Confessions Of A Somnesiac: Spamtek's Journal

**Spamtek** · 07-07-2006 04:57 PM

Intro post. This is mirrored at http://somnesiac.livejournal.com, and I'll probably flood it with a few old entries from my still-young journal on ld4all to bring it up to date.

Replies not only welcome, but demanded.

Color Key:
Normal Dream Material
Lucid Dream Material
Waking Life
Commentary

Rating System (1-10; 0 for inapplicable) VMSFL:
Vividity: Sensory engagement. Brightness of colors, tartness of sounds, etc.
Memorability: Plot cohesiveness, novelty, interesting details, clever phrases, etc.
Scope: Sense of size: spatial, temporal, and otherwise. Was it epic?
Feeling: Sense of personal meaningfulness. Intuited irrationally, emotionally. (formerly Meaning)
Lucidity: Control and consciousness. N/A for nonlucid.

Index retired because I can't be arsed.

**Spamtek** · 07-13-2006 06:56 PM

2006-07-11 - Medicated Haze; Spontaneous Hurricane

After much decision, I had decided to get my gut worked on before my military insurance expired. I had checked into a hospital and gotten myself a nice hospital bed; apparently the operation was quite serious because I had to take a whole battery of premedications, and I had a small army of friends who were supposed to observe me and make sure I wasn't getting up to no good. The operation was supposedly quite simple, so it felt like they were overblowing things. I remember the drugs they put me under made me think that I was Calvin at one point and I started creating comic scenarios to put myself in in my mind, including one where I would sled from the top of a hill to a stop, then pick my sled up and throw it as far as I could as some kind of statement against physical limitations. It seemed really clever in the dream but not so much now.

I had just returned home from school to our house, which was considerably fancier than ours now with shag carpet and multiple levels, situated on a southern community next to the sea, on a golf course built upon layer and layer of gently sloping hills. I could look out one of our windows and see a lot of different housing communities split up by little manmade streams which were themselves criscrossed by little manmade bridges, and little copses of trees and palm trees broke up the manicured-lawn monotony of the course. It was really quite idyllic. Soon after returning home, though, I noticed that the weather outside was turning from nice to bad to worse. Gusts of wind were rattling the trees, and the cloud cover was quickly descending upon my surroundings: it looked like the contents of a roiling cauldron turned upside-down, swirling and bubbling with ominous intensity, and it kept on lowering closer and closer to the ground. As it lowered, winds began rising to absolutely insane levels, and I saw branches begin snapping off of trees and unattended objects begin flying away. I knew this was some sort of hurricane, and I started trying to gather up the pets and get them to safe ground. After finding a few, though, I glanced out the window again and witnessed whole palm trees start to get unearthed, flying across the landscape like massive lawn darts ready to puncture anything in their path, and I think a few cars began to go airborne as well. Houses all around me were being torn to pieces, but the gale that surrounded my house apparently didn't quite touch it, because while I could hear the wailing wind outside it wasn't battering the house at all. I finally panicked and ran to the bathroom at the center of the house, as far away from danger as I could get, and waited the spontaneous storm out, which lasted another half a minute or so.

When I came out to survey the damage, the house had still been untouched, although spontaneous outside flooding had led to a few water stains around doors and windows. I started doing a head check of all the pets, but to my horror I discovered that Hazel (dog) had died in the storm: she lay motionless on her side next to a window. Although I had heard no thunder, apparently a bolt of lightning had struck through a window and killed her.

After this, I left the house and began wandering rather aimlessly, surveying the destruction. Most palm trees had been uprooted and it was simply a matter of luck that my house hadn't been impaled by one. I walked south to the poorer side of town, which hadn't been hit as hard but was still in tatters due to the poorer build quality of the structures there. I walked around like this for a while, until I noticed the clouds descending and the winds picking up again, and I quickly ran into a seaside mansion to escape the relentless storm again. I felt bad that I couldn't return home and protect the pets.

**Spamtek** · 07-13-2006 07:17 PM

2006-07-12 - Giant Musical Face, Me In A Movie, Palace In Atlanta, Crystal Wands

I was part of a hyperintellectual troupe of super-artsy kids who were probably all good shoe-ins for UGA Honors. I believe we were at some sort of boarding house, and these kids constantly came up with silly ideas to keep themselves entertained. Their latest idea was to put on a musical (maybe a music skit is a better term) populated by one massive character, a giant king's face. The way it worked is that they designed different cardboard cutouts of different facial features, some of which had popup-book qualities to them, and they would sing a "partridge in a pear tree"-style song, slowly starting with a single kid with this guy's mouth and then bringing out the rest of the facial features one-by-one as the song became more complex. The actual song was some clever little ditty about a pig. There were 12 kids and since I didn't play a very active part in creating anything (I thought the entire thing was ridiculous) they assigned me part #11, the right eyebrow, and actually I never even learned the song until ten seconds before we got up on stage to perform it in front of a massive crowd (why there would be a massive crowd for our motley performance was beyond me). I can't really remember how the song went.

In any case, there were a bunch of stepladders arranged for kids to climb when the time was ripe, and the musical got underway. Everything went fine up until the appearance of #9, who I thought was supposed to be the right eye... but it turned out that had I actually looked at the cutout they gave me, I was not only the eyebrow but the eye as well, and that there were only 10 kids, not 12. Being as such, I was actually #9 instead of #11, and when 9 failed to get out on the stage, I just stood there thinking "ha! what an idiot that kid is!" After nervously repeating their latest stretch of the song a few times, the kids got irate and called the performance off, and they afterwards asked me what the hell my problem was, why didn't I get on stage, which is when I figured out my mistake.

For reference, here were the facial features in order of intended appearance:
1. Mouth
2. Chin
3. Nose
4. Right Cheek
5. Left Cheek
6. Right Ear
7. Left Ear
8. Hair
9. Right Eye/Eyebrow
10. Left Eye/Eyebrow

After that, I sort of became the black sheep of the performing group, being shunned everywhere I went. I personally hated these prentious art ninnies, but there was no one else around to associate with. After this incident, my perceptions slowly zoomed out of myself so that everything I did was in third person, and I was actually sitting in a living room in my dad's palatial estate (imaginary) watching myself in a movie, one of those Nickelodeon/MTV kitsch movies intended to keep young adolescents entertained and little else. Even though it had gotten a *** review, I thought it was complete trash (although I kept on watching it 'til the end). After the face incident, I (the movie me) ended up playing a lot of sports, and anything I played in I failed miserably, partially due to my poor physical coordination and partially because everyone tried to make sure that I failed as just desserts for my sabotage on the play. Eventually the movie got caught up in a plot about a supernatural body of water that hid itself in dark places and consumed teenagers when they were alone. In one particular instance a kid was washing someone else's SUV inside a mechanic's garage but noticed that it was rocking from side-to-side heavily. He opened the trunk door and was engulfed by an inky, oily goop that stripped his flesh to the bone in seconds before fleeing the scene down a water drain.

The theme song to this movie was ridiculously trite, overbearing, and long - as a matter of fact, the entire second half of the movie (and it was a long movie) was haunted perpetually by it. There was one instance where I reentered the movie as first person, where my sister and I were sitting in a coffee lounge/candy shop and were desperately trying to find something to block out the neverending candy-sweet lyrics of the song.

The rest of the dream had to do with the "reality" I had zoomed out of my movie role into. It was in some byzantine remix of downtown Atlanta, what Atlanta would have looked like had victorian architecture remained perpetually in vogue and had Atlanta been located deep in the jungles of India. My dad was some unbelievably rich colonist who could afford to to pretty much own half of the downtown area and populate it entirely with a massive swath of orchards and gardens surrounding a relatively small but ridiculously ornate estate house. We had just moved there, so I was splitting my time in between helping carry furniture off the palates the movers had left them on out in the yard and exploring the house and its surroundings. On our property I discovered a tiny little shack of a gift shop, a place that sold extremely expensive and fancy artifacts from all around the world. I let myself in, where I found Welton Li perusing a strange array of irregular crystals. They looked a bit like wands from Harry Potter, but made of quartz, thicker, and shaped a bit like bones. These ones had elaborate translucent red bands located at random on their surface. Welton had apparently become a master of psionics in the time between my last visit and now, and he was browsing these crystal rods because they could amplify certain sorts of thoughts to increase his power. I asked him what he used his powers for, and said, "Not much, really. But that doesn't matter, what matters is the talent." I decided not to argue with him. Each little rod cost anywhere from $6,000 to $17,000, money which he apparently had in abundance because he purchased three of the more pricey ones, along with a huge marble dais with inlaid amethyst and jasper, the cost of which I could hardly even begin to estimate.

Curiously, when I returned to the house, the items Welton had bought were sitting on the mover's palates ready to be carried in. He didn't live with me, but I decided not to ask and just hauled them away inside with me.

**Spamtek** · 07-13-2006 07:30 PM

2006-07-13 - Contemplation In The Band Hall; Scavenger Hunt & Maze Race

Sitting quietly in the cool darkness of the band hall, I listened to the band playing, and playing, and playing. I didn't want to be a part of it, not right now - instead I just laid back and stared at the unfinished, dusty expanses of the hall ceiling, which looked a bit like a backstage area would. Derek Cole showed up at one point, as reluctant to go in as I was... he had contracted some sort of disease that had given him no end of pain and inconveniences, and it may have even served him a death sentence, and he was in no mood for hustling and bustling, playing and making a show of being cheerful when he most obviously wasn't. We sat together outside the the band room, exchanging simple ideas about life and fatalism and sharing that silent companion-feeling that I can only really only get in dreams. Others joined us, some more gregarious, some less, and while the loud ones usually wandered off after a while, the quiet ones stayed. We were not the movers and shakers. We were the people burdened by the world, who wanted nothing but a quiet spot and the company of others who could empathize with our personal dillemas, and us with theirs.

----

This was the sort of place where the darkness was tangible. It was a crossing, a sooty bridge surrounded by seedy harbors on both sides, connecting the New Town with the Old. My mother and I were there, and I was tasked with finding her something - I can't quite remember what, but it required extensive sleuthing, was part of a scavenger hunt of some description. I wandered the adjacent streets hunting for what I think was a rubber fish, and ended up with a bouquet of flowers instead, something she didn't mind at all receiving. Later, she was incredibly excited to find a city block nearby that, in her own words, "[had] eight street lamps on it! Can you imagine how much security that provides?" She was fond of taking walks but not so fond of being mugged and killed, so taking her walks in highly lit areas was a godsend to her. I accompanied her on her first walk around that block, and it seemed pleasant enough.

The finale of the scavenger hunt. Among the participants were me, Derek again, several of the ghetto crew from RHHS band, and most of the Super Mario cast, like Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, Koopa... I don't think bowser was there though. Our final task (we had done many others, either nondescript or immemorial, I suppose) was a race through a topsy-turvy maze. As we began the race, the camera zoomed out to show us in a 2D sprite-based system similar to Link to the Past... I ran fast and furious, and while I didn't end up first, I did manage to get to the end and to the airship docked there before time ran out... I passed Luigi on the way out who had exceptionally low self-esteem and had given up near the finish line, collapsing into the fetal position and mumbling to himself how terrible a person he was - I hauled him up, draped him across my shoulder, and strained and grunted my way to the finish line as the maze began crumbling to pieces around me. The camera had reverted to a real-life cinematic perspective by now.

Up on the airship, flying, we had a small celebration with trashy party snacks, while I stayed in a corner and tried to help Luigi recover from his psychotic breakdown. I wasn't sure where we were going or even why we had gotten on the airship in the first place, but everybody seemed irrationally excited.

**Spamtek** · 07-16-2006 01:16 PM

2006-07-16 - Dark Halls; Serial Killer Brother; Castle, Door, War

I was helping a poor lost friend navigate through a dream-representation of his own lost mind. We were crawling through the top floor of a completely pitch-black apartment building, he fumbling down the main corridor worriedly groping desperately for any sort of illumination to give him a bearing on where he was and what he was doing. There was a more interconnected reason for why he was here, but those pieces are still fuzzy in my mind. The hall was perhaps 100 meters long, with no windows and many open doors flanking its sides that we were afraid to go into. There was a man on the loose who was entirely too willing to kill us if given the chance, although we weren't sure if he was holed up here or not. Eventually he groped his way from one side to the other, and after having found no light switches or light bulbs or ceiling cords or anything, he began to despair. He desperately needed this hall lit up so that he could navigate the addled passageways of his own mind. I told him to kip up and not give up hope... I knew there must be a trick to lighting the place up, as I myself had actually felt light switches on the walls myself on my search - I had refrained from flipping them so that he could find his own way, but since he couldn't I decided it would be acceptable to help him along. We headed back from where we came, and I quickly ran my fingers against a light switch, as did he on the other side - we both flipped them, and a sickly, bare lightbulb flickered into existance above our heads at our end of the corridor. We discovered that the secret to illuminating the hallway was simply to begin from the beginning - one can't dive directly into the fray of his mind; he must first wade through the shallows, and so did we have to begin at the end of the corridor before heading towards the center. We slowly fumbled our way back, feeling through the darkness for the reassuring feel of the light switch before flipping it and moving on. It took us perhaps a half hour to make our way slowly from one end to the other, and when we finally did, we turned around and surveyed our work, the entire hall lit up now as clear as day.

J.S. suddenly lazily walked out from one of the side doors. This was where he lived, and he was in the process of snogging his five identical harem clones, one after the other. He asked if we could turn the lights off so he could get back to business, we asked if it was really that big a deal, he said no, and we went on our merry ways.

----

That serial killer I mentioned was the focus of an earlier dream. He was something of an insane mixture of Leonardo DiCaprio and that annoying cowboy actor, and he was quite simply a serial killer, killing for the sheer self-derived pleasure of it. He was also my elder brother, and I had to live every day knowing the list of people he had slaughtered without being able to do anything about it, my parents being a strange breed of being both loving and protective (which meant they never snitched on the atrocities my brother committed) and cold and heartless (because, well, they never snitched, again). This meant that he often killed with reckless abandon, as messily and overtly as possible, and took joy in the sheer visceral messiness of it. We lived on an obscure mountain residence in a tiny close-knit community, partially to attempt to curb his tendencies by isolating him from a lot of people. What it really meant was that he could usually get away with his killings better since there were bound to be less witnesses out in the country.

As it turned out, I was in love with a woman, and it was his sadistic plan and pleasure to woo her away from me completely before slicing her up into bits for his entertainment. I warned her again and again of the simple fact that my brother was crazy and would kill her, I warned her and my parents and the police and my brother himself and nobody listened; I was completely powerless as I watched him charm her socks off, slowly draw her to him until the marriage we were supposed to have was the marriage that they were having. After sealing the knot, later that night I walked in on the inevitable: him with meat cleaver in hand, her in a hundred fleshy pieces. In my rage I blindly charged at him; he could easily have cut me down but decided instead simply to run idly away, jumping from spot to spot in casual glee as I chased him with tears in my eyes.

----

There was a complicated aphorism that connected the first dream to this next dream, a self-referential nugget of wisdom that somehow became more wise the more you looked at it. After I was finished lighting the hall of the first room, I remembered this phrase and began saying it over and over again in my mind, and as I did the words began expanding and taking on a life of their own until they were the setting and props for this next dream.

----

I was member of a castle community, a small kingdom at the bottom of a long forested hill and flanked on either side by mountains. Our heraldric colors were red and white. I was technically a page just like all my other friends - everyone under the sun, although I remember Ian and the RHHS Ghetto Crew specifically - our parents were around, technically, but we mostly stayed in communal bunks, training and learning to become stalwart defenders of the land and all that good stuff.

We had peaceful, although tense, relations going on with a native tribe who lived just up the woody slope a little ways. They were primitive and mostly detested our presence, but we had valuable things to trade with them so they tolerated our presence.

Many other things went on in this castle, and suffice it to say that this place was my home: I slept there every night and in the course of this dream several nights did go by, although not in real-time. But what I remember was one specific event that kept on reoccurring. One night as I settled down into my tiny room (although still a private room, amazingly, and actually it mostly mirrored my RL room) I discovered to my aboslute amazement a door-shaped crack in the wall behind my bed. I examined it for a long time, but eventually decided it was perhaps a strange piece of water damage or who knew what else, and left it be.

The following night, though, things were different. I crept into my room and surveyed something even more amazing than last I had night: the outline of the door had given way to a full frame, door, and doorknob: they had pushed themselves out of the wall as if from nowhere, and where the frame stuck out of the wall there was an upwelling of cracked drywall, as if the door had erupted from the surface as violently and as contrary to the wishes of the wall as a zit. It was white, and wooden, and the doorknob gleamed in the twilight outside my window. Well... what else was I going to do? I had to open it and see where it led. Slowly, very slowly, I pushed and pulled and heaved my bed out of the way and tried the knob. It turned easily and the door swung open towards me...

I stepped through to find a mirror version of my own room, and after taking a step in and looking back, I saw that this door had erupted from the wall in a similar fashion to mine. Whereas my room was furnished with utilitarian items, this room was decked with a bunk bed, a whimsical desk, and the walls were painted with polka dots. Before I could venture further, I heard someone coming, and I dove for the cover of the door. On my side, with the door open but a crack, I watched a young girl enter the room from a trapdoor in the corner, possibly around 7 or 8, in a white dress and with long, blonde, wavy hair down to her hips. I quietly closed the door, not wanting to risk confrontation today. Had she seen the door? Was she the one who made it? What did she mean by it, and why did she install it in my room of all places? These were questions I didn't want to face that night. I pushed my bed back into its place blocking the door from opening.

The next day, an ill omen appeared. Apparently the tribal leaders of the nearby town had had enough of our meddling ways, and had declared war on us... they had promised to attack at noon of the next day. We, being defenders-in-training, were oath-bound to take part in the war. I was stricken with terror.

I rushed back to my room after the announcement and locked myself in. I wanted to find out more about this strange other place. I pushed my bed out of the way, but not before noticing that the door had begun receding into the wall a bit - indeed, while the frame was still there, the door itself had reverted into drywall from wood, although it was still functional. This worried me. I made my way in, and the girl was nowhere to be found. I timdly took the trapdoor down to the level below, and explored a few mostly bare rooms, until I turned a corner and - there she was! She was playing with a stuffed animal in the corner, and hadn't noticed my arrival. I cleared my throat and tried to introduce myself: she still didn't notice. I quickly discovered that she couldn't see me at all, nor hear me. I spent a lot of time dancing around her, waving my hands and asking her pointed questions, but to no avail. Eventually, confused and discouraged, I made my way back to my room. As I headed for the door, the girl came up after me. She still didn't notice me as I crossed her room to exit, but a strange thing happened the moment I crossed the threshold between her room and mine: she gasped and jumped, and I turned around, a step into my own room, and looked at her. She was frozen in place, staring right at me. Could she see me? I asked her something, and she said something in return, but I couldn't hear it. I tried to make my way back in, but the door slammed shut of its own volition, and when I tried to open it again it had become a solid part of the wall. No going back.

My sleep that night was morose, to say the least, as I was thinking about the war I could very well lose my life in tomorrow and the door that had shut itself forever on me.

In the morning, I awoke to an expected disappointment - the doorway behind my bed had descended entirely back into the wall from which it had came. I began to make my way, heavy-hearted, from the room, when to my amazement I saw another door outline, identical to the first, only with this one taking root behind a 7-foot-tall, narrow green display shelf on the opposite side of my room! It wasn't enterable yet, and the time was upon me when I had to don my battle paints and chain armor in preparation for the fight that was only a few hours away.

In the communal shower and locker rooms, testosterone was in the air as men and boys alike slapped red and white paints on themselves and strapped themselves into their battle gear. I went through the motions but with no bloodlust in my movements. The battle was nearly here, and we were to line up in just a few minutes... but I couldn't take the suspense. I dashed off back to my room despite the protestation of friends - I had to see if I could get to the other side just one more time!

My room had transmogrified into a common barracks, with long rows of impersonal bunks, but all the same it was an easy thing to find the emergent door, which was now fully functional. I threw my display case out of the way and dashed through the doorway...

I found myself back in the girl's room. To my right, she was standing there, and in front of her were her parents, who were loudly admonishing her:

"Katie, this door business needs to stop immediately! It's good to know that you can do it, honey, but it's dangerous! You don't know who could be on the other side, and besides, it's a headache to clean up. Now you're going to get to work right now on closing this one up, and after that we don't want to see another like it, ever! Do you understand?" Her face was downturned and I couldn't read her expression, but she slowly nodded her head and the parents, satisfied, left the room. I walked up to her again and attempted to make conversation, despite my failure last time. As I started speaking this time, though, she jerked her head upright and listened intently: apparently she could hear me a little bit this time! I bounded back to my side of the doorway, where once again I appeared magically before her eyes. She came to the doorway and held her ear against it, where I shouted into it: this was good enough that she could just barely make me out. I asked who she was and what she was doing, why this door was here, but all she could do was looking at me meaningfully - was she mute? It was at this point in time that my friends, who had apparently ran after me back to my room, burst in and overcame me, cursing me for my cowardice and dragging me away to my battle post. The girl, terrified by the arrival of these armed and burly men, stayed safely on her side and looked on in horror.

The battle was a great terrifying blur, and all I know is that I just barely survived out of sheer luck. When the adrenaline had stopped rushing and we had returned, I ran back to my room only to find the outline of the door mostly faded, with long nails sticking out indicating that the door had been forcefully hammered shut. As I watched the door, I saw new nails bursting from the surface, accompanied by a fairy-faint pounding of a hammer issuing forth from a world that I knew was eternally out of my reach now.

Despite this being one of the lengthiest pattern of dreams I've ever had, I'm amazed at the first one - I thought that using light switches never worked in dreams, but in this one I turned one on after the other methodically, probably flipped 50 switches, and each of them immediately produced a flood of light. Maybe this is a signal from my brain telling me that any and all reality checks I do will be thwarted by my mind's superior powers of reality simulation. (although I wasn't actually doing an RC, it was just part of the dreamplot - but come on, fifty switches in a row! Couldn't at least one of them have not worked? And later on I was essentially in my own room (in the castle), it was indentical to my real one, so you think I might have noticed that a doorway appearing in the wall and leading to an alternate dimension wasn't strictly canon... there are just so many signs I missed in here, just like I always miss signs, which is why I've yet to induce an LD. I'm so absolutely certain of all my surroundings; my dreams occur in fantasy realms so often that all my presuppositions of what would make a good RC just fly out the window.

**Spamtek** · 08-08-2006 11:08 PM

2006-08-08 - Vigilante VG Designer; Dual Dreams

Itsutaya Uzuki was a video game designer who defied convention and pigeonholing; he had been responsible for game after game that was a cut above the rest. Most notably, his games were famously nonviolent, which angered the VG Megacompanies who preferred video games to adhere to a rigid code of success: formulaic stories, regurgitated tropes,tried-and-true interfaces, and of course, lots of blood and guts. I was reading the Wikipedia article on him, which states that eventually the companies became fed up with Mr. Uzuki's antics and tried to clamp down on him; when they did, he simply chose to disappear entirely. He became a part of the underground game movement, associating with indie game developers and playing lots of go in his spare time.

I woke up at 2:30 AM and putzed around for a little while, before trying to WILD at 3:15.

----

A partial lucid dream? I believe that after some time, I incubated a scenario wherein I was visiting the RHHS band again (but there was a mishmash of CO and GA kids there). It was late night, and Jason and I were strolling together across a small college campus. through a tiny garden bordered by a glass room which served as the lobby for a residence hall, a hall where all the band kids were staying that night. Most of them were sitting in the lobby watching football (soccer).

A little later and it's morning; kids are slowly waking up and crossing the street into a covered market where there is a breakfast joint, inspired by beach cabanas and infused with modern edges, built with faux-drift wood and cold dark industrial steel - it was still very inviting though. I stood outside the door for some time watching and meeting kids as they filed through and into the joint. TO my surprise, Contage appeared as well - he was a guitar player in the concert band now. We shuffled off together for a few minutes, and he asked me if I had had any luck with lucid dreams yet, and just generally went on to explain how excited he was about them, even though he had only had a few as of yet as well. We eventually parted ways.

All the while this was happening, soft, exquisite music was playing in the background - something that sounded quite a bit like Sigur Ros's "Seaglopur," with soft, floating piano and tinkling celestas. Near the end it began taking equal time with an exact rendition of the end of Sigur Ros's "K K Harpadi" as well. I hadn't listened to either of these songs at all the day before.

So why lucid? Maybe it wasn't - but it was an extremely strange feeling, as if I was having two dreams at once. My awareness had split into three bodies: one section for my asleep self which, being asleep, I could not sense; one section for my dream self which, being a normal dream (AFAIK), I could experience only passively; but there was another section that seemed to occupy an alternate-reality dream of myself in bed, a dream where I was still attempting to practice the WILD techniques I had been while being genuinely awake. As the normal dream I've described carried on, this second dream also ran its course in the background: it was a dream where I was still trying to induce a lucid dream even though I was already dreaming (twice over, no less&#33

. I felt as if I was stuck in an odd position on my side, wrapped in pink bedding and being bathed in the very soft light of a very early dawn. Eventually I attempted to move my body in the dream, which I could only do the slightest bit - I could pull my arms out from my side a little, but they would soon come up against what felt like an invisible net, keeping me from moving them any further. I concluded that I was experiencing sleep paralysis and let my dream-self lie still, confident that this meant I would soon be experiencing a dream.

Eventually both dreams came to a close when I was awoken by a congested nostril of mine, which was producing loud hissing noises every time I exhaled. The sound materialized in both my dreams at the same time as a gargantuan black hissing cat, coming out of nowhere and spitting directly in front of me, which was unsettling. As I drifted into waking, I attempted to move my dream arms again and got the same results as before, but now I could sense my real body behind those arms, still as ever. Then I lost both dreams and awoke entirely.

How the hell am I supposed to know whether to call that lucid or not? I'm inclined to say that it was closer than I've ever been before, because if nothing else I was dreaming about trying to get a lucid dream, but it never dawned on me in either scenario that I really was dreaming. That second synchronous dream of mine was like the opposite of a false awakening... very strange, especially since I've never had a false awakening.

**Spamtek** · 04-08-2007 08:28 PM

2007-04-01

The Fatalist Fiasco

Vividity: 3/10
Memorability: 5/10
Scope: 5/10
Meaning: 6/10
Lucidity: N/A

Three individuals, linked by fate and misfortune.
There was me, or a dream representation of me, skinny and unsure of myself, possibly female.
There was Jack, a black man with smart short hair and glasses, an undercover journalist and daring raconteur. He wore a maroon overjacket.
There was another, possibly female as well...

All our lives were connected in that we had recently integrated World of Warcraft into our lives. I don't mean that we had decided to spend a portion of our lives sitting on a computer playing the game, but that we had gotten implants, devices, etc. that allowed for the simultaneous playing of the game with real-life actions and settings, on the fly. The devices and implants would modify our perception of reality on the fly, altering how the world looked around us in ways that would functionally match Warcraft's world without changing pertinent details - a subway station might become Onyxia's lair, complete with stalactite ceiling and nacreous cavern passageways, but we would still see the subway tracks and the early morning workaholics waiting for their ride. What could be changed into warcraft was, but nothing functional about the world ever changed. So, with only unimportant details being altered, we were given the best of two different worlds to experience simultaneously. Above and beyond this alteration, there was outright insertion of other things: items, characters, monsters. RP characters were physically indistinguishable in presence from real life human beings, although their dress and mannerisms usually gave them away.

I lived the life of each of these three people playing through their first electrifying few levels. I remember the thrill of seeing myself in my WoW armor, seeing my guildmembers packed around me, seeing the monsters I was fighting up close and personal. Every few levels a message box would pop up announcing my new title in-game, an admission of rank and honor for my valor. It was more than rank, actually, for the title was based entirely on my action and was more something like a class unto itself, even though a mage was still a mage and a rogue a rogue. It heavily modified your class. Every tenth level the paradigm of entitlement would change, so while the first ten levels you might be given varied titles based upon your courageousness, the next ten might be based upon your cunning, new dimensions of behavior opening up as old ones collapsed into certainty through your repeated actions. Since how you landed on the spectrum of choices had about a half dozen end-states for each tenth-level bracket, the amount of class refinement was immense - nobody here was a hunter, but a "Alduvian Templar Light Runeseeking" Hunter, etc. The game used procedural generation (because the entitlement criterion was completely random from person to person).

So we lived each of our lives simultaneously as much online as not. Each of us traveled within the confines of the dusty megatropolis that was the only world we knew, and each of us became linked with each other due to the same, terrifying event, manifested in each of our lives differently.

I, myself experienced it like this: I had been walking up a zigzagging steel ramp that clung to a concrete wall overlooking undeveloped darkness. I was traveling with a presence, possibly a real pet, possibly an ingame one, but one which never left me during the dream. My software had overlaid a sparkling island paradise on top of this; I was also, simultaneously, walking up a steep cliffside path hedged by palm trees, overlooking sparking beaches below me and a shimmering midday sea and straddling to the right of the path a recession and waterfall that glissandoed down from a higher field I couldn't see. My guildies were all around me, and we fought as we walked. When I got to the top of this, I broke off from my teammates - why? I wasn't sure, but walked off down a steel corridor that had no analogy in the game, therefore collapsing me into reality for a moment. New areas in real life that hadn't been mapped by Blizzard officials were still just real life like anywhere else. Some players allowed Blizzard reps to design WoW counterparts for their own homes, although I had never done that. This didn't lead home, though.

I soon came to a crossroads, and felt a strange weight upon me, as if my choice here were going to be momentous - but it was just a choice between one dingy corridor and the next, right? I tried to shake off the feeling, and went down the right path. This steel passageway eventually opened up above via trapdoor into a small room, its wallpaper decorated with images of more tropical locales like the one I had just left in WoW, with toys heaped in the corners. On the long side of the room was a door, which I approached and opened. Beyond was another room, more closely styled than even the first after a real life setting: brightly lit and with brilliant baby-blue walls and ceilings, with lush palm trees and distant tropical landscapes frescoed upon the bottom of the walls. Interspersed too were cartoon animals lovingly rendered, poking their heads out of the palms like curious monkeys. This room was filled to brimming with bananas, and sitting just inside the doorway looking away from me was a Pedophile, humming to himself, with short eggheaded curly hair and a wide face.

I knew he was a Pedophile because of my net interface, and pedophiles had to be registered online so that they could be recognized on sight. He heard me and turned around, mildly surprised. This was his home, after all, that I had burst into. We locked gazes, I apologized quietly, he nodded and asked me to please leave. I wasn't sure what he was doing, beyond surrounding himself with the infantile and waiting for children to descend upon him as I did, maybe. I got up, and I left.

The next day, there was nothing left of that place. Not mysteriously, like it had vanished into thin air, but more literally, a bomb had exploded at that exact location, killing the Pedophile and everyone around him for several miles. And I knew when I heard the news - it was my fault. Something I had done had attracted this disaster when and where it did.

As Jack, much the same occurred. I was confident and sly, and within the WoW interface I had hit the ground running, being the guild leader and a brilliant investigative reporter (reporting wasn't a profession in-game, obviously, but was a roleplaying duty for him, one he excelled at and was appreciated for.) My latest story was about exploitation in the Ulkan mines and rumors of a growing cartel ring there that meant to seize power from the Empire (some ubiquitous ever-good government). I had gone there (admiring the detail of my leather armor all the way) and snooped around the place, a square maroon scar cut out of the landscape around me, questioning workers whose treatment suggested that they were slaves.

The next day, there was nothing left of that place, either. It had been obliterated in a blast.

Through curious circumstances, Jack and I met, along with the third woman whose own story modeled after our own, although I remember no details. We shared stories, and discovered how each of us had had a choice, and a feeling of immense imminence, importance, as if our trivial choice in that situation might decide so much besides its own circumstances, and how each had been proven right on that invisible hunch, and seemingly picked wrong (for had we not lost innocent lives in our decisions?). Each of us had a deep feeling that we were being played the fool by fate, because we somehow inherently knew that had we chosen differently in our conundrums (if I, myself, had taken the left passage for instance) that something analogous would have happened regardless. It was fated to happen, and especially fated that it should happen by our doing, inexplicably, our presence and intrusion spelling inescapable demise for other living creatures. We banded together, then and there, to discover what in the world was controlling our actions and putting us in these situations against our will.

----

Academics and Music in the Endless City, Titan Waves in the Vineyard
Vividity: 6/10
Memorability: 4/10
Scope: 6/10
Meaning: 4/10
Lucidity: N/A

We had been many places, but this was the last. At the end of a long and mostly inexplicable journey, here...

The city was unbelievable. I had started off getting an education in the main corridor of town, the heart of the city, lumbering near the water and piled high with rounded arabesque buildings and domed roofs, multicolored majesty twinkling in the hazy desert sun. I was floored every day by the place's beauty. But unfortunately here, the education was not quite so beautiful...

Certainly I myself could have been trying harder, but the classes were not giving me much incentive. The Wind Symphony for instance - we met on the second floor of the Music Building, which was an ovoid squat little structure with a dusty pit of an orchestra chamber in the center of the first floor, and a ring of observation seats on the second floor where we would gather and inefficiently practice. There were conventional practice rooms on the north and sound wings, split-level between the first and second floors, all empty, but we never chose to use those. Today in class was a test, but, everything was absurd here - while taking my test, the first inch of text and instruction was missing from the left margin, so that I was really not sure whatsoever what I was doing. What I could read seemed easy, and I finished the test quickly only to look up and find the rest of my class missing. I left.

When I returned to class the next day one of my friends (casual black kid) informed me that there had been difficulties with the test so that it was going to be graded based on completion. Great! Only, I had never turned my test in on account of the rest of the class vanishing, and I told him this and he responded in disbelief, that no such thing had happened. I had never turned my test in, and so got a 0.

Things got stranger after this. I became trapped in the music building, and got relegated to waiting for a metaphysical solution to show itself in an east-facing side room to the second floor observation ring where some of my better friends congregated and waited, like me, in mostly silence. The view of the sea from there was majestic and powerful. Among my friends in the room was an exceedingly well-known webcomics artist who constructed comics similar to 8-Bit Theatre, and most of the other people there were members of a clandestine team of supporters of his who worked for unknown purposes. For the most part I felt entirely out of place here, neither a real musician nor one of his weird staff members, even though I was still good friends with him. The others proved themselves through their subtle actions to be not human, most of them, and would consort in sibilant whispers and corners and disappear and reappear later completely without warning or rhyme or reason.

I got my break on the balcony. I remembered, suddenly, absurdly (as in, how absurd that I've forgotten!), that I could fly! I raised my arms, stared determinedly at the scintillating sea, and rose up above the waves below. I veered back towards the city with a purpose in mind.

Sometime later I am walking through the teeming city and almost get hit by a walnut-sized object. I look across the intersection I'm at and see a physics class testing the elasticity of different spherical objects - impromptu bouncy balls, ie. One girl finds a ball about two feet in diameter and kicks it, hard - it flies across the busy intersection and makes impact with the sliding glass door of a second-floor apartment on the other size, part of a stucco complex. A sorostitute immediately runs outside to see what the commotion is, and I can't help but laugh at it all.

Sometime later again I keep on catching glimpses, again and again, of a kid who, despite having curly hair and a pudgier frame, reminds me very much of Travis.

And sometime later once more I have found my mother and we are on a quest. We have finished what needs to be done in this part of the city, and discover that our next destination is at the northern reaches of the city, a good mile or two away. We float up and soar towards the sea, and fly along the coast looking west towards the bejeweled city as vista after vista unfolds itself before us beyond the turn of every harbor or quay. The northern reaches of the city are built upon steep, dramatic cliffs, cliffs whose contours are revealed to us through the heavy shadows of the late afternoon sun behind us. The coast begins thrusting out of the water, forming sheer cliffs miles high, and it is here at this suddenly mountainous district that we find out destination.

We settle down in a small complex that looks like a vineyard, a small plot of verdure carved out of the urban bustle around it. This is on the coast, but I thought there were cliffs...? Hardly, there's the surf lapping at the property a few hundred feet away. Here are K_______ and dad, and I soon enough find Jason milling about too... there's something about all these people, they're all uniquely tainted or chosen or otherwise imbued with a very strange aura, something I am a little uncomfortable around.

I don't have much opportunity to be perturbed , though, not with the waves rolling in on us. The swell here is mighty, and from the shoreline the waves are regularly rolling up and into the vineyards themselves, variably coming as high as my knees or as high as a two-story building. The tallest waves form terrifying crests that loom over the property before crashing down with a vengeance on top of us. I attempt to have fun with them, holding my breath and letting myself be battered around by the undertow until I surface, but when a large wave crashes over me and I wait to surface, it never comes - I hold my breath, longer, longer, and realize I'm not going get there, I'm going to drown, Oh god -

So I open my eyes to show myself it's all a dream. Oh, good, back in my bedroom.

Eyes closed, and I'm back. I find shelter in a plexiglass showroom where the oenists ply their vintages: even here water floods in rhythmically, but I am sheltered from the blast of the collapsing waves at least. The watery barrages subside momentarily, and I look out to the coast and gasp: there used to be cliffs here, and it turns out my first observation was right: the cliffs have returned where they were minutes ago hidden by high tide. A sheer mile drop now separates this winery from the violent waves below, and even as I watch I see the hundred-foot-tall waves crash and crash and crash against the cliff, each swell bringing the water that much higher against the rock in an impossible tide pattern. As I begin to wake up, I witness disembodied one fathomless wave with all the power of the ocean caught up in it, its swell miles out to sea already meeting in height the precipice where I stand and sure to become much, much higher than that as well. This place has minutes-long tide cycles, and a high tide that is miles above its low tide, with waves hundreds if not thousands of feet tall! The southern reaches of the city had no such phenomenon.

**The Cusp** · 04-10-2007 12:44 AM

Fantastic dream recall.

And I like your rating system. I just about to implement one in my DJ and had been mulling over the qualities I wanted to rate. You've got it all pretty much covered here. Hope you don't mind me ripping off your style. BUt I was using those colors long before I say your journal! lol

Good stuff. Keep it up

**Spamtek** · 04-10-2007 02:22 PM

Thanks, and rip all you like. As far as I know, I stole the colors from the custom tags (like [nd] [ld] etc) on the ld4all boards, so they're not patented or anything. I just farted out the rating scheme; I'm thinking perhaps a simple "interestingness" score might be useful too, but that really begins to blaze into the realm of redundancy. If anything Interestingness would just be a mean average of the rest of them thrown together.

These are my mammoth dreams; I definitely don't get things in this much detail every night, and even then I'm sometimes too arsed with other things to write them up properly. Journaling a good dream for me is as much a process of storytelling as it is one of recollecting, and I have no problem admitting that I sometimes take liberties as far as the order of details or shape of the plot goes (assuming I can't remember a cogent order), or sometimes while writing come upon reasons for otherwise inexplicable dream behavior that I include for the sake of a good narrative.

**The Cusp** · 04-10-2007 07:30 PM

I like to try to force my dreams into a coherent narative as well, and I sometime take creative liberties while writing them out as well. Usually justt inventing names where I've forgotten what something was actually called, or like you said ordering parts of a fragmented dream to fit the plotline.

**Spamtek** · 04-11-2007 03:22 AM

2007 - 04 - 10

Irreconcilable Pieces That Yet Indicate a Whole: Resort, Panserbjorne, Butcher's, Face-Melting, Wooden Contraptions

Vividity: 6/10
Memorability: 3/10
Scope: 2/10
Meaning: 3/10
Lucidity: N/A

Fragments: although every piece of this dream is indicative of an overarching narrative (or a few smaller plot arcs), the pieces do not want to stick together. It's difficult to explain; I normally take pieces that make sense together and assume that one led to the other, which led to the next, on and on into a successful story. These images don't just feel carelessly disjointed, though: they feel purposefully disjointed even though many of them occur in the same setting, even though many of them logically lead to another image. Respecting my subconscious proclivities, what comes next are bits and pieces that should add up to a whole, but refuse to.

(This happens more separate from the rest of the vision - almost like a prelude) Nothing but an array of wholly alien states of mind - paradigms and value systems based upon concepts so abstract, unnatural, and removed from human ethics that my waking mind can put no words to them. G_____ & T______, the Norway Program, ... ? What do these mean? In the background, "Skullflower" is being played by TSOAF.
Breaking my glasses in a corrugated trailer, abandoned by a former owner. It's raining furiously outside. My vision is blurry without them, and I freak until I pop one of the lenses back in, which works well enough.
A tropical resort built up upon a grassy ridge not unlike the one we visited at sunset on ATV Day Costa Rica.
K______ and chubby chess boy are a couple.
I approach the precipice of this cliff on a bike, and know it to be a cliff before I get there because I can see sky through a missing polygon in the ground. I save myself from careening off the edge by millimeters.
Perched on the edge in sunnier circumstances, K______ and I observe the splinters in our hands. I have the largest, one the size of a headphone jack embedded into the flesh of my thumb. I wrestle it out of me.
I encounter two armored grizzly bears (panserbjorne) at the end of a darkened hallway, a part of the resort's north wing nobody should have known existed. My vision was blurry here, but I could see their immense selves at the end of the passageway and knew they could see me, and bowed slowly, slowly, as slow as I could, to show them my deference. This moment was powerfully vivid. After a great time one of them, a female, bowed in turn back to me, and I approached. They were mates, they explained, and were not really panserbjorne, but creatures of ethereal white flame come from another planet. They lived in a grotto carved into the nearby west-facing rock wall, with a fountain and icon of some unknown saint in the middle of it all, and there they made love, often, every day. The manner in which their passion was displayed to visiting company could be controlled by a panel that edited incoming visual stimulus to a desired level of family-friendliness.
The king of Creoles, a black man dressed in impeccable red, has died, and all throughout our inn is being held a vigil by his former servants. They all wear red as well, and center around a small sunroom on the north side where my mother sits in as a surrogate for him, and gets served drinks. They order an immensity of red flowers for the event which breaks a world record.
In another setting, the Meat Hook Inn: a refurbished second-story butcher shop turned B&B.
The street level below is built in gothically-styled concrete. There is a chef who wears a bandanna and semisapient quaker parrots perched on stone roosts as mere decoration.
My mother and I are getting to this place, but she gets waylaid. I go on ahead, pass a cop car with flashing lights, freak, but to no effect.
This place is called, simply, Yale, and is surrounded on either side by a military avenue called Navy Yard.
My face! My face is pale, flaky, crusty, patchy, leprous; it is curdling up and peeling off of me as I watch in a mirror.
Alone in my parents' futuristic, modernist apartment loft, I hunt down the source of a strange brushing-scraping-clicking sound. I discover a wooden device, a warm golden teak color, shaped like a trilobite, but skinnier and thicker, that moves across the hardwood floors by means of an undulating length of wicker bristles on its underside, something similar to the movements of a caterpillar or worm. I cannot discern any power source or way to turn it off, and the thing makes me uneasy the longer I hold it, writhing like a living thing.

Fun fact: you can't change font colors in the middle of a list. Bugger it all!

**Spamtek** · 05-05-2007 07:46 PM

2007 - 05 - 03

Quest: In Search of Excalibur

Vividity: 5/10
Memorability: 3/10
Scope: 5/10
Meaning: 4/10
Lucidity: N/A

I find myself immersed in snippets of a disjointed, surrealistic fantasy world. It's colorful and vivid, rendered in accessible WoW proportions, and feels unnaturally alone, as if designed specifically for a multitude but lacking sore in it; I am the only person I can see. I am standing in front of a burnt-out holy house, smoldering timbers and a charred bamboo frame marking the spot where once a greater edifice stood. This house faces northeast and stands close to a pristine river mouth - on the other side of which is boundless forest. Where the bamboo poles of the house joined with one another, they were bound together by reeds and shining joints of amethyst. Intact, standing where the front of the second-story wall used to be, was an elaborate wooden mask that I needed.

I climbed the precarious skeleton and swung my way up to the top; at every interval the entire frame groaned and threatened to collapse. When I reached the mask, I put it away into my inventory: it was a normal, seemingly nonmagical item, and had but a single descriptor in its item profile box: 'Ignore Excalibur'. I think I needed it in the culmination of a long-running quest. My foe, whoever he was, had obtained the fabled sword Excalibur and this mask was my ticket past his otherwise unchallengeable offenses. To get back down, I swung back and forth on my support until the entire thing gave way beneath me, collapsing forward in a slow swinging motion that I rode down with. I landed in a vicious patch of blackened brambles, and was porcupined with them, but to no harm, apparently. I headed north across a bridge towards the forest, unpricking myself as I strode.

I've later caught a small ferryboat, riding down the same river I crosses, out through the mouth and into a wide sparkling sea. The boat is heading northeast, hugging the shore, although I'm not the one navigating. In fact, I'm still alone, and this boat is some man's personal home-on-the-water. Inside it is richly paneled in dark wood, and every shelf and counter is stacked with arcane trinkets and philosophical instruments. I am searching for something here, hurriedly - do I expect someone to show up?

I find what I'm looking for, after a long scouring. With it, I exit the cabin and dive off the side of the boat into the immaculate water - and singlehandedly swim across the sea, in a beeline towards a location I know not of.

Even later, fuzzily: In an art gallery, in a crowd of small children, all garrulous and hyperactive and decidedly unpleasant to be around. What are we here to see?

The other kids find me annoying.

----

Apostrophe to a Girl
Vividity: 6/10
Memorability: 6/10
Scope: 2/10
Meaning: 7/10
Lucidity: N/A

(I am female. I am not myself.)

"Brenna, wake up... please wake up.
"I don't know what I can do. I feel so weak, so worthless, like I can't change anything. You're asleep now and I'm afraid, afraid that I can't fix that.
"I can summon my Sprites. I don't know if Faerie Fire can reach down through the depths of your unconscious to light the way for you, but oh, Brenna, it's the best I can do.
"Brenna, I hate myself...
"But at least...
"...at least I love you."

----

Woodswandering
Vividity: 3/10
Memorability: 2/10
Scope: 5/10
Meaning: 3/10
Lucidity: N/A

My guide and I are riding on horseback, riding through these woods that I can sense are alive with magic. Those stormclouds, the ones we mean to prevent, descend on us a little more every day from the south. Our time is rationed out to us in the shadow of those approaching thunderheads.

We have to take a detour, despite our urgency. I need to go see someone in a far secluded village - an artisan, maybe, either that or my own mother. When we arrive, I receive a cellphone call from the man who gave us directions here in the first place, at that crossroads in the clearing: he needs a curio, a small timepiece constructed by a master watchsmith in this hamlet.

**Spamtek** · 05-05-2007 07:55 PM

2007 - 05 - 04

Arena With a Thousand Places

Vividity: 4/10
Memorability: 3/10
Scope: 2/10
Meaning: 2/10
Lucidity: N/A

Magic cards, a series of in-deck cancellation spells... Parents, airport, hungry too early, father wants what? I push an apple fritter off my plate in disgust.

I find myself later in a great stone complex, underground. It is dark, demesnous*, and solate*. These are the boarding halls adjacent to our great battling coliseum. The nature of the battles? I don't recall... but here I was, boarded up in my cubicle with my sister. I hardly knew the fact, though, since she was almost never around. The room itself was small but strangely resonant, with stark stone furniture fashioned organically... too round, too form-fitting, I thought, for the material it was crafted from. Stark, alienating coldness, and the silence of great spaces, pervaded everything.

Later I am still boarded up with my sister, and we are still in areas adjacent to a coliseum, but all else has changed. We are now in a desert city under a darkened sky.

*These words don't exist as I want them to exist. Interpret them based on how they sound, not on what they mean.

**Spamtek** · 05-10-2007 03:52 PM

2007 - 05 - 10

The Eight Aspects of Immortality: Part I

Vividity: 3/10
Memorability: 3/10
Scope: 3/10
Meaning: 6/10
Lucidity: N/A

I fight my first Guardian of Immortality. A grim, darkened shade, he inhabits the graveyard adjacent to a blasted city. He is one of the few to have even begun to learn the secret of eternal life - 8 souls, total, either waiting for their partial demise still or trapped beyond the veil, past their mortal deaths, in a pale mockery of real immortality. I would challenge them all and extract their secrets, combine them to learn the truth. I would become immortal.

He was a swordsman, with a vitriolic fighting style on horseback. We traded blows, flitting between the headstones. On the first pass through I just barely defeated him - best two out of three, and then a Judgment Match to seal the deal - and yet later on in my own story, after many other tribulations, it occurred to me to restore my game here and beat him more tidily, to see if the results were any different. There was a move I could perform - one he never anticipated me having, and which won me my Judgment Match when I used it then - which when done over his own grave would send a shockwave through the ground and shatter his earthly remains, effectively crippling the spirit tied to them. I could never use the move very efficiently, and the first time I used it, it was only enough to slightly rattle him, and not so much defeat him utterly as let him see that my potential to exceed him was undeniable, and that I deserved to have his secret (rather than forcibly extracting it from his pulverized soulstuff.) But this time around I had mastered this ability, and in our second round (1-0 me) I artfully dodged all his blows, sending him into a righteous fury - and I, haughtily, disdainfully, dodged lightly away from him and landed on his grave, and in one hideous move shattered the ground around me into dust.

The ghost stopped where he floated and stared at me, shellstruck. That was not honorable behavior, that was not... was not... I expected to be rewarded with twice the enthusiasm that I had received the first time I had beaten him, but before I knew what was happening he had sulked away from me into the gloom, and the words 'You Lose' flashed gravely on my screen. I found myself forcibly removed from the graveyard, riding away from it on my steed, and I turned right back to find the Guardian again and demand an explanation from him, but could not find him anywhere. My actions had been too outrageous; I had skipped all ceremony and destroyed him utterly without prelude or forewarning. His secret had evaporated along with his essence, and if he had had a moment before dematerializing where he still might have been able to divine to me his Aspect of immortality, he had spitefully kept it to himself. Nobody so dishonorable as I deserved such a thing.

----

The Eight Aspects of Immortality: Part II
Vividity: 4/10
Memorability: 4/10
Scope: 3/10
Meaning: 5/10
Lucidity: N/A

I am still on my search. The UGA campus has many secrets, secrets that show themselves when all the talk and bustle of daily academics has left the halls and grounds of the school - when dusk settles in and spirits find time in quiet alcoves and dusty corners to live for a space unperturbed. I meant to seek them out; amongst them must be another Guardian, or at least a spirit in contact with one.

My hunt was not the only after-school activity, though. As I explored the great polished mahogany halls, I encountered strange groups of students - quiet, multitudinous, expectant, sitting in darkened antechambers waiting for an invisible cue. I found myself in pitch darkness many times - having to navigate by touch and sound around the waiting forms of solemn students and through the labyrinthine rooms of the halls. I encountered Amy at one point - Amy, who I explained my grand plan too. Being a good Christian, she scoffed at my ambition to become something of a god among men, but bade me goodwill and good wishes all the same.

**Spamtek** · 06-15-2007 02:00 AM

2007 - 06 - 14

Shopping Should Be Easier

Vividity: 3/10
Memorability: 3/10
Scope: 5/10
Meaning: 3/10
Lucidity: N/A

My father and I are living alone in S________ still. We need groceries, not just now but all the time apparently, and we've traveled to the local Whole Foods to collect our necessary grub. It's late, near closing time, and he seems mostly incapably of finding anything himself. I grab the list and rush around to collect what we need since he can't. This Whole Foods is lavishly furnished; the floors and walls are made of black granite and all the shelves are fashionably constructed from polished mahogany. The ceiling is built from black-lacquered steel and glass skylights. Near the back of the store (westward) is a long, winding staircase leading up to a second-story foyer where customers can eat lunch if they want to.

I run the aisles collecting what we need. I begin to return to where I left dad when all the lights blink out, and I realize that I haven't seen any customers for a few minutes: the store's closed. Dad and I wait in the darkness for a few more minutes, wondering how we can even begin to feel our way out of the place without knocking displays and shelves over. Suddenly warm orange lights to our left illuminate a wide open space covered by wine trellises; another restaurant where the commissary staff have gathered to eat after hours... or so they want us to think. Their only reason for congregating there and now was to give us light to lead us to the exit without letting us think that they were in any way ushering us out or even noticing our ineptitude at all, but it was a shallow farce: for one thing, their plates had nothing on them.

Unable to gather all the groceries we need, we meander to Best Buy to finish our shopping list. Best Buy has an ample, albeit utilitarian, grocery selection in the back of their store, in contrast with Whole Foods; where the latter was chic and fashionable, this place is characterized by aluminum shelving, white linoleum and flickering fluorescents.

On our way home, Dad tells me how thankful he is to have me around. I tell him that's crazy talk; we're just gathering groceries after all. He responds by intimating that he is entirely incompetent when it comes to grocery shopping; while in the military as a colonel he used to have his own personal military courier who would take his lists and do the shopping for him, and if not for me he'd be completely unable to do this.

----

The Darks
Vividity: 5/10
Memorability: 4/10
Scope: 6/10
Meaning: 4/10
Lucidity: N/A

Alaska has strict laws concerning the presentability of fast food establishments, and probably more generally the presentability of all private storefronts. We're here in Anchorage, the family, sections of extended family (G&T, of course), and K's new boyfriend pilot from the Air Force; he looks like the kid who bought my computer back in May. I believe this is a Burger King, a two-story building constructed on a steep hill. On the top level and the main entrance is an expansive concrete landing covered by restaurant roof, and is so clean and unoccupied that it looks a little desolate. We suggest bringing some of the chairs and tables to eat out here with, but the store management tells us we can't; state regulations forbid it. We have to eat inside.

The family gets food to eat (high-quality for a fast food joint; laws ensure that as well) and spreads out among the upper and lower levels. We're here thanks to K's boyfriend, whose family lives on the Other Side, which we've used as an excuse to come and visit... them, and the Other Side in general. The OS is something of a primordial dreamscape; rather than being a collection of the frenzied imaginings made manifest of sleeping people, it represents the lumbering subconscious complexes that eventually give rise to those more coherent, contextual, and specific dreams. That being the case, the OS was typified by large, surreal landmarks and landscapes that were often unfinished or furnished with incomprehensible physics. There were generally rules governing how they worked and how they related to neighboring scapes, but they usually had little plot or context to them; they were playsets or sandboxes that did not yet have actors to occupy them. In the meantime, visitors from Earth came and fulfilled those roles.

From where we sat in Alaska, a hike to the northeast would quickly bring us past the veil and into the OS. The boyfriend's family lived on the other side of a scape called The Darks, which was a massive (World Trade Center-height) cubic concrete labyrinth riddled with sparse rooms and plain connecting corridors. Within it, gravity pushed outward from its center, towards and perpindicular to the outer side of whichever pyramidal sixth of the cube you happened to be in at the time. The Darks were a moderately dangerous place to navigate; like any abandoned urban structure, criminals and vagrants (from earth only, of course) had taken up residence within its pocks.

Before we all make the pilgrimage through The Darks, K and her boyfriend alone travel through there, to get a feeling for how to travel through it (its chambers occasionally change their configurations) as well as to take a test flight in his air force jet: his family lived not only near The Darks, but also right adjacent to an Air Force base. When they return they all have fantastic things to say about both journeys; it was so exciting, amazingly surreal, the jet ride was out of this world, etc.

We gather up our effects to make the real journey. To enter The Darks we have to board a small boat, on which we float down a river that ducks under The Darks entirely; we disembark on a cement landing and let the boat go on empty; in the center of this plane the river takes a plunge into interminable, probably infinite, depths, and the boat will meet that same fate. The novelty of The Darks is that of crossing from one sector to the next, where gravity changes directions and you experience that split second feeling of walking on a wall or ceiling where you know you shouldn't be able to, before you reorient yourself and remember that this is technically the floor now. We do this many times as we navigate our way through the scape; our journey necessitates us traveling very near to the center of the labyrinth, where these gravitic turnabouts are most frequent.

The Darks are, of course, extremely dark; there are no windows anywhere and there is no natural light to take advantage of. We all carry flashlights and lanterns with us which all cast a pale, sickly glow around our concrete surroundings. We often see shadowy figures loitering or ducking out of view down corridors we pass by, but none approach us since we are a large (10-12?) group.

As we near the center, I become momentarily separated from the group, lagging behind, and accidentally turn a wrong corner. I know immediately that it's wrong, and I turn to rush back towards my family when I catch a shadow moving towards me; some thug has seen the opportunity to take advantage of me. I dart out and run in blind fear towards where I suspect my family's gone. I turn a corner to my right, open a door, and...

...am blinded by light, the warmest, most golden color of light I can imagine. I slam the door behind me as my eyes adjust: this place is domed like the inside of a pyramid, paneled in yellow wood with pillared supports running through it all, and there are lanterns and light hanging from every usable surface flooding this place with warm light. There is a crowd all around, all travelers reclining or relaxing on makeshift tables or picnicing on the floor, bustling with talk and hearty gossip. I find my family gathering around a table or two, all letting down their packs and breaking for a while; we get out food and start consuming lunch. This place is a waypoint for travelers through The Dark, maintained entirely by volunteers who supply the place with lights and heating elements and comfortable furnishings. Criminals and other dangerous people can't stand to come near here because years of living in the dark have rendered them extremely aversive to such bright and concentrated light. It's a new feature, no more than a few months old, one that K and her boyfriend discovered while scouting out the complex their first time through and wanted to surprise the rest of us with.

For some strange reason we had been carrying with us three very large plastic hamster cages, all occupied by live hamsters, which we all set down in a row near the middle of the room. The place is overflowing with warm talk and cozy thoughts. I have nobody to be close with on this trip, but here without talking to anybody I feel like everyone is a good friend.

**Moonbeam** · 06-15-2007 02:18 AM

You have the longest, most detailed, story-like dreams I have ever read. Very interesting!

**Spamtek** · 06-15-2007 02:45 AM

Thanks. The fact is that I love writing, but I'm always consciously at a loss of ideas for things (narrative or essay) to write about. With dreams, though, I don't have to worry about my words making sense or even being worthwhile; they exist independently of peoples' judgments and nobody can blame me for having them, so I get to type away as much and as detailed as I like at them.

I really want to illustrate a scene of The Darks from outside; I don't think I got across just how imposing they look, this giant concrete cube breaking up an otherwise flat landscape of plains, moors, and swamps. Mountains in the distance, now that I think about it.

**Moonbeam** · 06-15-2007 03:01 AM

Originally Posted by Spamtek

Thanks. The fact is that I love writing, but I'm always consciously at a loss of ideas for things (narrative or essay) to write about.

I find that hard to believe!

Originally Posted by Spamtek

With dreams, though, I don't have to worry about my words making sense or even being worthwhile; they exist independently of peoples' judgments and nobody can blame me for having them, so I get to type away as much and as detailed as I like at them.

I really want to illustrate a scene of The Darks from outside; I don't think I got across just how imposing they look, this giant concrete cube breaking up an otherwise flat landscape of plains, moors, and swamps. Mountains in the distance, now that I think about it.

Maybe writing the dreams will free you of that feeling of people judging the story. Pretend it is a dream that you had, or start with a dream and add to it.

Your dreams could be made into illustrated stories, if you are a good artist too.

**Spamtek** · 06-15-2007 03:24 AM

I am a dismal artist, but it gives me reason to improve.

**Spamtek** · 06-30-2007 08:27 PM

2007 - 06 - 29

Shepherd of the Space Ark

Vividity: 4/10
Memorability: 5/10
Scope: 4/10
Meaning: 5/10
Lucidity: N/A

Negotiations had broken down. This, the last space station mankind had; this, our only escape gifted us by the exoterrans; this, our final chance of eking out a future despite the cataclysm and decline of civilization; all this, rendered impotent regardless in the face of bureaucracy and bad feelings.

The space station rested in a glade surrounded by silver pine, a ring of stately marble about a mile in diameter, decorated all 'round with slender windows and built two stories high. In triskelion symmetry on its ring were three wide-arching entryways, and three executive verdigrised domes evenly spaced from those. Each dome was the center of one of the three interested spacefaring factions: our two squabbling human tribes (each equally xenophobic, each equally incompetent) and the exoterrans in the third. In the center of the great ring beaconed the ship that promised to save what little of humanity it could bear to, a great gleaming rust-red rocket ship so tall that its top pierced the sky itself and was lost to sight somewhere beyond the heavens. It dwarfed all things.

The ship was brought here by the exoterrans. Their travel here and date of arrival had been known for decades, so much so that when the station was built an entire wing had been constructed in anticipation of their occupancy of it - hell the entire station, and others like it, had been made for them. We had no spacefaring technology. The exoterrans could look like many things, but to humans appeared like Greek gods, things perfectly chiseled by the hands of Michelangelo himself, flawless in every physical feature. They had fine muscles, wild hair, fiery eyes, and their trip here was no leisure tour or embassy call, but an emergency rescue effort. The exoterrans were the EMTs of the universe; selfless, serving, and brilliantly, naively trusting. From unfathomable distances they saw this society crumbling, and came to offer what they offered to all dying peoples: a second chance. We had been able to see signs of them coming for some time. Their arrival was the climax of decades of slow societal decay.

And they had arrived, and talks began. And it was ugly, from beginning to end. The exoterrans offered everything a dead-end civilization could hope for: a new world, new resources, a new start, with everyone and everything preserved exactly. Nothing to lose but a worthless and wasted earth. Yet the two earth factions could come to no terms with them, or each other. They demanded impossible things: don't take us anywhere. Revitalize this world. Use your technology, sprinkle fairy dust, we don't know what, but make everything better here, not there. They spoke of impossibilities. The exoterrans had brought an Ark, not a cosmetics kit.

I remember my place in this. I stood there with a crowd in front of the Ark as Yuthuay, arms gripped by the Ministers of each faction, made one final plea for them to come to their senses. Yuthuay had a ragged black mane of hair and a proud jawline; he, like all of the exoterrans, shared their duties and titles equally. He asked how, after these two weeks of talk, they could look him in the eye and still reject his offer - how could they damn themselves so haughily, so thoughtlessly? They would say nothing in return. The Ministers had chosen decline and destruction over change and challenge.

The last of the exoterrans filed their way back into the ship, and the two factions shared a rare moment of smug cameraderie; together, they had banished the threat to their sovereignty. The days crept on, but the ship would not move. Months passed, and the world wound down around us, and the ship did not move.

Then the Shepherds appeared. Or, maybe, I should say that Shepherdom appeared, because the Shepherds were just people, you and I, anointed with an alien grace and purpose. They were easy to spot, because they wore immaculately white robes at all times. I could only guess that rogue exos had begun the movement - or maybe the common folk had taken their own initiative - but either way, it was a motion to make use of the Ark no matter what some executive assembly decreed. To take the mantle of Shepherdom took no more than the resolve to save what pieces of the earth you could while you could - to save them even at the price of your own life. With such resolve, it took only short time to manifest your new powers and, bitterly, your new life - you could never revert. And the life of a Shepherd was, on average, horribly short.

Shepherds were tasked with saving the species of the earth. There were no theatrics or biblical shows they employed, no standing on a hill and chanting verse to lure the entire animal kingdom from Aardvark to Zebra onto the ark in neat 2x2 formation. Shepherding was haphazard, it was running and ducking and searching hastily in the night hours for what creatures you could; it was guerilla tactics and espionage. When a shepherd found a group of live animals, they could convey their purpose to them telepathically - those animals would then faithfully follow the Shepherd to the Ark, where they would board. The animals were loyal to the Shepherds, and would employ what tactics they could to protect and support their guide, no matter the cost to their own numbers. The Ministry had caught wind of the Shepherding movement, and took no mercy on those who would betray mankind to run away to some alien planet. They had their standing army, and they had their guns, and they had no reservations. This is why the life of a Shepherd was blazing yet brief - they had to lead their charge into the heart of their enemy's territory, the space station, to reach the Ark. Shepherds were sworn to save lives, not destroy them, and they could not fight back against their oppressors. Shepherds considered it a grace just to be able to live long enough to lead one species onboard before being gunned down. The Shepherd who lived to herd a second time was a rare spectacle to encounter.

Animosity within the spacefaring Ministries and escalating trepidation over the successful smugglings into the Ark of animal species eventually led to the blast that signified the true beginning of the end of mankind. Whatever the intent behind it, a bomb was set off on the grounds of the station - one with enough force to destroy the entire structure and hopelessly cripple the ark. Before the flames could engulf the entirety of the buildings or spread to the Ark's base, though, the exoterrans broke their passivity long enough to encapsulate the blaze in a staticy green time-retarding field, freezing the explosion into near-motionlessness. They could not control or extinguish the explosion, but they could slow it down long enough to give the Shepherds and like minds one final time frame in which to save what they could. The explosion was a final countdown - come zero hour, it would finally reach the central court of the Ark. If not gone by then, it would be consumed in fire and man's hope of salvation extinguished along with it.

Luckily, the first few seconds of the blast had caused enough damage to life and structure to cause the fragmentation and diaspora of the Ministry. Severely weakened and scattered, they roamed the byways and towns surrounding the station - still posing a threat to Shepherds, but leaving, for the most part, the doors of the ark unguarded. Their time had come to act with renewed vigor.

And I joined their ranks. I roamed through the sparse woods east of the the station, vaguely veined with old cart routes and disowned merchant trails, dappled generously with the leaf-light streaming in above me. Few species remained here to be herded, but the place was a frequent byway for other Shepherds leading their charges to the ark or returning for more. Despite the traffic we didn't fear for our lives here more than we did anywhere else; the leftovers of the Ministries didn't gather intelligence or study areas to ambush: their time was spent wandering meaninglessly from town to town, trying to survive as they could among the world's crumbling infrastructure.

I remember driving a gaggle of geese towards the Ark. As we trotted they flew around me in joyous circles, knowing they would be saved. Their flight seemed to make my steps lighter, and their eagerness propelled me onwards. I also remember coming upon the tragic remains of a Shepherd who met his end herding a bale of turtles, unable to flee the Ministry militia due to the excruciatingly slow pace of his charge, and the turtles themselves unable to do anything helpful for him. I paid my respects and reflected upon my line of work. You don't choose who to save.

Later, a crowd of Shepherds and I had run across an abandoned zoo: jackpot! The buildings were small and squat and concrete, utilitarian. We were scouring the place for creatures to save, even though many had already died or escaped. In the northeastern corner I found the walrus exhibit intact and a huddle of a half-dozen walruses or so inside. We barreled our way back to the Ark, and I thought to myself how great it felt to be tending creatures who could actually be useful in a fight for once.

As the zoo emptied I found myself with little to do, and climbed over the walls and into the hedge garden surrounding them. There under an arbor I found an unassuming asian boy, no older than I, who explained that his life had been a montage of stress and unfulfillment until he had run away to these hedge gardens to take up the mantle of Shepherdom (although he wore no robes, and had saved no animals). He found tranquility here in doing the right thing and living apart from other human beings. We became good friends.

When time ran out on the contained explosion and the Ark was forced to leave, each surviving Shepherd would be allowed aboard, along with three other human beings of their choosing. I wanted to find my old friends from Colorado to choose among, but simultaneously felt reluctant to, since I would have to choose some and jettison others.

Why not just call them extraterrestrials? I guess even when I'm sleeping I feel I have to be cutting-edge and different for its own sake. This dream felt nice, but the writeup disappoints me. It sounds like a dry history lesson, and goes on for far too long.

edit Also now see: thematic comparisons with 45-Minute Apocalypse In Naboo.

**Moonbeam** · 07-04-2007 04:09 PM

I'm speechless. That was the most amazing dream/story I've read here.
You definitely have a way with words. Even the ones you make up! If it was good enough for Lewis Carroll, it's good enough for Spamtek, that's what I say.

Seriously they're all really good, huge imagination. That last one should be sent into an SF magazine or put into a collection with your other works.

**Spamtek** · 07-04-2007 11:49 PM

Wow, I've really been having a ego roller coaster trip today. First I heard something from someone that made me feel great, then I see someone's artistic work that makes me feel pathetic, then I come hear and read what you have to say - ooh. Thanks. I really have to say that these recent dreams haven't felt natural coming onto paper, though - I feel like I've had to fish for too many details that in the end I probably just made up to connect the dots with, and my writing style is really taking a nosedive. Since I can't rely on enough linear, continuous imagery to make a first-person narrative with I really feel like I'm reduced to speaking of vague unconnected events in the past tense which puts a cramp on how I want to tell the stories.

Anyways, I feel like I'm making too much of it up right now to properly call it a dream journal, but it really bolsters my spirit to hear someone speak so well of my creative output, be it dream recordings or otherwise... so much so that it encouraged me to index what I have so far in my intro post, and to drag my shorthand paper journal down here to the computer and squeeze what I can out of my dreams of the past few nights (which were borderline interesting).

I mean, I have dreams every night, and I record what I can of them every night, but most nights even all that only results in a bunch of scattered, boring, uninteresting imagery that I feel perfectly uninspired to spin into a more proper typed-up entry. But if I get word that there are people out there actually anxiously waiting for me to update my journal with new material, that's the strongest motivator I have to get off my lazy ass and make something out of more of the raw dream snippets I scribble down every morning... or at least the ones I was on the fence on before.

I also sort of feel like a dick because I don't cruise around admiring other peoples' DJs, even when I know there's lots of material out there to get excited about. Anyways, this is all mostly irrelevant, but the bottom line: thank you, the encouragement means more than I can express.

I'm going to puff up my repertoire with reposts from my livejournal DJ and then try to get to scribing up snippets from the last two nights. I want to make entries into this thing a daily occurrence, but I guess I'm irrationally afraid of making dream entries where all I can remember is one or two hopelessly drab fragments. I don't like to read that crap, and I only imagine nobody else does either, so I have to battle myself over whether to stay regular with the postings or to be irregular but maintain the quality of what I do post. Again, this is just me rambling.

**Spamtek** · 07-04-2007 11:50 PM

2003 - 01 - 16

Untitled

Vividity: 4/10
Memorability: 4/10
Scope: 2/10
Meaning: 2/10
Lucidity: N/A

"What's wrong with the soup?"

I look up at my sister, and then back down at the strange concoction on the table, some orangish liquid with what looks like marshmallows floating in it. It smells like cut grass.

"Nothing, I'm just not used to it."

She shrugs and goes back to tending the sand garden. The rays of the sun diffuse through the translucent ceiling of this modern new-age-style house. Somewhere in the distance a silver fountain trickles.

**Spamtek** · 07-04-2007 11:59 PM

2003 - 01 - 22

Lego Warfare

Vividity: 2/10
Memorability: 3/10
Scope: 4/10
Meaning: 2/10
Lucidity: N/A

Bitter enemies we were, always on the move to get the upper hand on each other. I'm not even truly sure who this person was, but we both commanded ships and it seemed our sole purpose in life to go after each other. The only way to get an upper hand was to build a superior ship design... with legos, because we were lego people ourselves. After several botched designs and attempts to bring the other down, I designed a giant hook-like structure, to lay cocealed until I was within range to tear down their mast with it. I waited in the fog for their arrival, and when the stern became visible all my crew leapt up, hoisted the giant lego noose around their mast, and tore it down onto their own ship. It didn't take long for them to sink from our surprise attack.

----

Inflatable Jet From Alaska
Vividity: 5/10
Memorability: 5/10
Scope: 3/10
Meaning: 4/10
Lucidity: N/A

Alaska, for whatever reasons, was now located on Antarctica. I was travelling there on a metal rigger along with some people who seemed like friends to me. I didn't know what their motives were to come down to Alaska, but I had come to check on Orus. Antarctica was now a fairly colonized place thanks to Alaska's location on it, and after we arrived we were able to stay in a mansion-esque house surveying the surrounding frigid wastelands. I made my way out to locate Orus, but barely made it through the front door before something else caught my attention. Out back there was a shed with a giant tarp draped over something. My irrational dream-driven sense of curiosity got the better of me, and I removed the tarp only to find the carcass of an orca. I had no idea who had killed it ( it looked like it had died from being beached or otherwise getting too much exposure to the sun/air) but suspected something foul at play. I covered the corpse back up and went to sleep back in the mansion.

In the morning the mansion was on fire, but it was small and didn't seem to spread. None of us were too worried about it, and we were all scheduled to leave today anyways. I spent the morning worrying that my comrades had noticed my intrusion on their privacy the day before. Nothing seemed to come of it though, and we eventually left for the airfield to make our way back home. At the airfield, when we arrived, though, no plane was there, and we and everyone else waiting there were told by some suits that we were being detained.

The whole thing was apparently a practical joke, though, and eventually an airship arrived to whisk us off. I was afraid that the giant air bladder would burst in midflight. As we boarded it and took off, though, the airship transformed into a passenger jet - but it was still a rubber hot air-filled bladder, so we ended up riding an inflatable jet back from Alaska.

**Spamtek** · 07-05-2007 12:03 AM

2003 - 01 - 27

Fragment

Vividity: 1/10
Memorability: 4/10
Scope: 1/10
Meaning: 3/10
Lucidity: N/A

"I don't think I can deal with two doppelgangers at once."

"I thought they were vezzerdrixes."

"Whichever."

Thread: Confessions Of A Somnesiac: Spamtek's Journal

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Confessions of a Somnesiac: Spamtek's Journal

2006-07-11 - Medicated Haze; Spontaneous Hurricane

2006-07-12 - Giant Musical Face, Me In A Movie, Palace In At

2006-07-13 - Contemplation In The Band Hall; Scavenger Hunt

2006-07-16 - Dark Halls; Serial Killer Brother; Castle, Door

2007 - 05 - 03

2007 - 05 - 04

2007 - 05 - 10

2007 - 06 - 14

2007- 06 - 29

domo

2003 - 01 - 16

2003 - 01 - 22

2003 - 01 - 27

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