All DJ Entries

Bottomless

Towards the end of the women's choir concert, a soloist walks on. I don't recognize her as one of the members of the choir. Her first few notes have pretty bad tone, which I realize must be because she hasn't done any singing yet in the concert (so she isn't warmed up). As the song goes on, she doesn't get much better--although she does have a nice stage personality, so the song's still enjoyable. But eventually she stops and goes into the bathroom. It's kind of dark, so I'm not sure about this next part, but . . . when she comes out of the bathroom, it looks like she's not wearing any pants or underwear.

Dreamer's Tales

I'm reading from a random dream journal on DV. The writer uses a large, boldface font. The basic story is that he's incapacitated the leader of the bad guys, but he's still looking around for the rest of them. Then he realizes that in the time he's been looking, the leader may have woken up again. For all he knows, the leader could be standing right behind him, right now. The DJ entry stops there. I'm delighted to realize that I understand why: the sense of being followed is sometimes scary enough to cause the "Abort! Abort! Nightmare!" response. Overall, I'm impressed with this dream and with the way it was told.

Revelry

My dad is laughing about something he just heard from one of his friends. Apparently, that friend just received a call that his son was arrested in Philadelphia. As far as anyone knows so far, he got drunk with some friends, and they decided to fly over there to watch our state football team play an away game? Either way, it's hilarious.

Gaps

I'm writing in my dream diary when I realize that I'm running out of space: there are some more notes in the diary, below where I'm writing right now. I must accidentally have written on that page one time when there wasn't enough light to see what I was doing. I have plenty more stuff to write, though, so I need more room. I look back at the previous page and notice five or six blank lines on the bottom. I have no idea why I skipped those, but good thing I did! Now I have enough space to finish my entry.

Accio Glasses

I'm home between classes, working on something. When I look at the clock, I realize that it's way past time for me to be heading back to school. Class has already started. Even worse: I just remembered I have a worksheet due today. I meant to work on it during this break, but it completely slipped my mind. Hurriedly, I gather up my things from the room and start towards the door. I notice that everything looks a little fuzzy, and I realize I've forgotten to put on my glasses. I run back to the room in which I left them. They're all the way on the other side of the room, and my sister's sitting in an easy chair, reading a book. I suspect she's irritated about all the noise I'm making, so I try to make a joke.

"Accio glasses!" I say, pointing my hand across the room. That way, she'll realize I'm in a hurry (since I wish I could just summon my glasses, rather than walking to them). Hopefully she'll also think I'm in a good mood ('cause it's a joke), and it'll put her in a better mood (since it's a Harry Potter reference). Anyway, my glasses case rises from its resting place and floats across the room to hover in front of me. It opens, and my glasses float out and unfold themselves. Bemused, I reach for them. But apparently they were expecting me to reach for a different part, because they helpfully dart a foot to one side, causing me to miss. On the second try, I grab them.

Cast Iron

I'm being chased by a wild animal, a bear or something. Right in front of me is an alley guarded by a cast iron gate. If I can climb over the gate, I'll be safe. But the bear is right behind me, so I have to climb quickly. Once I start climbing, my arms and legs suddenly feel like they weigh fifty pounds apiece. They get tangled in the gaps in the cast iron, and I know I won't make it up in time.

I decide to try again. This time, I'm being chased by a gorilla with tentacles on its chin, like Davy Jones from PotC. But it's also farther back and I'm already halfway up the gate. I manage to get over in time. I watch as it runs up to the gate and starts climbing after me. Uh oh. I run to a door at the end of the alley, just a plain rectangle of wood, painted white. It opens inward, but the space behind is almost entirely filled by the door itself. I try to hold the door at just the right angle to squeeze around the edge, so that I can shut the door behind me.

Presentation Day

I walk into my English class, and the teacher says "Let's talk about [insert author here]." I'd completely forgotten about that reading. I remember him assigning it almost on the first day of class, but I thought he would remind us at least once before the day it was due! Apparently he expects us to keep track of everything we should be doing. Which is fine, except that I've failed that expectation. I'm supposed to have read an entire play, but I have no idea what it's even about.

A small group of students goes to the front of the room to do their presentation. Sometime during the course of class, I accidentally scratch a girl's ankle.

I wake up [falsely]. Taking a long, sharp metal stick, I go into the front hall and begin scratching the wooden floor, writing down my notes for the dream I just had. My sister walks by just as I finish writing the name of the girl I accidentally scratched. I notice she's looking at the name, and I'm worried she'll recognize it, or perhaps mistakenly associate the name with someone else she knows, who just happens to have the same name.

Water Damage

It's time for my lesson to start! The instructor and the one other student are already swimming out from the shore. I hurry after them, but then I realize that I'm still carrying the 600-page novel I've been reading. Water damage! I panic and get out of the water, extremely grateful that the covers of the book are laminated. Only the first quarter inch of pages seems to be wet. I don't know how many pages that is, but I sit down and start peeling them apart one at a time, blowing on each of them, for all the good that will do. This is a library book, and I have to save it, and my lesson can wait. By looking at page numbers, I notice that sometimes the pages are stuck together so closely that I flip three of them at a time without realizing it. That just goes to show how dangerous water damage is.

Despair

For the last week or so of class, the instructor is alternating days between individual work and group rehearsal. There's one piece that we'll all play together as an orchestra, but all the other ones we must each prepare on our own. Today's for individual work. I feel like I've been pretty productive so far, but I'm still worried that I only have half an hour of class time left. My project doesn't feel close to finished.

I get an unexpected call on my cell phone, so I walk over near the doors to the auditorium while I answer. It's a young boy, I'd guess about thirteen or fourteen years old, and I can't quite figure out what he wants. He says something about a ScanTron, and he seems to be asking my permission for something. He's not very coherent, and whenever I ask him a question, there're about five seconds of silence on the line before he answers. Other people in the auditorium are staring at me like I'm being rude, so I leave to go pace around the hallway instead.

Eventually this boy says, "Your answers were very helpful," and with a shock I realize what he must be talking about. Not long ago I took a short quiz for this class, and I turned in my ScanTron by dropping it into a slotted box in the room. This kid must have taken out my ScanTron and copied my answers when he went in to take the test, and then his parents found out about it, and now they're making him call me. I hadn't realized that the test I took--questions from the 11th grade ACT--used the same set of questions as the actual ACT for eleventh graders this year. This is not a good situation. But I don't see that there's anything I can really do about it at this point, so I don't react strongly one way or another.

Another voice comes on the line. It's an older man, probably the boy's father. "You've been surprisingly nice to my son," he says.

"Nice?" I ask.

"Yes. We were worried you might press charges for theft."

Theft? Wait, did this kid actually steal my ScanTron without putting it back in the box? That would be bad news; that test is a significant portion of my grade for this class. I ask the boy if he put my test back. He doesn't seem to understand the question. I sometimes hear an indistinct voice in the background, as if his dad is coaching him about what to say. I try asking him other questions, but he has trouble with all of them. Eventually I back up and ask if he's even in eleventh grade. That, at least, he answers in the affirmative, though he doesn't enunciate very clearly. He eventually says something that reassures me that my test is still safely turned in. That was all I wanted to know, and I'm fed up with this horrendously ineffective conversation. But I don't like this kid, so before I hang up, I give him an angry, rapid-fire lecture about everything he's done wrong. I tell him to answer more quickly when people ask questions over the phone, and I tell him never, EVER to take anything out of boxes with slots on top. I also threaten to come after him if there are any problems with my grade on that test. I hang up without waiting for him to answer (though I wonder if maybe I spoke too quickly for the slow-minded fellow to understand anything), and I go back into the auditorium.

Another student is just finishing giving his presentation (a slide show about something from physics), and people are packing up to leave. Crap. The instructor must have asked for volunteers, since presentations weren't supposed to start for another day or two. That this guy was already prepared makes me feel even worse about my own project.

A friend of the presenter's drops some review worksheets on the seats at the back of the room, near the exit. I grab one on my way to get my things, even though my chances of being able to do the worksheet without having heard the presentation are very low.

When I try to put the worksheet into my backpack, I knock a hose loose from a glass jar, and the hose starts filling my backpack with water. I'd stuck the hose in the jar earlier because I couldn't figure out how to turn off the water. And now it's ruining everything in my bag, taking my progress on the project from "very little" to "absolutely nothing."

It's too much. Maybe I should try to turn off the water or control the damage but it's too much. I give up. I seize one of my juggling balls, hurl it across the room, collapse tumultuously into a chair, and start sobbing. Some of the nearby students are looking at me; others are trying to ignore me. I see people throwing my juggling ball around the room. At my feet, the water coming from the hose thins to a trickle, then stops, and I know the instructor has shut off the water supply. Moments later, he comes to look at me from the next row forward, frowning.

"I've seen a lot of reactions like this in the past few days," he says.

It didn't work, I realize. Despite my complete breakdown, he's refusing to show me any extra sympathy. What an unfeeling world this is.

My dad comes to drive me home. Suddenly I realize that, in my distraction, I've forgotten to put on my seat belt, and my dad is careening straight towards some cars stopped at a light. With my free hand, I seize the strap and pull it across my body, hoping that holding it in place will be useful even if I haven't managed to fasten the buckle. Dad swerves out of the way, narrowly avoiding an accident, and explains that he was trying to do a live performance arrangement of "Jingle Bells" using sounds that a car makes. Shaken and annoyed, I tell him irritably that that was a really bad idea. He seems to think it's my fault, though, since I was humming the tune earlier.

Back in my room, I decide to do something really simple to convince myself that I'm not a complete failure at life: I put on my glasses. But the glasses don't work. I can't make the world come into focus. I can't even do that. I try reviewing some German instead. I stare at the word "ssssssssut" for a time, but it doesn't make any sense even though I know it should. At this point, basically the only emotion I'm feeling is despair.

Class Policies

I come to class early and run into "Cameron," a high school acquaintance. He tells me about a sort of email writing group that the teacher, Mr. G, runs. Students write in with philosophical and spiritual questions, then the group discusses what the answers might be. Recently, Mr. G has re-forwarded a lot of those questions, saying that people tend to spend a long time thinking about them then forget to reply, and that it's time to revitalize the discussion group. In particular, Cameron opens up a web page that looks a lot like the "check subscriptions" page on the DV forums. There are two threads in the inbox, both of which have been resurrected by Mr. G. But the most recent post before him was from like 2006, so Cameron and I laugh about how ridiculously old they are.

With a jolt, I notice that it's past time for class to have started, and I should be in my seat. I snatch my backpack from the floor and speedwalk down the long table in the middle of the room until I find an open seat, hyper-conscious of how disruptive I'm being. But when I sit down, I realize that Mr. G isn't here yet. Also, the long table at which I'm sitting has been covered with equally long, yellow venetian blinds, which apparently have been removed from the windows along one side of the classroom. (Through these windows, the inside hallway is visible.) I'm surprised no one's gotten rid of the blinds yet. I decide this must be a psychological experiment. Mr. G's trying to see if anyone will point out how strange it is to have venetian blinds for a tablecloth, or if instead we'll all just sit around waiting for someone else to speak up first. Well then. I get up and start rolling up the blinds (lengthwise), and before long others start helping me, and we finish that job. Then I ask an older woman if the proper way to store venetian blinds is to continue to roll up the blinds the other way, like a sleeping bag. She says yes, so I do. I hand the roll (which is not much larger than a dinner plate) to one of the other students.

Then Mr. G arrives. He takes the roll and starts hanging up the blinds over the windows. Oops. I guess that's what we should have done. I take the other half of the blinds and try to help by hanging those up. There are two rubber hooks which I have to snap over a pole above the window, similar to a shower rod. The pole is a bit higher that I can comfortably reach, and it takes some force to get the hook onto the pole. But I see this only as a challenge, and after some jumping and stretching, I manage to hang the blinds. Belatedly I realize that this may itself have been a psychological test, testing how stubborn I am about doing things myself when it would be easier with assistance.

Mr. G starts talking about class policies. There are only four big rules, which he calls "domains." They're all pretty standard for high school classrooms; stuff along the lines of, "Listen when the teacher is speaking." He shows us a well-designed, colorful poster of four students arranged in a diamond, each demonstrating one of the four rules. He also points out that the only reason he has rules at all is for the symbolism of it. If he makes rules, it establishes him as a leader of the class, and that's what allows society to function. Interesting.

Frags:

• I thought I wrote down a few other dreams, but those must all have been false awakenings. One of those dreams I debated whether to "censor" using spoiler tags, but then I decided it wasn't necessary.

Summer School

On Monday, we have an orientation. Then I go to bed to get rested for classes tomorrow.

For the first day of classes, we have to get in line for some kind of check-in. The line moves slowly, and by the time it's 8:25 I'm still a few places back from the front. My first class is at 8:30, so I think I need to go. I pick up my bags and leave the line, but one of the check-in ladies intercepts me.

"Oh, I'm sorry, did you have an early appointment today?" she asks.

I'm confused, because I don't think class counts as an "appointment," and doesn't every student in this room have class at 8:30? But we go through check-in anyway, and when we're finished, suddenly I remember that I was supposed to set back my watch by forty-five minutes. So I'm actually not late at all. No wonder no one else was worried.

I head to my morning class, thinking I'll be early. But when I get to the room, there are already a lot of people there. What? It's not even 9:00, and this class doesn't start until 10:00! But then I remember that this class is usually MWF, and we couldn't have class yesterday because of orientation. So the professor is squeezing in an extra session on Tuesday morning to make up for it. Hmph. Maybe he ought just have planned to have one less day's worth of material in the course.

The morning class involves a running game where there are a lot of items strewn around a medium-sized room with a grid-patterned floor. Sometimes new items appear in the middle of the grid squares. There are certain items we're looking for, worth more points than the others. We're competing to see who can collect the most points.

The first time I play the game, I think I did pretty well. But it turns out another guy actually won, because he grabbed the items worth the most points. I hadn't even known what those were, but now that I do know, I want to play again. The second time, I notice that there are people stuffed into lockers along one wall of the room, and some of them are worth points. The animation for the game is pretty good, and rather charming.

Now it's time for the afternoon class. I'm skeptical about this one, because the subject seems like total hocus-pocus. I'm not even sure what it is, actually. The professor tells us to take out our textbooks, and the whole class groans. We remember this book from yesterday. The title is completely nonsensical, and by now I'm pretty sure this class will be full of New-Agey crap that doesn't have any business being taught in a university. Good thing I'm sitting in the back.

During class, I notice that the girl sitting on my left is resting her head on my leg and dozing. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, because it's almost like cuddling, and I'm glad she feels that comfortable around me. I'm also amused to confirm that she's just as bored as I am. She notices I've noticed, and she smiles. But it doesn't last too long, because the professor has the class break into groups for discussion and disperse to different rooms.

After discussion, there are still maybe twenty minutes left of class, but I don't feel like going back to the lecture hall. Everyone else leaves the discussion room, but I just spend a long time re-packing my backpack. I'm enjoying being lethargic, but I also hope that the professor doesn't take attendance at the end of class, so I don't get caught.

Later, I'm startled by a student coming into the room. But he's just there to move the front table back to where it was before discussion started. How responsible of him. Anyway, I guess that means class is over. Time to leave.

Seven Keys

A middle-aged man hands a young boy a pistol, warning him never, ever to speak a word of what has been done with that weapon. Presumably it was used to commit a murder of some kind.

In the very next scene, the boy brings the gun to another, older man, telling him mischievously that something terrible has been done with it. When the man asks what, the boy says, "We blue'd it," and takes out another of the same kind of pistol, except this one has been painted blue. Amusedly, the man pretends to be horrified by this action. The idea is that the color blue isn't very aggressive or serious or anything, so it has no business decorating something like a gun.

The boy pretends to aim the gun behind himself, but then coincidentally a spider the size of a small dog comes running into the hallway right where he's aiming. The man's face abruptly becomes very serious. Fighting these spiders is the main purpose of this community, and he says to the boy, "You may fire." But the boy, not having seen the spider, is just confused. Instead, the man lifts his own gun, takes careful aim, and shoots the spider.

Now, I'm in the final stages of a game involving these spiders. The building I'm in has seven levels, and in order to get a good score for the game, I have to collect one key from each level. The trick is that in order to reach the next level, you have to use the key from the previous level, and in the process of using it, you have to leave it behind. So there's got to be some kind of secret passage I can use to go backwards from the end and pick up all the keys. I'm running all over the building trying to find this passage, and I have to restart a few times from a save point near the top of it. There are about five or six other people helping me out with this.

This time, I try using a sort of wooden fire escape on the outside of the building. It's very reminiscent of a treehouse, spiraling around a tree and built entirely out of two-by-fours. There's one other person following me down. On one landing, there's a dead spider, lying in a pool of its own fluids. "Watch out!" I call over my shoulder. "Spider juice!" (It's very dangerous.)

Once on the ground level, I go inside to find a lot of people in a large room. They want something from me; they're expectant that I've gotten the keys; or something. In response, I start taking off my shirts. I'm wearing seven of them, one for each level in the building. But taking them off is actually very difficult. I can't quite seem to pull the first one over my head. A thirty-ish woman, someone I know, asks me what's wrong. I reply that I don't know. I tell her that apparently my arms just feel very tired and I can't muster the force necessary to take off a T-shirt.

Type: Regular dream.
Lucidity: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Vividness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This dream took place outside in the daytime, with a light blue sky, unlike most of my other dreams which were inside. The location was a slightly-rounded, clay-coloured cliff wall that I guessed was about thirty feet wide, and this cliff was attached to another wall, a bit taller and much longer in length, but consisting of the same saturated clay tone. The surface of the rounded cliff reminded me of flaky chalk or thin layers of stone (I could see some of the layers coming off and beginning to separate from the rest of the cliff). The other one looked like ordinary rock with a slightly chalk-like appearance to it. There was a rounded entrance, well carved-out, into the face of this long cliff, for students to come and go. The area was like a classroom, and I was the teacher; my job was to teach dream control to enrolled students.

I was hanging from the top of the rounded cliff, suspended against the side by a rope. The rope was held by a very heavy rock at the top of the cliff, and it was was made of that pale yellow straw-like material, and was probably no thicker than an index finger. I wasn't worried about it snapping, though, because my feet had found purchase on a piece of rock that stuck out a few inches from the rest of the cliff. It took some of my weight off the rope. Although I couldn't see them from my viewpoint, I knew my students were on top of this cliff, listening to what I was saying.

"The first thing about dream control," I said, "is that you have to be 100% certain. If you aren't, the dream won't act in your favour."

I then started pulling away at the shedding pieces of rock that the cliff was shedding, breaking them away and letting them fall to the ground below me. I noticed the textures and how much the cliff really looked like hardened chalk; it even had a slight amount of dust over it. I casually looked down briefly during this, however, and the pieces of cliff I'd taken off were nowhere in sight. After all, the cliff was so high up that it simply descended into white, blue-tinged clouds not twenty feet below where I was suspended. I was in absolutely no fear of falling or heights, though.

After a few moments of pulling a few layers of cliff off, from the outside of my peripheral vision I grabbed a stack of fifteen or so papers. I'm honestly not sure where these papers were from, because before when I was scanning the cliff, I didn't see any papers. Regardless, I looked briefly at them and saw that each one was white printer paper with neat, professional typing on it. In the upper-left region of each paper was a line and a messy scrawl of either a date or a mark (I can't remember which) in thicker-than-normal red pen, almost like marker. It didn't show through the other side of the paper though. I looked up to the top of the cliff, still unable to see my students, and held it up so they could take the papers from me.

I sat there for maybe a minute before starting to panic slightly. Had they left me here?

Then I saw a hand reach over and miss the papers, pull back, then get ahold of them. I let go and the student took them. I then looked to the right of where I was, at the longer cliff wall consisting of a more rock-like appearance, and pushed off the cliff I was on, floating over to the flat surface sticking out of the wall (where I could stand). I landed a few feet to the left of the rounded entranceway, and saw students who I could not identify starting to walk out. I was leaving, probably because I wasn't the teacher for this class. However, as I walked towards the exit and ended up in front of it, I saw one student coming out whom I recognized; she was from grade 11 at my school.

For some reason, I believed that she was leaving this class, even though she was entering the area and not leaving it. I said, "wait," and turned around to look out into the sky. In front of me was a new piece of rock; it was super flat on top but again in the same clay tone as the other cliffs! On the edge of it was a sheet of paper; it belonged to that girl. I must have dropped it.

The distance between the entrance and the piece of floating rock wasn't more than a foot, so I simply walked onto the rock, and walked back. It didn't sink down when I stepped on it. I handed the paper to the girl and she continued walking over to the rounded cliff, but I didn't look back.