down one by one on the vent edge where their caretakers were now waiting to receive them back, they were.... like small yellow lumps of playdough that had been squished into flat circles. And yet, somehow still alive.

I said, "I didn't do this," and after setting all the... squished kids down... tried to figure out what it was that had smished them. I picked up a junk envelope from old mail that was nearby and found a weird moving piece of flat plastic-clay-like stuff that had a shape like someone had bent the middle short side of a rectangle enough to make a creepy little vague "head" almost like a sea creature or slug or something. It moved around with the rest of its weird self and moved pretty fast. I knew that'd done it.

Meanwhile one of the little people parents were saying something about how it wasn't safe to raise babies where they were anymore, and something about how this wasn't New York and yet we seemed to have the crime rate of it. Logic completely fell apart and I'm not gonna bother with reviewing the rest, there was only about a minute more of idiocy anyways.

Then I woke up.

It was the beginning of a science fiction movie, the camera view floating above the earth in orbit and approaching a very alien looking ship, all smooth curves and a large hole in the middle. Over the edge of that hole was crawling a very chattery sort of quasi-robot alien that was going to go down and spy on the planet. He jumped off the edge and headed down towards where gravity soon pulled him faster and faster through the atmosphere.

Now it was like there were two people instead, a man and a woman, and the guy was the leader and also me. We both used some kind of braking mechanism to slow our descent, but still hit the ground so hard it shook badly. We were now inside a building (that I don't remember having crashed through), and the damage from the shock was so great that it started cracking up the walls and breaking, daylight visible outside.

It was imperative to leave before anyone came to investigate, but outside it was obvious that there was a lot of confusion due to other buildings also suffering damage. Nobody seemed to take much noticed of the visitors who looked human enough, if maybe our clothing was a little oddly cut.

Later on, there were now three people in this group as if it had always been three, the third being a robot that had a skin-covering to make it look human, like an android. Now I was the girl, and we were standing beside a large cliff looking up it at a research center built at the top. To the left, the cliff had been hollowed out some by what must have been a huge impact that was still glowing red, like a meteorite had landed there not too long ago. Now the plot was trying to imply that the huge impact from earlier had happened there instead.

There was some kind of water system or dam above the impact zone, and it released water that rushed down into the hollow area. I was thinking that it looked like an awful lot of water, and backed up. The water hit the hot rocks and completely evaporated into steam. The robot guy and the man were busy trying to figure out whatever the heck we were there to figure out, and I stayed back even though the more obvious danger was over and there was no more water.

As they were deciding they should find a way up to the research center, there was another deluge of water and this time the rocks were cool enough that some splashed across the area where the other two were still standing. The robot seemed to find this most disagreeable, while I was giggling because it wasn't like they didn't have enough warning to get back to where I had stayed nice and dry. At least the robot guy's sensitive electrical workings were protected by his fake skin.

The scene shifted to possibly inside the research center, the plot wasn't very clear on that. I was now the guy in charge, and wearing a Star Fleet uniform in the style of the old show. It would seem the show was now reality for this dream though, as Captain Kirk was talking to me and making sure we were legitimate researchers on the planet. We weren't, but we were faking it. Spock was there, and as we were leaving the room, I saw him press something into a round vase he was holding and then give it to one of my allies who didn't notice anything wrong.

In the next room where we were alone and moving on elsewhere, I stopped and pointed to the vase, saying, "He bugged it." My associate nodded and either located the bug to destroy it or just left the vase in that room as we continued on. I'm not entirely sure, as I was thinking that perhaps it wasn't smart to have said that out loud, but then realized they probably weren't monitoring the frequency until after they got back to the ship. Either way, we were heading for a safer area where we could properly go on with our plans... whatever they were.

Then I woke up.

The first dream was rather long and I barely remember any of it, but it involved zombies who passed on their disease by biting. They could also make zombies out of animals, and although the animal bites didn't make the disease contagious to a person, they were vicious and obviously getting any sort of injury doesn't help one's cause in staying un-zombified. For part of the dream I was indoors and I think underground, which was bad because zombies did better in the dark. The end of it had me and a guy who would be like the main or almost-main character in a movie (if I were the main) outside in the sunlight, with some kind of supposedly-protective circle of branches around us.

The circle was probably a good thirty or forty feet wide, so there was a good amount of room to move, and I think there was only one zombie beyond the circle at the moment but there were a lot more animals. I remember specifically a squirrel or two, and one of them managed to get into the circle and bite me on the back of my right hand (OW yes it definitely very much hurt). There was a third guy with us I think, and I was yelling at him that this circle thing wasn't keeping the bad crap out like it was supposed to and realized right around then that he'd been zombified just now. The whole thing was going to hell and I'm not really sure how it ended, but I woke up really scared and realized it had been the first nightmare of that type I'd had in quite a while (the typical scary-nightmare or horror-movie inspired thing). I was disappointed I'd gone through the whole thing without realizing it was a dream, because if I had, I could have woken myself up.

Well, I went back to sleep because I was way too tired to get up. I went almost immediately back to dreaming. I was in my (randomly dream-created) house, with my (randomly dream-created) boyfriend and family, and it was night time. I was afraid the zombies would attack, as if part of the old dream had carried on to this new dream. Suddenly my boyfriend revealed that he was one, and I ran out of the house. I remember very little of this dream and I wish I could because I'm pretty sure it was epic-scale. I eventually met up with a slightly overweight middle-age lady with a kindly face and medium-length, kinda-curly brown hair. She knew who I was, and told me that I was very important to stopping the evil.

I think I was telling her about what had happened so far, and as I was going over the beginning, the dream sort of flowed into my narrative and thus ended and started to repeat. This time I was back in my house at night where I'd started (though the house had changed) and my boyfriend was there again with my family. I think I was telling them about the first dream, as if I'd just had it or something, and I told them we needed to lock the doors and windows to make sure the zombies didn't get in because I didn't think it was just a dream. Then one of the zombies I recognized came to the front door, I could see him, and as I was freaking out I began to realize my family and boyfriend were all zombies and they were saying something like "she's not ready yet."

I'm not sure what happened to the zombie outside (I think they let him in) but he wasn't out there anymore and I ran outside to get away from them all. I ran left along the sidewalk and I remember thinking it was important I stay under the stars. I looked up and saw what looked like a yellow glow-in-the-dark sword-shaped mouse pointer in the sky pointing to a specific star, so I ran that direction (which was sort of the way I was already going, to my right a little but for the moment I was staying on the sidewalk instead of crossing the street).

An expensive black luxury sedan that I think was a BMW suddenly seemed to be swerving at me or chasing me, so I had to change directions. I silently begged the sky for more help and saw the sword was now on a star further to my left now and right on the horizon, leading me onto grass to my left that dipped down a hill and into some forest and stuff. I was still near the top of the hill as the car stopped and two black people got out, a guy and a girl, dressed nicely and I remember the guy had very short hair.

They asked me what the heck my problem was, and I forget what reason they were actually there but I begged them for a ride. They asked me where I wanted to go and I forget where I said (San Paulo?) and they were cool with that. So I got in the back seat of the car which was now for some reason a convertible, and I had a pillow in my arms when we drove right back past my house so I hugged it and looked away from the house hoping they wouldn't recognize me but at this point I knew I had red hair and I had a bad feeling they would... but we weren't chased immediately. There didn't seem to be anybody at all outside the house as I peeked back at it when we'd gone past.

The couple said they had to make a stop, which was uncomfortably only a few blocks from my house up a side street, but I had barely started telling them about the zombies and I don't think they believed me. The lady they met was going to give them some food they'd ordered, I think they'd found her through some kind of internet service. It was the lady who I had met in the first dream, the one who said I was important, but all I knew now was that she was somehow important, I just couldn't remember why. We were all out of the car as she gave the people their food, and then asked me, "Do I know you from somewhere?"

I answered something about not being sure, and she asked me what my name was. I said, "Shane..." and then it was like it was really hard to remember my last name, it was like I knew the one I had was wrong, and that there was another name I was supposed to be known by. So finally I got it out, "...Dawson" (ahahaha my brain must be taking inspiration from YouTube, even if I have wanted the name Shane for years before running across Shane Dawson). She was sort of looking at me a little funny, like she might be figuring something out, but the other people were saying we had to go now so I left with them.

A few blocks later we suddenly got rammed from behind by another car (and now our car was back to being a sedan). The guy driving finally believed about the zombies, and was wondering how they'd found us so fast. There was some dream illogic behind my response ("They're editing the video!" as if there had been video footage of us going by, and access to fully processed video feed for editing meant they... somehow had all the information they needed) and now it was a car chase.

As if this were a bad Ed Wood movie, we found ourselves in heavy city traffic in broad daylight a few moments later. The zombie car was still too close behind and now they had a large, odd tractor thing on their side as well. I kept telling the driver he needed a wide open road, this kind of car should be able to go really fast and this was totally the wrong area to try and escape in. The girlfriend of the guy agreed with me, and even suggested it might be better if I took a cab instead as those guys could drive fast.

I think we heard on the radio or something that there was an actual ghostbusting service being advertised. I asked the people if they knew about that, they didn't really but the girl drug out a phone book and handed it to me, it was supposed to be the White Pages or something, and she apologized saying it might be harder to find in there. She also gave me her cell phone to borrow, and I dialed 911 while I was looking through the book trying to figure out what the heck section ghostbusting would be under. The operator wasn't honestly sure she believed what I was trying to tell her about the zombies and all, and was fairly sure she couldn't help me. The last thing I asked her was if she had any guesses as to where the ghostbusting number would be, and she said to try the services section. Conveniently, there was such a section, and it wasn't huge.

In that section of the phone book (which was difficult to read because reading is often difficult in dreams), I finally found a page with spiritual services, a lot of occult-related stuff though too much of it seemed like it was places that just sold stuff and had fun-houses and maybe palm readings or fortune tellers if lucky. Still, that had potential and an ad I saw for a place was one I wanted to go to but wasn't sure how to get there, and was about to mention it. The girl suddenly tried handing me a very slim "phone book" that she said was the Yellow Pages with a warm, triumphant smile like it was way more what I needed... but I still wanted to go to the place where the ad was and was about to ask again.

I noticed the shops in the area we were in were a lot like the section of the phone book I'd been looking in. Then the guy said something like, "What about this place?" and suddenly he was pulled over right by that one shop I'd seen the ad for, and in the window there was a sign for "Horror House" though the windows hadn't been cleaned in a while and the whole neighborhood looked really dumpy.

Well, it was the place I wanted to go and we were sitting ducks with the zombies still too close though it seems like we'd temporarily lost them. I said sure I'd go in and begged them to please stay and wait for me in case I had to run out fast again. I grabbed Teddy (my actual teddy bear) who for some reason was in the car as if he'd been with me the whole time, but I left my purse with them as if it was somehow safer to do so (??) and also left the door open even with the zombie threat because I was that worried I'd have to run right back into the car. Also, right around this time there was another person in the back seat of the car, an Asian young lady who the dream plot just sort of threw in like she'd always been there was well.

When outside the store before this conversation, I'd seen some of the employees through the window. Now as I went into the store, the layout changed (baaad dream logic, bad) and also I no longer remember having Teddy (baaad dream edit? lol). I sort of recognized the employees (a guy and a girl in toned-down punky haircuts and stuff) and well it was the same kind of store so I just went with it. I walked past the main customers and those two employees, feeling that the help I wanted wasn't in that area, and I would know the right kind of person when I saw them... if they were there at all.

I saw a lady behind a different counter, she was older and I think she had longish light-colored hair. I could see in her eyes that she held wisdom and knowledge of the sort I was looking for, or something very close to it, so I walked up to her and said I needed help. I forget exactly how I phrased it, possibly being under attack from darkness I was afraid to talk about in public, but at the end I said, "and I'm not looking for help from 'god'" and I even used air quotes.

She nodded, seeming to understand, and then I realized she had totally vanished while I'd... stood there staring for a moment? The Asian girl from the car was now with me (she'd come to check on me I think) and I said, "Wow, she's good." I knew the older lady was going to either talk to someone before talking to me again, or was fetching someone else... possibly because she'd told me. I forget.

It was only a moment or two later that a short, elderly Asian woman walked out from a back room and guided me to go sit nearby with her on a sort of round booth-like seat without a table. I sat down with her and the other girl who was with me, and started telling her about the zombies. I really don't remember what all I said, but this all seemed to make sense to her and she was saying something back to me, I'm not sure what, but as she did so her eyes started looking past me. I looked behind me, back the way I had come, and the area there was totally obscured by almost living darkness.

The old lady got up yelling some kind of curse or something at it (I forget, words of banishment probably) and stretched out her hand. From it came a yellow-white stream of magic with a thick orange-red cord through the middle of it, and it made a long line as it struck into the darkness. A male voice said something from inside the darkness, I don't remember what it was but probably something about the futility of her standing against him. Then I could see a man in the darkness there, and I knew it was one of the zombies, but now it was like I also knew they were actually vampires. Could be that was part of the dialogue, I wish I could remember it better.

The man countered the magic with his own power (which I don't remember what it looked like), and the lady shriveled up and fell backwards, dead. The other girl by me tried to get in his way as well and I think she also either died or got zapped into unconsciousness. Then I was on the floor as well, passing out because he'd hit me with some of that power next, and as everything went dark I heard the voice of Vampire Hunter D asking a very short question. Sadly, I can't remember the question now, though I do believe it had to do with asking where I had vanished to. I realized that perhaps I had disappeared off the floor completely, perhaps with my female friend too, and maybe the lady who I had seen in the previous dream had done it? Perhaps all hope was not yet lost?

But I wouldn't find out, because then I woke up.

I was sort of myself and sort-of not, part of a team sent into a city that was crawling with zombies, trying to find the source of the problem. I remember a trashed street where we spent a lot of time fighting. We realized too late that this seemed more a suicide mission than anything else, as we were vastly outnumbered and were having to improvise weapons much too quickly as ammunition ran out. I vaguely remember the leader of our team, a blonde woman, realizing she was infected and doing some kind of heroic thing like running out into a ton of the zombies with explosives and blowing herself up. There was some vague reference to flying zombies, perhaps a genetics experiment gone very wrong, but the dream seemed to retcon that a moment later.

A lot of this is fuzzy because it was the first of several dreams involving the bio-zombie concept. The last bit of this one I remember was fleeing into a building of some sort, and another member of the team realized he'd been bitten. I think at this point there were, at the most, three or four of us. I walked right up to him with some kind of wooden stake/pole and stabbed him through the heart. He couldn't believe what I'd just done, but then he was shortly dead and the other guy(s) on the team completely agreed with how I'd handled things. Then I woke up.

I fell back asleep, and this time I was playing probably another part of the same story on a console (probably a 360 with how good the graphics were). The view on the screen was first-person perspective, and my character was part-way up a slowly-spiralling, sturdily-secured hanging staircase in an office building somewhere. A cutscene had just ended, and I was trying to pause the game because I had to talk on the phone. No matter how hard I pressed the start button, it wasn't pausing, and I was being attacked from below by a T-Rex skeleton that apparently had been animated by the zombie virus. It wasn't actually trying to bite me though, it seemed to be hellbent on head-butting me to death.

I figured the game had done this on purpose as some sort of surprise realism gimmick, so I figured I'd let myself die and reload the saved game because I was still dealing with the phone call. This seemed a lot like a boss or at least a mini-boss fight, but I noticed it wasn't hurting very much on the interface's life bar. That was a good sign, that meant when I redid the fight it should be pretty easy. Suddenly the T-Rex flopped down onto the main floor as if I'd defeated it. Apparently it only had so much fight and then the thing gave out completely. Weird.

At this point I was done with the phone call, then suddenly the game showed me the hanging supports for the stairs were coming undone (super-rust attack of doom?) and the whole thing was going to collapse. I ran off of the stairs before they fell, then wandered over to see what was up with the skeleton. It seems like there was someone else there now, some guy who was maybe a team member, and we were discussing strategy for taking this thing down if it happened again. It was also not a game anymore, but actually me (or some psuedo-version of me) and the person standing in the room with the dinosaur skeleton.

The dream rewound for a moment, as if the whole fight were happening again, except this time I had a chance to load my gun up with these large, pointed bullets that were "just the thing" for taking the dinosaur out. I think I was trying to kill it without going onto the stairs, because now I knew they had a limited duration and I wanted to see if there was anything I needed to get on the landing the stairs led to (the video game puzzle-solving concept was still in effect it seems). This bit is fuzzy, but I think I was succeeding in taking down the dino but I noticed that the second-floor-type landing had changed more into a catwalk that didn't look very stable. Then I woke up again.

I fell back asleep and this time I was an office-worker who was again sort of like myself. I knew something was wrong, thanks to all the hints from the previous dreams, but it seems like everyone on my floor had no idea and was doing the daily routine. I remember thinking maybe the virus was currently outside and hadn't gotten this far into the building. A group of ladies wanted to gossip and I blew them off because I was actually trying to find a way outside even if it was dangerous out there. Obviously staying in the city would end up a death sentence in the long run.

I was in darker offices before long and I think the zombie thing hit around then. People out in the main offices were toast, and I may have run across something myself (this bit is fuzzy yet again). I was now looking for weapons and not having much luck, but I did find a woman who wasn't infected yet, as well as a little girl. I picked the girl up and we went down a back stairway to the floor below. I remember wanting to protect the child but finding the other lady a nuisance. I woke up again.

Back to sleep, and now a sequence of elevator puzzles ensued. I was alone again, and I knew various floors of the building were badly infected. The main elevator shafts all seemed to open up in the same general area on each floor, but not all the elevators went to every floor. I remember one elevator going to the 5th, 11th, and 12th floors, and one on the 5th floor supposedly went to the 7th, 3rd and 1st. (I'm not 100% sure on the numbers but that sounds about right, considering I was keeping track of this in my head for solving the damn "puzzle." Whether I'm off or not, I'll talk about them like they are the correct floors just to avoid confusion.)

I think I was on the 5th floor when I managed to get onto the elevator that should take me down to the 1st floor, which was my target as I think it was the only one with street exits. I do remember basement numbers that I think I pressed by accident, but managed to clear with a cancel button (which of course I've never seen on an actual elevator in real-life). The elevator stopped at the 3rd floor and a guy got on who looked like Mr. Jones from Fringe. Oddly enough, the elevator now went upwards as if his priority for wanting to go up floors somehow overroad the fact that the elevator should still be going down.

Great, so now I was on the 7th floor where he got off. Somewhere in here I woke up again, and went to sleep again, not wanting to give up on this trail of interconnected dreams (I was actually enjoying them, even with the scary factor and the puzzles of illogical doom.) I was back in the office building on one of the floors a few stories up, and I was near the elevators. There was a black woman who was one of the secretaries, on some very open stairs near me, and it was a bit dark there. I think she knew something was going on, but she was going to take the stairs down and I had no interest in teaming up with her. At this point it seemed like it was gonna be a solo project for me.

By now I'd realized that I'd spent a lot of consecutive time in this building where other people were getting infected, and I wasn't. I'd even tangled with zombies and was still fine. Hmmmmm. I had a feeling that there was some reason I wasn't catching the virus, that I was somehow immune. So now I needed to escape not only to save my own skin, but possibly help make an antivirus or vaccine. Time to get crackin' on the elevators again. Plus, it seems like as soon as I had this epiphany, zombies were approaching. Yep, good time to split.

I thought the first elevator I got into was the correct one, but as I hit the button trying to get the damn door shut right now I realized there was only one number on it, and an arrow above it. The number was 75. Oh crap, I'd just gotten on the executive elevator that makes a non-stop trip to the 75th floor. Gaaaaaaah! Well, at any rate, at least the door would be shut for a while and I had time to think.

The back side of the elevator had another set of doors that was cordoned off by those easily-movable poles with a thick decorative rope between them. There was also cardboard taped over the doors. Hmm, that says "not allowed" in a major sorta way. I had my eyes on the poles themselves, and decided that since it looked like nobody could see what I was doing, I'd try to take the things apart and see if they'd make good weapons.

The pole part itself unscrewed from the top and bottom parts, and was now made of wood for some reason (pretty sure it started as metal -.-;; ). The ends were very pointy where they'd screwed into the other pieces, and it was about 2.5 feet long. Perfect. I got two of these things, though for some reason the second was shorter by about a foot. I also peeked behind the cardboard on the doors, seeing that there weren't actually doors there at all and I could watch the elevator shaft wall go by.

Right then a voice came over a speaker like somebody had been watching me; the way he talked it sounded like a security guard who was probably monitoring things from the 75th floor. There were suddenly a whole bunch of little tiny black cameras in the elevator ceiling now too. (Hey dream logic, you and I need to have a talk.) He was asking what I thought I was doing, and... yay for fuzzy memory... I think I may have said something weird was going on in the building, that it was dangerous, and I didn't even want to be on this elevator.

He was starting to respond like he didn't give a rat's ass and needed to report me and all this stuff... but not far into that he sounded like he was losing interest in the conversation, and forgetting that he'd already said part of it. Then he made this weird staticy almost-growly noise and the feed cut out. Greeeeat. The elevator started slowing down, and also for some reason it had gone from the size of a decent elevator to a rather cramped space. I pointed both my weapons towards the main doors and was sort of crammed in the back-left corner of it, ready to defend myself as needed. My main goal was going to be getting the doors closed again once they opened, and thus the elevator returning to where I'd gotten on earlier.

The doors opened, and I could only see a bit of the waiting room beyond. The lighting was very dim, and I could see a woman sitting in a chair facing away from me. There was some kind of decorative plant next to her, and I couldn't really see anything else. She was just sitting there making little odd humming noises, and I was trying desperately to get the elevator to understand that I'm hitting the damn button that indicates I would like to go somewhere else please. I think I hit it with my elbow at first while holding the weapon in that hand, then using my hand when it wouldn't cooperate. Mind you, the button is now smack in the middle of the back wall where the do-not-touch doors should have been (and no longer were).

The doors shut finally, nothing having attacked me though I knew there were bad things in that room that thankfully hadn't noticed me or hadn't gotten to me yet. As the elevator made its way back down, I made a mental note again that I still wasn't infected. Suddenly I noticed blood on the far ends of my weapons, as if I had been attacked up there but had made it through fine. There was suddenly also carpet in the elevator, so I busied myself with wiping the blood off onto it.

The last thing I remember is finally getting off the elevator of doom, and managing to get to about the 3rd floor or so. There were stairs nearby, the sort of stairs that go to all floors, and I decided that it was high time to screw the elevator puzzle and just walk to the first floor.

Then I woke up (for the last time).

I dreamed I was a little girl, not myself but some other girl, in a vaguely steampunk setting. I had a life-size doll, it looked like a teenage girl and was dressed in a lot of black, Victorian style. I tried to make her come to life (I don't remember how anymore) and it worked. The doll, however, seemed to recognize someone on the street when I took her for a walk. The stranger was a woman with long, dark hair and a big black bow in it. I changed perspectives to the doll, who really felt like she had to figure out why it was she knew this woman.

Then I woke up.

(Old dream notes are old. I just found this again, it was written November 4th, 2008. I'm going to transcribe it pretty much the way it was originally written.)

Movie like Lethal Weapon on TV, two cops find a girl witness, drive in bad weather. (Then I was the girl in the "movie" which was now reality.) There is deep water ahead, think they can cross but it looks so deep it's blue. Car is an old large convertible with the top down. They try, and even paddle the car with hands which sorta works but the deep water just seems to keep on going.

Get near an odd obstacle and a lady appears like a vision and says we are the chosen ones, and must help her world. She summons magic into her hand (warp stuff) that coalesces into three small teardrop stones. She gives them to us, then shows putting another on her forehead and vanishes.

I do what she did and it sticks like it won't come off. The others do it too; one of the guys puts it in a spot more like where an actual teardrop might go. He did it that way so it would seem less gay (AHAHAHA!! fail). My "marker" starts burning and it hurts, and then we're transported to the new world instantaneously and together. We're standing and it's dark. We're on grounds near a forest.

The evil bad guy has seen our entry in a crystal ball (or mirror?). Tells his three-headed dog and three wolves to go destroy the intruders. What he doesn't seem to know is that I can't be harmed by animals due to being the chosen one with the right combination of inner powers and the crystal. So the dogs cower and cannot follow their master's order, though they would have instantly otherwise. The protection the girl has extends to anyone she is near. Animals who intend to harm her or anyone near her can't get anywhere near her.

Then I woke up.

At first I was a young lady of some sort who was in the hospital and this other family member came up, another woman a little older. I was supposed to be unconscious but I could see this woman inject me with like three or four syringes full of morphine. She was overdosing me, trying to kill me!

Then my perspective was switched to the evil girl and the person "I'd" tried to kill became the elderly grandmother of the family, a very important person in the heirarchy. (The attempted murder scene repeated from the new viewpoint, with a few dream-logic-messed-up differences like having problems with one of the syringes.)

Apparently I failed to kill the old woman, and now people were trying to figure out who'd OD'd her. So far I was coming up clean and appeared clueless as the rest. I was worried about some apples in her room tho, as I'd apparently also injected morphine in a few of them. I also remember eating one during a family meeting, so it'd look like someone tried to attack me too. But I was worried that would come across as too obvious, that I'd set myself up but I was really the criminal.

The apples were still in the grandmother's room (and tons of them, along this odd counter with little sides on it so the apples wouldn't roll off). I was trying to think of how to get rid of them all entirely, or figure out which ones I'd poisoned before someone else showed up (I think the grandmother either had been moved from the room or was still completely out of it)...

I don't remember the rest.

(Definitely inspired by reading Ultimate X-Men v.1 yesterday, this dream starts out rather more boring than the title implies but gets more interesting later.)


I was my real self at a Wal-Mart waiting in line at the entertainment department checkout. There was someone ahead of me and they were taking forever. There were at least two guys behind me as well. Someone had managed to find two chairs and they looked as if a lot of people waiting in line had used them that day. They were in the first and second person-waiting-in-line positions and the line was kinda spread out anyways, the store wasn't busy in our area except for those of us waiting in line. So I sat on the chair by my position and waited. I was buying a scanner that was on sale for $20 and I had some other stuff I'd set on a nearby shelf.

As I was waiting I realized I didn't have enough money to get all this plus Sims 2 which I was going to get in a couple days (this reflects real-life plans to get that game) so I just sorta left the extra stuff on the shelf and still sat there waiting since I was gonna buy the scanner regardless. (It was pretty much the same one my parental units got me for xmas but apparently my dream had forgotten about that.)

I was quite bored and looked over at the counter. The cashier was gone for some reason, but so was the person ahead of me in line. I moved up to the counter and set the scanner box on it. Suddenly there was shouting and an explosion from somewhere beyond the department, but close enough that it sent stuff around us flying. The other guys scattered and I found myself surrounded by a dozen rifle-armed black ops specialists, every muzzle pointed at my head. (At this point the dream logic decided I was an X-Men-style mutant and these guys were something similar to Weapon-X enforcers from the Ultimate X-Men comic book series.)

I thought at first they wanted to capture me but it turns out they were just going to kill me. I moved lightning fast and kicked up at the muzzles, spinning in a full circle. Now they weren't pointed at me but at random angles, and several of the bad guys fired as a reflex to my attack, hitting their buddies instead of me. The rest were easy enough to take care of quickly and I glanced around fast to see there wasn't anyone standing near me. I grabbed my scanner box (hey, a good scanner is a good scanner and the store was going to hell in a handbasket) and tucked it under one arm, heading for the main doors. On the way there I spotted another mutant (she looked like Ultimate X-Men Storm) and told her to follow me. As I ran out the front doors I noticed candy stands by the registers there and yelled at her to grab a candy bar, "Hell, grab a whole ****ing handful, we're going to need them."

She did and followed me out to the parking lot, looking a bit like a deer in headlights. (My character changed somewhere around this point, becoming male, sort of a punk, younger version of Wolverine.) As we're running across the parking lot I say, "Okay, where'd I put the Jag." (This was in part a vague realization I was dreaming, but only enough to seed an idea into the dream... it beat stealing a car.) I found it quickly after saying that, it was completely black and oldschool-meets-ultramodern (special edition?). I grabbed the keys out of my pocket and unlocked the door with the remote. I threw the scanner in the back and the girl got in the passenger side.

Pretty soon we were speeding down streets and away from the main area of town. The girl was worried that the cops must be after us, and I said "Oh they definitely are." Nobody was giving chase behind us at the moment, so the girl asked me how I knew for sure. "I can hear them, I pick up radio frequencies when I want to... and sometimes when I don't want to." (This was another semi-lucidly seeded idea, the whole time I don't remember hearing any radio but the dream logic didn't seem to care.)

Then there were two cars ahead of us driving directly at us through oncoming traffic. I swerved to miss them and ended up going down the embankment on the road we were now on, a small highway in a forested area. I kept the car running along the embankment but steering was sluggish and I couldn't seem to work the car back up to the road. The last thing I needed was for the cops to show up now, so I stopped the car and got out, telling the girl to stay put. "What are you going to do?" she asked fearfully, and I answered, "Use my other talent." I dragged the car back up to the road with inhuman strength and hopped back in the driver's seat. Vroooooooooooooooom!

The rest of the dream changed dramatically and made a lot less sense. I became the girl character, who was now white with blonde hair done up very prim (think Jane from A&E's Pride & Prejudice), and the other character was even more like Wolverine now, closer to the correct age for the movies and how he looks in Ultimate X-Men. We'd made serious tracks and were taking a break on a northeast-coast beach that was apparently a memorable spot to the guy character. Let's call him Logan (Wolverine's real name) cuz I think that's really who he was supposed to be at this point.

I was wading in ankle-deep water and talking to Logan about random things and it was obvious we'd fallen in love. A fog was creeping in and tendrils of mist curled towards the shore. Then a rather thick, smaller bank of fog rolled in, moving towards me. Eerily I noted that it seemed almost sentient as it moved straight for me. It covered my feet and moved up over my body, engulfing me. I passed out, falling into the water, and had a vision of a woman who looked at me out of the fog, at first suspicious but then she smiled and turned and left. I woke up a moment later in Logan's worried arms, and I told him what I'd seen. He said he used to come to this beach with his wife before she died, and it must have been her spirit. I still felt a little dizzy and he helped me walk back to the sand.

Then I woke up.