Batch

08-04-2012 -- Started with just bits I can't really expand on, but gets better near the end. Somehow I am walking between a couple of buildings, heading to a place where I should be investigating something, except there are a bunch of cops who won't let me into the area. So I walk around the building trying to come at it from another angle, but they block me there, too. Eventually I find myself driving down a road where I see three or four Del Taco locations (fast food chain I know from CA, but there are only two of them in this area that I know of) and I am thinking it is kind of nice they are building more of them.

Soon I am in an office signing up for something, and Tammy is the receptionist. [Tammy is really the receptionist for the company I currently work for.] Some kind of mafia-type organization, and I am waiting for paperwork about something I have been asked to do, before I can go out and do it. As I turn and look around, I spot Calvin from my high school, and I recognize him because of the yearbook pictures Steve has just recently posted on Facebook. I think it is nice Steve posted them, because otherwise I never would have recognized him now. [Funny thing is, the dream version I only recognize because of the pictures of the now version looks exactly like he did in high school.] He turns and recognizes me, as well.

I am just about to leave, but the shelves of the office are loaded with boxes and boxes of candy, and as I glance over, I notice one of the candies they have is Wacky Wafers. They have them in a package containing six different flavored wafers, and I grab one. Somehow, as I try to open it, the one turns into six (that is six packages of six wafers each), and I end up eating all six of the watermelon wafers at the same time. Very tasty! I'm thinking about how I am going to have to post this on some of the lost candy forums on the internet, and how great it is that one of these old favorites has finally been brought back. I try to pay Tammy for the candies, but she is busy trying to put the hands back on a clock that lost them in an explosion. Finally she turns back to me, and tells me they are 86 cents each, and both of us are trying to do the math for six of them. As usual in the dream, math is difficult.

Soon I find myself watching some sort of reunion on a cruise ship of the cast from the Love Boat television show. Oddly, though, even though it is a reunion show of actors, they are all being treated as off-duty crew, and expected to keep out of the way of all the passengers who have come to see them. I spot at least Stubing, Vickie, Isaac, Doc and Julie, not sure I see Gopher anywhere.

07-15-2012 -- I'm in my original bedroom in the Hickory House, which is a Hogwarts dorm room. I'm surrounded by piles and piles of trash and I'm shoving them around with a bunch of dorm mates making a half-hearted attempt to clean the place up. We're actually a lot more interested in learning a secret Ravenclaw spell that helps them keep the Slytherins at least slightly under control.

We Gryffindors learn it and abuse it for revenge, which leads to all-out warfare at the school. Thankfully the year is almost over, and we're leaving on the Express, but it is not a comfortable journey. There's a lot of magic being thrown around on the train ride, and it is starting to reach dangerous levels. I'm about to get between cars and try to release some of the magic so it can drain off into the countryside, but they've sealed the passages between cars.

At this point things have kind of shifted, and I'm halfway watching Harry, and halfway being Harry. There is a strange multi-timeline story going on, where there is a girl stuck in an inaccessible part of the castle, back in the founders' time. She's trapped in an area that is flooding, and is going to drown, and nobody can do anything about it.

Harry, in the present time, is working on some sort of project involving the Mirror of Ravenclaw, a long-lost artifact from the Founders' Era. Dumbles is trying to help, but really doesn't know what's going on. Harry has managed to recreate the mirror, and is sending it back in time along with a powerful cloak. The two items together can help save the girl.

Rowena Ravenclaw receives the cloak and the mirror, and manages to save the girl, then reveals that she never had any special mirror, and the rumored artifact that Harry 'recreated' was actually the mirror itself, which he sent through time. He was responsible for what he was trying to copy. The drowning girl was saved, somehow in the Smith's Food King parking lot. She half-turns into a guy, then turns back into a girl.

By this point, we are walking through the Disneyland parking lot, instead. Some of the girl's friends are telling her that they will meet her at the end of the night, in the employee parking lot near Harbor House. Problem is, they don't actually work there. I can understand their interest, but am explaining it is better to get a spot in Bambi than in Alice, anyway.

We're getting nearer the main entrance, and suddenly my sister Melody is there, and is two clues away from finishing a Penny Press crossword puzzle. She's going nuts about these last two clues, reading them out to see if anybody else knows them, and drawing thick lines in a grease pencil to make it easy to tell at a glance what the two clues still left to solve are.

We are now at the ticket gates, and I am now with my friend Dale as well as the girl rescued in time. Dale goes through the gate with a normal annual pass. I have one as well, luckily, but it is a key chain version, and is falling apart, like the old key chain I had for L.A. Fitness. They just barely get enough of a response from it and let me in.

It is raining heavily, and as we pass under the train station and reach Main Street, there is a really lousy parade going by. It's one of the really minimal parades like 30 Years of Magic, just something to pass time until they unveil the next major parade. I just try and ignore the whole thing. Dale has walked into the fire station for some reason, and I find myself walking down Main Street singing the Tap Shoes / Harvest Moon medley from Showbiz Is ..., and tap dancing my way down the street. I think I am dancing really badly, but for somebody who doesn't know what they are doing, it is actually pretty good.

I cover the entirety of Main Street in about five seconds, and suddenly find myself at Coke Corner, looking for the piano player. It is still pouring rain, so the piano is inside the restaurant. As I walk in, I find Johnny Lee there, talking to a guest. The guest keeps talking about the last piano player he saw there, who was a bit friendly, a bit crazy, and played very, very fast, and Johnny admitted it sounded like Rod.

The guy was asking Johnny to play a song, and Johnny indicated he wanted to, but unfortunately he had managed to break both his legs, so couldn't make use of any of the pedals. Instead Johnny seemed to be getting ready to go to sleep, and was pulling himself onto the piano keyboard and pulling the keyboard guard thingy over himself almost like a sort of coffin, before he took a nap.

08-02-2012 -- Its late at night, and I am in a room on the third floor of a beat-up, worn house. There may have been lots of interesting things getting me here, and involving people and chases and stuff ... I have the barest hints of such in my mind. Unfortunately, if there are, I can't remember them, though details are pretty good from this point on. I'm kind of tired, and am thinking of sleeping, perhaps after just a tiny bit of 'private time' to aid in sleeping. Unfortunately the door to the room won't lock, or even properly latch. There are some guys out in the halls who seem to be playing football or something, and they keep bumping the door and knocking it open.

I go out and try to talk to them about it, and one of them (who makes me think of Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds) points out there is a note from the landlord on the door saying it is never to be completely shut because it would be a fire hazard. By this time the door has vanished, and it is now a bit of a mattress that has been leaned against the door, instead. I am trying to find a way to position it so it will leave a gap of several inches at the very top, where it will still allow some privacy, rather than at the side. Just can't get it to stay that way.

Suddenly my third floor room is very rickety, and the only access is an unstable staircase which seems to be turning into an even more unstable ladder. As the football players wander a few feet, a blonde who I think is Billie Piper has come over to speak to me for a few minutes, then wants to get back to the ground floor. She is afraid to try the ladder, however, so has put on a climbing harness is is going to kind of scale her way down, except I have to use a rope/bungie sort of contraption to lower her down, as well. She's scared, and things aren't working too well at first, but I release some of the tension, and soon have her at a point where she only has to drop about a foot to the ground on the outside of the house. This has also lowered me to the ground on the inside of the house.

I head out a door where the football players are, and I find myself in a mall. It is still the middle of the night, mall has long been closed, and we are the mall security. [Possibly inspired by a conversation with somebody working mall security on here last night before I went to bed.] There are several people wandering around when they shouldn't be, and we start to try and run them out. I take a minute to walk in a restroom, turn on a light, and relieve myself. For some reason I am about a foot long. I'm thinking that is kind of cool, but as I fasten my pants I am now perhaps four feet long, the end of myself trailing out my trousers on the ground, and with a faucet on the end of it. It is some sort of joke item, and as I come out of the restroom like that, and we're walking back toward the house, the football players are joking about it.

As we walk along, the site has kind of turned to Indiana Wesleyan University, where the FCM convention is going on. This is a magic convention I have attended a few times in the past, and I believe it is going on this week in real life. Anyway, as I am walking along, one of the other guys has picked up my egg vase and is looking at it, and discovers the secret to it and is waving it around. I grab it from him and am trying to get him to stop ... does my act no good at all! Strange little dream.

07-24-2012 -- I'm in my room in a house where I am renting a room, and it seems like Randy (one of the roommates where I currently live) and I are sharing a room. There is very thick dust everywhere, and it is obvious nothing has been dusted in years. There is a third roommate here, as well, and he has a slim black girlfriend. I'm thinking about asking the others for some help in maybe dusting a little, but figure I am not going to ask until the girl friend leaves. But Randy already has a can of Pledge, and is starting to work.

He's dusting a table, and to help him out, I start picking up the stuff sitting on the table. He asks me where I am going to put it, and I admit, right back where I picked it up from, but in the meantime, he'll be able to dust more of the table. Mom is there, as well, though she doesn't seem to actually do anything.

Soon things shift, and I am driving in the city centre of either Cambridge or London, and am thinking about the recent visit I made to the museum in another dream. Strangely, though I could have sworn I posted that dream, I cannot currently find it. In the car with me are mom, Randy, and the black girl friend. I'm turning a corner, and suddenly the brakes don't work, and I find myself jumping a curb onto a lawn, and hit a couple of wooden posts that help me to stop.

I'm right next to a broken down car, and suddenly a police car pulls up next to both of us. I'm worried the cop is going to give me a ticket, but he seems to be ignoring me. I can't go forward, and I have cars to the left and the right, so all I can do is start to slowly back out, but the brakes are still not working, and I am worried about them. I'm being very slow and careful, but as I approach the curb, I am afraid I'll shoot right back out into the intersection, so I open the door and stick out my foot, using it to brake.

I'm still on the grass, right at the edge of the curb, and now the cop is watching me, so I want to be very sure I keep control of the car. I decide I better carry it to the street. But when I turn around, it suddenly isn't there. So I bend over and pick up a large nothing, and very carefully set it down in the street. I'm still worried about the brakes in my, now non-existent, car, but the black girlfriend tells me to just add some brake fluid and I ought to be fine. I seem to remember an Auto Zone about a half-mile down the road, so I figure I can get some fluid there.

The car still isn't there, so I very carefully climb into nothing and mime taking a seat. None of the passengers have any problem doing the same thing. As we're just sitting there in thin air and about to start driving, a young kid comes up to us and fastens a Pleasure Island wrist band around my wrist. He starts nattering on about saving seats for me and collectibles and stuff. As he runs off, I tell the others he is a great kid, but I don't know why he is saving seats for me at a Disneyland stage show when I am currently closest to Euro Disneyland.

We start driving, and I realize I am on the wrong side of the road, but so are most of the other cars. In my dreams, most people in England seem to be tourists who can't remember which side of the road to drive on. We keep kind of drifting from one side of the road to the other. Meanwhile, this road in England seems to be Euclid Avenue, and the shop I seem to remember is just a couple of doors down from Euclid and Malvern / Chapman in Fullerton. But it is in England.

I'm nearly to the building I am looking for, but it is no longer an Auto Zone, but a photography store being run from an old house. We step inside, and I really need to buy some of the flat round batteries for my camera, but I don't have any money. But I remember that I don't have a car, either, and that hasn't stopped me, so I just reach into my pocket and pull out nothing, which I figure I'll use to pay for the batteries. That was I don't have to borrow money from mom.

All the people who work in the shop are females, and somehow I know they are all werewolves and vampires, though it doesn't seem to be affecting them right now. I've been here before, and the woman who owns the place remembers me, even though it has been 15 or 20 years. Somehow zombies are mentioned, and one of the women snaps out "We aren't dead, yet!" I see Amy Pond walk down a hall, but only half-register it in my mind. The whole thing is very surreal. A few moments later, she wanders back through and starts up the staircase. I turn to Chris Hires next to me, and in tandem we both shout "We've got Amy Pond" kind of like the Weasley Twins shouted out "We got Potter!" at the Hogwarts sorting.

07-28-2012 -- I am driving down a road, in Omaha, I think. It is late at night and I am hungry. I am hoping to find something to eat, and as I drive along, I find a New York-style pizza parlor. The name is something like Giovanni's or the like. I stop and enter, and find the place does seem to be open, but shelves and cupboards and displays are almost empty. I realize the place has either just opened, or is in the middle of selling everything and shutting down. They only have something like three choices of topping, cheese, pepperoni, or sausage. I really push it and ask for all three on my pizza. The guy is making me a very large pizza (at least 18", maybe even larger) but doesn't seem to know what to charge me. I offer him $15, but keep wondering to myself if I might have offered too much or too little.

As I am waiting outside the apartment-like parlor, there seems to be somebody hunting me. I spot a figure in a nice suit who seems to be following me, but is trying to stay out of sight. He keeps dashing around corners or hiding behind walls. He is trying to shoot me with bullets or poison darts, and soon seems to be trying to build some sort of explosive mine or something, but it falls apart. I gather up as many pieces as I can to try and keep them away from him, then run off.

A couple of miles away I come to a warehouse on the NE corner of an intersection. I glance inside and find it is my warehouse, and there are three small box trucks that I know are filled with explosives or something. There are some incompetent thugs that have been sent to hunt me down that are driving down the street in two larger trucks filled with some kind of ordinance to use against me, but they are stupid, and they really aren't at all sure what they are supposed to be doing.

I convince them that I am not me, but am actually one of their bosses, and I order them to start moving all the stuff in their trucks into my trucks of explosives. Since they are carrying things like detonators, I know this can be a dangerous combination. I wait until they are both out of site in a couple of the trucks, and then go running to the south while they cannot see me. As long as they don't actually see me running off, they won't be worried, and will keep doing as I told them.

I know that when the explosion happens, it is going to be very powerful, and most likely nuclear, so I really want to get at least a mile away, so I can be safe. I keep running south in Omaha, and get a couple miles down to a major street. I knew what the street was in the dream, but cannot remember it now. Dale is now with me, and we are both running. We get to this major street, and find a bus just pulling up. We both board it, and I have .75 for the bus fare, but when I try and put it in a slot, the driver starts screaming at me that it is the wrong place, and he orders me to put the money in a different slot.

He is very rude and obnoxious, and I really find I don't like him. He keeps screaming abuse at me, and I am considering really telling him off, but instead decide to take a seat. As I get a little further back in the bus, he orders me to choose a locker and take the key. Amazingly there is a row of lockers. I tell the driver I don't need a locker, and he just gets more abusive. Rather than fight about it, I pull out a key that turns into a lock in my hands.

Dale and I sit down, nervous, and quietly discuss the upcoming explosion. We keep our voices down because we don't want the other passengers to hear us and report us. Soon the bus has turned into some sort of stadium, and we are in the stands, surrounded by ladders made up of a kind of horizontal window blinds. To get higher up and move to the next level, we have to climb these rickety blinds, but as we get a little way up, they all fall apart and collapse, leaving us to fall on our backsides.

I get to an area with some nice sofa-like benches that seem to be a little higher up, so I hope to have a shorter way to climb, as the blinds-ladders start to reappear. By this time it is feeling very much like some sort of video game, though we're in it, instead of just playing it. I look around and find Dale is gone, so I realize he must have solved the puzzle, and moved on to the next level. I still don't know how to do it, so I pull out my cell phone and call him. There is a lot of interference, and I can barely hear him, but he says something about the lock before the call drops. I start to realize the bus driver may have been an idiot, but there was a reason he ordered us to take the locks.

I wait a few seconds for the blinds to reset again, then start to climb. I go up about twenty rungs, and can just feel the tension as the thing is about to fall apart and drop me. At that point the dream kind of turns into a good news/bad news story. It's good that the driver insisted I take the lock. It's bad that right as I need it, I drop it. It's good that I happen to have a combo lock of my own in my backpack. It's bad that I can't remember the combination. It's good that the combination is printed on the back of the lock. It's bad that the combination is wrong. It's good that the thing opens up, anyway. It's bad that as it opens up, it starts to fall apart. It's good that as it starts to fall apart, it has turned into a lock mechanism like "The Club", the thing they used to sell to kind of lock steering wheels.

The bar that I end up holding is exactly what I need, and I slip it over some sort of stud on both ends of the blinds, right before they start to fall apart. Everything beneath me collapses, but I am able to continue climbing up to the next level. By this point, the dream is feeling like some sort of a competition, as well as a sort of video game. I find myself in a strange, colorful landscape that very much reminds me of the new Runespan in Runescape, but the place is very weird.

People are running around, throwing bowling balls, base balls, basket balls and other objects around, but the rules of physics don't seem to fully apply. Balls swirl down odd gravity wells, or break holes in the walls, and people follow them to try and find paths to the next level. I throw a couple of bowling balls, and they work all right, but when I try and throw the smaller balls, I can't throw worth beans, and always let go of the ball way too late, so it slams into the ground a foot or two in front of me, rather than flying through the air and triggering anything. Somehow I manage to make it at least a half a level further, however.

Now I am grabbing guns and things, and shooting at weird aliens and targets that seem more like a Buzz Lightyear-type of shooting gallery ride at a theme park. I'm doing a lot better with this than with the throwing balls thing. I shoot my way through several targets and barriers, and kind of fly into the next area.

I suddenly find myself in a swim suit in what seems to be a very colorful water park. I am on a large field with circles of colors with numbers in them, looks like some sort of giant Twister game. I see some odd footwear that is kind of a cross between flippers, snow shoes and skis. I try and get one on one of my feet, but don't have a chance to get one on the other. I have to start trying to run through the fields as different numbers are being called.

If I land on one of the circles before another number is called, jets of water help propel me in the right direction. If I hit the wrong circles, the water is pushing me in the wrong directions, and is liable to knock me over. Soon I have shot into the wrong direction one time too many, and find myself in a red sort of structure seconds before water is going to come at me from every direction and fully soak me. I'm horrible at this part of the competition, but I am also really having fun, and I am just starting to laugh about the soaking as I wake up.