The Kestrel's Dreams

June 15, 2015

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I was with a group of my classmates, except that there were some other people there, too. One of them was a girl who was a year below me in high school, who is doing her undergrad in education at the same university as me. She was telling me how she was going to come back to do the same master's program I'm doing when she finished her undergrad studies. another of the people in the group was a guy from my high school.

We were sitting, eating our lunch near a large building with lots of big windows. There were apparently a lot of illegal Asian students at the university lately, and the campus police were really cracking down on them. We could see through the huge windows that a young woman was running from a group of like five cops. She was carrying her books and had classes, she looked like a normal college student but much more modest. She eventually ran out of the building and past us. I was a little worried because one of the people in my group was Asian and I was worried about racial profiling. Three of the cops continued chasing the young woman, but two of them stopped and inspected our group. One stood back as the other confronted me first. He asked my name and major, I answered. He moved on to the friend from highschool, and asked him the same questions. But he was nervous and stammered, and the cop got confrontational and hostile, got up in his face, and then forcefully kissed him violently. I punched the cop in the jaw and yelled at him, telling him I was filing charges and that I had been recording the whole thing. The cop skunked off.

Our group was moving on, to a secret garden type place, where we were going to meet Kali, who was apparently our field instructor or something. He told us we had to go to Germany for a final test, and that the university was paying for our tickets. I was so excited to be going back to Germany! We all packed our things, and somehow managed to get in the same car heading for a place we were going to stay in tonight, before the flight. In the car, I was looking out the window. The scenery couldn't decide what it wanted to be, and I thought this was funny... I had the inkling I was dreaming, so I checked my hands... I WAS dreaming!

I was so happy to be lucid again after such a long dry spell, that for a while I just let the dream play out. We were still in the car, though, and it was still driving. I remembered the TOTM to find a house that represented yourself, and so I told myself that the car would stop in front of the building that was ME. Sure enough, the car did stop very soon after that. I phased through the door and looked. The building in front of us was a large-ish Greek looking place. It was really pretty, and Kali stopped to take pictures of all of us in different poses in front of the building. I opened the door to see what the inside was like. It was fascinating! It was all Winchester-y, with rooms in odd places. I could see most of the rooms at once, though, because it was all very open. Most of the things in the rooms were deep reds, dark blues/browns, whites and splashes of blinding bright orange. Zukin was sitting on a bench in the entry room, and stood up when she saw me. "Finally!" She said, grabbing my hand and leading me around the house. "I've been waiting for you for ages. Let's explore!" We looked through a lot of the rooms, but I knew there were more. We went up stairs and ladders, down some and through countless doorways. Somehow I still knew exactly where I was in the house! Usually I'm so directionally challenged. We heard the maid calling us down for drinks, and I decided to go talk to her to see what she knew about this building. But Zukin wanted to go find the Chinchilla Room.

We split up, me going down and she going further up. When I reached the bottom, I was about to ask the maid what she knew about the Me-House, when the DC of the high school friend thanked me for sticking up for him earlier. He game me a drink in a "candied coconut shell" which was really delicious! I lost a lot of my lucidity and got horny, but the dream faded away after I walked onto a long balcony overlooking a cliff on the ocean. It was beautiful.

February 07, 2015

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Hooping

I was entering a sort of church with my mom and dad. It was in some foreign country, probably Germany or Austria. I knew in my dream that I had visited this church before, with Zukin, but she wasn't here this time. As we enter the first room, we spot Jeremy from Top Gear sitting in a chair at the far end of the room. He talks to us a little, but doesn't say much, and I can't remember what little we did talk about. I had the feeling I was a little scared of him, maybe it was more awe-struck. At the front end of the room, where we had entered, there was a table against the wall with two hoops on it. I had picked them up and was about to start hooping with one of them, when a young boy ran into the room and tackled me with a hug. We had met this boy last time we were here, and he said he had missed me. He asked where Zukin was, and I said she wasn't here this time. He then asked me to do that thing we had done last time. He meant a thing where Zukin holds a hoop in each hand and twirls them around. It's fascinating to watch and I've tried it before, it's pretty tricky to do. I told him, "It was Zukin who did that, I'm not very good at it." But he insisted, and handed me to lighter hoops than the ones I currently held. I gave in and attempted the trick. At first I was doing it all wrong, but I knew what I was doing wrong; my wrists were bending the wrong ways. I fixed it and was about to really get in a groove when I woke up.





ALL THE FOOD

When I fell back asleep, I entered back into the same dream (I was trying to enter it lucid, but it was a normal dream). The boy was gone, and Jeremy was also gone. My mom and dad and I went through the big double doors at the end of the room and entered another large room with tables all over the place. there were people all over, too, and it turned out it was a potluck day. I was excited for food, and realized I was ravenous. The back wall of the room had tables against it, covered with main dishes and sides. I got a plate with the best looking chicken I had ever seen, some pees, corn, and some bread and potatoes with gravy. I put my plate down next to where my mom was, to save a spot while I went to the dessert room. There was apparently a whole other room for desserts.

In that room, there were two or three tables all pushed together in the center, piled high with plates of cookies and brownies and cakes and whatever kind of dessert you could think of, basically. I walked around it once first, taking it all in and deciding what I would pick... There was a whole section of three or four different kinds of red velvet cookies. One of them was apparently red velvet but without the food coloring, and it had tiny chocolate chips sprinkled on the top of it. But I didn't get that one, I went for a more traditional red velvet cookie. I got two of those, and then I noticed a table at the corner of the room, and there was a bag on the table. The bag had two compartments; in one were smaller red velvet cookies with a weird looking frosting, and in the other were HUGE red velvet cookies with a delicious looking cream-cheese frosting or something. I took one of the big ones and put it on my plate. But now it was full, so I needed another (they were small plates).

I got another plate, and looked at the layered goodies. There was a piece the size of my hand of this layered fudge and chocolate and either coffee or peanut butter stuff... It looked delicious, but I assumed it was a tiramisu and I don't like those, so I left it. Next to it, though, was a foot-and-a-half tall layered thing of chocolate and fudge and vanilla and soft cakes and mints and it just looked so good. So I cut a super thin piece (maybe about half an inch thick, because it was so tall and I didn't need a shit ton of the stuff) and had to kind of scoop it out into a messy pile on my plate. I started from the top and scooped out 4-inch parts at a time because I was worried that if I just took it from the bottom, it would all topple and get all over the place.

I drab one more cookie, and then they announce that the food lines were going to close up pretty soon, so I left and found my spot next to mom. I realized I had forgotten the other plate, though, and tried to get back in. The door to the hallway leading to the dessert room was locked from my side, though. I waited for someone to come out, but no one was, so I knocked on the door. A young man peeked from around the corner (I was looking through the small gap between the double-doors, or there might have been a window in the door...) and tentatively opened the door for me. I thanked him with a hug, and went to find my other plate. It was on the table in the corner that had the bag on it. I grabbed it, went back to my seat

And then I started to eat. And oh my god, it was amazing. the chicken was the most flavorful and amazingly moist chicken I have ever had. I moved on to that layered thing, and it was so good. It's hard to describe what exactly it tasted like, but it was EXACTLY what I was craving (and am still craving right now). Like, think of your favorite childhood dessert, and it was that taste, pretty much.

I was sad to wake up from that dessert.





Romeo vs. Me: "Dueling"

When I fell back asleep, I dreamed I was in a car on the way to a small town in the mountains of Germany or Austria (there was a theme this night... I was thinking hard about castles and balls all day so I could increase my chances of remembering some tasks when I got lucid). We were almost there, I could tell, but there was still another mountain to get over first. Right now we were driving in a valley, with the mountain to our left and farms and scattered rural houses to our right... But the building were all torn down. It looked like there had been a tornado or some other really destructive storm... and so I was worried about the town we were headed for. I was hoping it was an isolated event and that everyone I knew in this small town was alright.

When we got to the town, I got out of the car and walked to the main town square. Someone was breathing fire (it was sunset, getting dark) and this was so fascinating but weird that I did a reality check... My left hand's middle and ring finger were kinda webbed-looking...

I was dreaming!

I looked around and started rubbing my hands together because my lucids have not lasted long lately... I felt the dream getting stronger, and I also took note of my surroundings. I remembered right away the challenge task for week two, and shot into the air to hover above the town square. I looked around the town for a castle that looked like it was having a party; it would probably be the Capulet's ball.

On the edge of town, on the hills leading to the mountains beyond, I saw what looked like a fancy villa or something, and there were lots of lights around it, lighting up the grounds and whatnot. I assumed this was the Capulet household, and was about to fly off toward it normally, when I remembered my last three-part task. I thought about how fast would count as "advanced" flying, and pretty much decided jet-speed would do. I'm not really sure that I did anything special, I just kinda expected to be going super fast, and I did. I shot off in a bee-line for the castle and was there in pretty much a second. It actually kinda reminded me of Lord of the Rings, when Sauron zooms in on things happening far away.

I land at the front door and because I am a Capulet, I just walk right in. I was greeted by a servant at the door, and handed something to drink. It was in a fancy glass and looked bubbly, so I downed it and continued into the main room. It was beautiful, really. There was the main floor, which was large, and then there were stairs on either side leading up to an upper balcony level where people were milling about and talking. I looked around, expecting to see Romeo. He was supposed to crash this party, yes? And then I thought, "My teammates and the other team should be here as well." So I called out the names I could remember: OneUp, Pickman, StaySharp, Spellbee, FryingMan. Five young men walked toward me from the crowds, and I asked who each of them were. "Which one of you is OneUp?" The one in the middle raised his hand. Though he also raised his hand when I asked who was StaySharp, and so it was a little bit confusing about which ones were which people (but my subC pretty humorously inserted clues about who was who). I eventually sorted it out, and grabbed OneUp (he had an arrow on his forehead, a little like Aang, but it pointed up, not down), Pickman (he had a flower sticking out of his head and wore an all red suit) and StaySharp (he was pretty nondescript), pulling them to my side. "You three are Capulets, right?" They nodded. "And you two are Montegues, correct?" I asked Spellbee (he was buzzing the whole time so I'm pretty sure that was him) and FryingMan (he actually had a frying pan on a rope around his neck). They nodded, too, and seemed troubled.

I was about to try to convert Spellbee and FryingMan, when Spellbee's buzzing got louder and he grabbed FryingMan's frying pan and tried to hit me with it. "Hey now. Be nice." I made the frying pan shrink so it was the size of a normal necklace now. "You two should totally join the Capulets. We have awesome parties." They both looked a little uncertain, so I kept going. "You will join the Capulets." I waved my hand, trying to use Jedi mind powers. They squirmed a little and then both said, "Okay," and stepped over to stand behind me. "Now let's find that Romeo guy." They agreed to help me find him.

I was walking around, expecting that I would bump into Romeo eventually, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and saw the Face. "Do you know where Romeo is?" I asked him. He just shrugged and took my hand, taking me to the balcony. "Wait, I have to find Romeo," I said. He looked back at me, oddly silent, and just giggled a little, then disappeared. I watched the DCs around me, wondering which one of them was Romeo. Then I heard someone (I think it was Spellbee) say, "Oh, Romeo," behind me, and I turned to see who he was talking to. The young man I assumed to be Romeo had black hair and wore a fancy outfit, but beyond that I don't remember much about his looks. I approached him and said, "You're Romeo, right?"

He looked at me, nodded, and said, "And who are you?" I told him I was Juliet (Romeo will obviously fall in love with Juliet), and he pretty much just leaves what he was doing, grabs my hand, and stands there holding my hand silently. It was like we were school kids playing date on the playground. I turned to him and said, "Romeo, do you love me?" He looked at me and smiled, nodding. "Don't you want to kiss me?" I asked, and he blushed, then carefully kissed me. Well, this should be enough for that task, right...? But I was also going to do the other option, which was to duel Romeo. "Romeo, I challenge you to a duel!" I said.

He perked up a bit, grabbed my hand and lead me to a door. The DVers I had found followed us, whooping and yelling encouragement to me. Then it turned into this really weird sex battle. Apparently that's what a duel means here. Romeo pushed me down onto a bed and tore off his own shirt, and one of the DVers yelled "BULLSHIT!" I decided to let this kind of duel continue, and pretty much flipped Romeo on his back so I was on top. I think that was how you won. So yeah. We "dueled" for a while and I'm pretty sure I won because I was on top at the end and my DV following was ecstatic and jumping around and hugging each other as if their team had just won the superbowl. I was barely lucid at this point, and then I woke up.

November 30, 2014

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I was with my family in Austria or Germany, on a river bank of concrete. It was like a man-made canal or something, with lots of bridges. It actually would look a little more like Chicago's river, but there weren't huge buildings all around.

We were going into a grocery store to get some food, and I was looking around for a specific pop. They didn't have it, so I picked out a chocolate milk instead. The grocery store was in someone's house, or something, and the owners offered tours of the top floors, where there was a lot of historical stuff and machines for sorting things. The stairs were in the center of the building, and the store was all around on the first floor. When we walked in, to the left were crates holding the drinks, like they had at the Kaufland in Germany when I studied over there (that picture's the best I could find to show what it was like. It was a culture shock to see everything out like that in the stores)

As I walked around the store clockwise, I found the counter at the back, and around a bit more was a deli. I met my little brother there and had him hold my things because I needed to get something else and didn't have any money (I didn't tell him he was going to pay for mine). I walked past a man who was looking at some product, and there were whole arms sticking out of the ceiling above him. It was part of the tour, I knew (somehow). The hands went back up through the ceiling, and the man never really noticed.

(I just remembered a few old dreams of rickety bridges through swamps and forests and fields at night, somehow... Not quite sure what the connection is there. Maybe I was on a tour in those dreams?)

July 30, 2014

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Dogs in Germany and a Failed Test

I was living in Germany, as part of my Masters in Education program. There was apparently a special set of classes abroad for people who spoke German. I was living in an apartment on a hill somewhere, it looked like it was near where I lived in Tübingen while I was there. My brother was apparently there, too. I was talking to him about how we would move all of our stuff to the airport. We had rented a car for the whole time we were there, and because we were in apartments, we had all this stuff we needed to either sell of take back home with us. I was under the impression that we were going to take it all back home. I'd also gotten two dogs while I was there. One teeny-tiny dog (which is so unlike me) and one very large dog. They've never been in the car before (I got them from a neighbor, so I didn't drive them to my apartment), so I was worried about how they would handle being in the car, and also worried about whether I would be able to get them on the plane and back home with me.

As I was putting things in the car, and getting a space ready for the dogs, my aunt L was there, for some reason. She wanted to ride in the trunk, where I was going to put the dogs. She was very adamant about it and got in the trunk, and wouldn't leave. The car was an old hatchback, by the way.

My friend Sammie was also living in the same apartment complex as I was. She was going to need an extra room for another month, so I offered her mine, and went to live at my host family's house for the rest of the time. They were gone on vacation, so I stayed at their place and watched the house for them. I was working out with Sammie all those details. I thought I was going to b there for another month, but it turned out my flight back was in a week. We somehow worked it all out, but I can't remember how.

Then, I went to check my grades from the exam I had taken for my final class. I got the results, and found out I had failed miserably and would need to take supplementary classes. But I was leaving in a week, and couldn't get my flight changed to a later date. I was miserable, and since I was at the school, I went to one of the monitors on the wall where we could check our school information. I wanted to make sure they hadn't outright kicked me out of the program. I did THAT badly. I went to a wall, hooked two parts into a device, and pulled a lever. A wall of water came down and an image was projected onto it, and I used the water-wall like a touch-screen to select files and options and whatnot. A tour group of incoming students was watching me the whole time, with looks of awe on their faces, but I had my head pressed against the wall in dejection because I was so upset.





(I woke up to loud music outside, and realized I had only been asleep for about an hour; it was 2:30 am... Fell back asleep, and stayed asleep until my alarm went off)

Poisoned the Wrong Guy

I was with Zukin in a classroom at one of the high schools in my hometown. It was apparently the office for the German faculty (though I don't know that they even have more than one or two German classes at that school haha). I knew I was at that school because of all the windows around us.

Zukin and I made an iced tea and shared it while watching some of the other teachers. I think we were interviewing for some sort of tutoring position. We didn't trust one of the teachers; he wore a suite of armor that was white and blue; mostly striped but with other intricate patterns all over it, too. So we made a plan: Zukin would be my student and offer him some iced tea. But there would be poison slipped into it.

But she went too far away and offered the poisoned tea to a different teacher on accident. Oops.





In The Mountains

I was in the mountains, on a train or bus or something going along what I think was either the northern or the southern edge of a valley. I looked out over the mountains, and noticed that they were green and lush at the bottom and in the valley, but the tops of the mountains were like the mesa biome in Minecraft; layered with orange, red, and yellow colored rock and sand, with the very peaks being vast and snowy. I don't remember what I was doing there, but it was beautiful and strange.

June 22, 2014

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I was with a really mixed group of my friends; Zukin was there, as were at least two people from high school (my ex and Annie, one of my best friends), as well as some people I know from random times of my college career. We were all sitting at a table in some sort of large cafeteria-type place. Maybe a dorm's dining hall on campus? Now that I think about it, all of the people i nthe group, even the ones from highschool, went to my college, except for Annie.

Anyways. I digress too much. We were sitting at a large table, deciding what to do for Spring Break, which was in a few weeks. Zukin and I suggested we all go to Germany and/or Austria. The group liked the idea of that, and so we loosely decided to make it happen. We all went our separate ways.

About a week later (one and a half weeks until SB). I was walking around downtown, when i saw one of the girls from the group, a friend from high school (actually, from middle school! Wow. Known her a long time) was walking dwn the street with bright, bright orange hair. I asked her what was up, and she said she had gone to the salon to get her hair colored, and they'd told her she could walk around outside while the color set. She'd gone walking around, and forgotten to go back, and her hair had turned bright orange like this. She was skeptical about whether or not she would be going on the trip or not because of this. I told her it looked awesome (I love orange) and that even if she didn't like it, she could just re-dye it before the trip. She said she'd get back to me about it.

Jump ahead about half a week, and I'm online, looking at flight prices. I found a super great deal, and booked it right away, then messaged everyone in the group about it. They all said they would get the tickets very soon...

Jump again to the day before we leave for the trip; I am staying the night at Annie's apartment and for some reason my ex needed a place to stay that night, so Annie invited him, too. We all talked about the trip, and I found out that Annie had forgotten to get her ticket, so I was really worried that she wouldn't be able to go anymore, but we got online and found that tickets were still available for that flight.

The next morning, we all met up at the airport. It's the same airport that's always in my dreams. This airport is... a bit hard to describe. It's got bits from all the airports I've ever been in, as well as some aspects of Grand Central Station in Chicago and some of the train stations Zukin and I went to in Germany (like the entrance of Stuttgart HBF) The airport is even more maze-like than most real airports, causing my dream self to have gotten lost multiple times... There are also two different runways that I've seen in this airport...

Anyways, we got to Germany in one piece. I don't remember much about the plain ride. We got to Germany, and I got the rental car we'd arranged. Zukin and I went, by memory, to a campsite we had gone to in Austria before. But the road there was like the one in the beginning of Spirited Away. We were all in two cars, since we were so many people, and at some point the other car lost us. But at that point it was just one road and they couldn't go the wrong way without tearing through gobs of trees, so we didn't worry about them.

Oh. Did I mention we were all in full larp gear? Well, we were. Apparently the campsite in Austria was having a special event for larpers. Zukin and I were trying to get them all into larp.

We park the car when we reach the site, get out, and head toward the registration desk. There are so many people. It's more like a ren-fair than a larp event. At least, there were way more people than any larp event I've been to. We lost one of the guys in the group (oddly enough, the one person in the group that wasn't a person I know IRL)

Mel (the one I've known since middle school) asked, "Where's Bret (or Brad. I couldn't hear too well over the noise of the larpers around us) Garrett?"
"I dunno. The reservation is under his name though..."
I waved my hand. "He'll be fine, and I can speak German so it's all good."

We got up to the desk and I asked in German if we could check in. The women responded in English, with a pretty fake accent. "Name?"
"It'll be under Bret (or Brad) Garrett."
The woman, who was rather large but very very friendly looking, looked through some papers, and then handed them to me, adding, "You know, you can stay for free if you go into the woods, have a drink, and tell three strangers you love them."

I went back to the group and told them about the deal. Everyone seemed pretty okay with it, and as we were heading toward the woods, Bret/Brad came hastily over, hiding behind us. "Those guys jumped out of nowhere and started singing weird shit at me...!" I turned and saw a group of young men, each with an instrument, singing love songs to Bret/Brad. I think the people from the other car were just joining us as I woke up. I was laughing at Bret/Brad.

June 04, 2014

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I was with Zukin on a bus (in Germany, I think. But I'm not certain). We sat in forward-facing seats on the left side in the back half of the bus, and our bags were to our right in a row of left-facing seats that lined that whole side of the bus. Those seats were elevated by two steps. The bus seemed abnormally wide.

The dream fragmented here. We must have gotten off the bus, and were now in a hotel room. We started talking about a reading assignment for a class we were both taking. We had to read part of a book I've already read (I get a very strong feeling that it was the Hunger Games), as well as the first 100-or-so pages of another book, which I'd never heard of. I hadn't known that we needed to read the other book, and the class was meeting tomorrow. It was already late, and so I asked Zukin to just summarize that book so far, but she refused to tell me what it was about.

Another fragment; I had spilled something all over me, and so I went to the hotel room's bathroom to take a shower. Zukin asked me if I was going to "take a real shower in the morning," to which I responded: "This is my shower."

After my shower I changed into my PJs and then I woke up.