We go back to the original room. John describes to me an incident: he went into a pawn shop, and people made fun of him. They poked him in the stomach and told him he was fat and needed to work out. This makes him indignant, because he isn't. They try to sell him exercise equipment that is clearly made of plastic.
Various animals: a large cat, then a white tiger. Bushes. The camera zooms in on a fuzzy picture of some animal attacking a baby. Someone is pulling the baby away. The animal turns out to be a jackal who is lunging puppet-like from the inside of a trashcan, the kind you find outside the highschool. They get the baby away; the jackal zoops back into the trashcan. An enraged man comes up and sticks the gun inside the trashcan and fires several times. This makes me unhappy.
Then I'm more in the events on TV than watching. Instead of a baby, the person who has been savaged is now a fully grown person. He is facing away from me. There is someone operating on him to the left, lots of nurses/surgeon people bustling around. A bag full of blood they pump. Tubes. Next to me is a girl I know from online, even though I don't really know what she looks like; I just know it's her. She's there because she is/was training to be a nurse. We are watching them work on the injured guy, and everybody is huddled very close. I can see the freckles on the injured guy's arm, the girl from online is elbow-to-elbow with me, and the surgeon is about four inches from my face. But I can't see the injuries. The online friend explains to me what they're doing, and although it makes sense in the dream -- something about bandages and duct tape -- it's absolute jibberish. There are abrupt segues back to French class, where we are reading aloud. Finally, the doctor announces that the guy will be okay. The online friend and I are very glad. She whips out a newspaper and under the guy's name, which I can't remember anymore, it says he is in good condition and will recover quickly. She starts to cry with relief, and that sets me off -- I start crying too.
When I go back upstairs, Evan is dead, laid out with a jacket beneath his head. I run back down the stairs. For some reason, I don't think the would-be killer is actually the one who murdered him, but I'm angry anyway. When I'm outside, suddenly, things change: Evan is not the name of the dead friend, but the name of the person who is playing the dead friend, as if we are acting or role-playing. When I try to tell the people outside that he's dead, I can't remember his name, so I have to whisper and giggle, asking them what Evan's character's name is. In the end I wind up shouting that someone killed Evan anyway, and we all snicker. Then we go on with the drama. I attack the would-be killer with the stick I grabbed from someone else. I'm still pretty sure he didn't actually do it and I fully expect to be stopped by the friends. I think somebody else did it. But those are "OOC" thoughts and I keep them to myself; "ICly," this is what I believe so this is what I'm doing.
My mom and dad have kidnapped a small girl and are hiding her in an apartment in New York. They have recruited me to babysit. In her room, which is huge, more like a store with kid things in it than a bedroom, there is a cage with an orangutang, a cage wtih a sleepy monkey and a mean monkey. The girl keeps trying to pet the sleepy monkey, and I keep having to slap the mean monkey away from her because it clearly wants to bite and scratch the girl. The mean monkey gets loose. I'm afraid it's going to bite me, but I keep myself between it and the girl.
I'm sitting on a couch with two people I dislike from online. There is a moment of lucidity where I know I don't like them, so they are changed into real life friends and my mom. We are watching TV, which shows a report of the murder.
Dad and I are crossing busy streets. Mom is too, but we argued about the best way to go, and went separately. We lose sight of her. She beats us the destination, but in a cartoon way. We go into the shop, which I know is connected to a hotel, and start looking around.
We are in a church I know is ours, even though it doesn't bear much resemblence to the real thing. Mom and I are trying to leave, but we are repeatedly sidetracked by people. There are teacups, porcelain things, old things; there is a girl who used to be on my softball team, and a boy who looks like her brother but isn't, although in the dream he is.
The vampire world is all dark and Victorian Gothic like. We are startled in a dark tunnel by someone (and old, dignified-looking white-haired lady in an old-fashioned dress) he calls the Librarian. We converse for a bit, then go off to explore other parts. Large staircases, dark wood bannisters, red velvet, large arches, all very dark (a bit like Myst, but smooth). I can almost float, but there's a sense of urgency to everything I do: I know I can't stay long, because even though I can't see anyone I know I'm paying for it. I'm halfways up a dark wide stair when I do the game equivalent of typing "home." I wake up and quickly go to my parents' bathroom, which again is different than the one in reality. It's strangely cluttered and has different colors, ivory and dark red. The mirror is too high for me to see properly, but there are bite marks.
In the sink, there are three books on history that I borrowed. One has a corner in the water that I'm using to wash my neck. I try to press it dry, but some of the book has molded and turned green. I leave them on the table and go out to another bathroom. Now I can clearly see there are four bite marks, not just one. Fuck, I am so never going to the vampire world again, I think.
I am trying to leave this house of friendly acquaintances. It's night outside, and the small daughter is playing. There are two dark figures that I am mildly suspicious of around. One is the next door neighbor, who seems to be watering things and taking no notice of her. The other is someone walking closer to the house. I tell the daughter to go inside, her father is waiting for her. The second figure turns out to be her father. She is happy and goes right to him.
Something about a teacher. I am consoling him about how his teaching career is over. There is possibly a very small red child's tent around. Something about a woman showing up.
This girl has been convicted of something. She has attacked two girls who are sisters, but it wasn't her fault. The friend of the two girls reluctantly allows the attacker and her guards to stay in the room to wait for the two girls.
He has sent us gold gilt invitations to a party of his. It's obviously a trap, but that's why he did it -- it's a taunt. Despite the computer problems in the previous part, we now seem to be more dated, something like Victorian New Orleans. We are very angry and we are going to go anyway. We decide to make copies of the invitations and hand them out to people on the street with the added specification that everyone should come masked. This is something we're chortling over, because well, we ruined his party, didn't we.
We are about to go. I'm wearing a fancy Victorian era dress, minus the corset and other overly restricting items of clothing. I make sure to take the nightstick with me -- the one that used to belong to Justin, the one that I am planning to grab before I go to college -- and somehow hide it in my dress. There is an impression of old buildings, cobbled streets; we all pile into a coach and four to go to the party ...
The next part is vague. We arrive, there are random masked people around. The part I remember is the fighting. I have a sword (similar to the ones I'd been staring at in the museum that day) and I'm fighting people. I'm doing better than I usually do in dreams, except the sword isn'treally cutting people, and every time I stab, I stab at the air at their side. So we are in a play? Or did I start doing that just because I'm unable to cut them? But they do fall down and seem to be dead.
Later, I am with Ariane and Erik. An alligator is ill-temperedly attacking us. I have a stick, so I poke out its third eye, which is in the middle of its forehead-snout. It scrabbles for the eye, with which it can continue seeing so long as he has it. I'm annoyed.
I am in my church and I want to escape people. I take the secret passageway from one of the upstairs classrooms, which involve crawling upwards through air ducts and other absurd things; secret cabinets, and small doors. There are parts where I think I'll be unable to continue, but I always can. In the upstairs secret rooms, there are old toys, some of which are mine, some of which are much older than I am. But somehow people are coming up through the same passage (perhaps I left something open), so I want to go. Luckily, there's another secret way out ...
Something like a large warehouse. Many halls, stairs, tunnels, walking, I'm going in and out of rooms; it's kind of like school or a test or learning something.. it's a semi-familiar place because it has provoked other dreams into memory.
This is a cult. I joined in ill-advisedly and now I must gently attempt to extract myself. My mock trial coach is staring at me the entire time, although I'm not intimidated -- he's a rather tiny man, mouselike. After some conversation (he asks me if I'm sure I want to leave) I have verbally confirmed that I am leaving the cult. This is after a bit of accidental standing on the transportation device. I leave quickly, but I know that I haven't really left, and it's possible he will send people after me. I quickly move to the parking lot, where my parents wait with a van ...
We are driving in the van to a volleyball game. One of the teams has my friend Ashley playing. There is a baby in a babyseat, which belongs to my parents. We arrive, but leave the baby in the van. We have some trouble finding our way into the gym, first of all, and then we have trouble finding seats.
At one point, Toad tries to help, but clearly he sucks too, at least in comparison. Spiderman leans his head back and his tongue shoots out, just like Toad's, and is in Toad's mouth, and it's sick because he rips Toad's tongue out. Then I switch perspectives to Toad. Being who I am, I don't dream of pain, but of throwing up blood. The professor is less than helpful. He says, mournfully, "Self defense plus seven." I am about to fucking slap him for this when he suddenly leans down and slurps up all the blood that's been coming out of my mouth. I kind of sag to the ground in amazement (less me than Toad, almost playing a role now, since there isn't any pain) and wipe my mouth on the grass. The professor says in a strange voice, something I can't quite remember. Spiderman changes into Superman.
I am looking around for them and the floor of the ampitheater is sand. I keep wandering, eventually I get down low somewhere, in the ground. It's dark. There's flour all over the floor so I am leaving tracks. Now I'm crawling, a small child, towards a room where I can see them, hear them. I have a bad feeling. I don't want them to see me so I hide around the corner to catch my breath. Then I move to join them, and I see they've all been murdered. They're all lying around, reddening the flour, piles of dead bodies. I'm scared and I flatten against the wall again, scared the murderer might come out and find me -- also scared I'll be blamed for it because my tracks are everywhere. I start wiping them out frantically, but how will I get all of them, and is the murderer about to come out?
Shortly after this I play with a large, friendly, golden hamster. It's hungry so I feed it sunflower seeds.
The two of me that are left are very happy. We intend to raise the baby, apparently, and we are taking it shopping. While there, though, we see a guy, who is an uncle or an older brother or something of the baby; the baby really likes him, and always laughs when she sees him. The other me and I are standing in a store. I am staring at these bottles of jam when the other me suddenly gets very upset. She drags me out of the store and says, crying, that since the baby loves the uncle, it's only right that we leave them, right now. She says it's not right for us to raise the baby (implication: because we killed her mother). She drags me out to the parking lot and stands there crying. I seem to be detached as this part of the dream ends.
The second part of this dream feels like an 'alternate ending.' All the classmates but me are turned into vampires. The settings shift to my fourth grade classroom, only the furniture is rearranged and the door is in a different place. My fourth grade teacher and other survivors are inside. We are watching a movie. I dash in and lock the door in time. Suddenly my perspective changes as well: now it's like I'm outside watching the girl I was playing. She says, "I'm sick of being scard. Just bite me." The vampire says, "You'd better sit down." They sit down in front of the teacher's desk and he bites her. The perspective switches again and I am back to being her. I'm bleeding out my right ear; I grab a tissue from her desk and hold it to my ear and apologize to the teacher. She shrugs and says it's all right. The three of us, the vampire, me bleeding out my ear, and the teacher just stand there.
In this part of the dream, I am explaining the two preceding parts to Sasha, Ellen, and Todd. We are walking around a house, down a sidewalk, into a hall; I tell Todd, "It was surreal even before the vampire-thing started, because there were this really chipper parents around and all." (Although I cannot remember if there was really a part of the dream with that in it.) Todd makes some sort of comment that makes no sense, and I get mad at him, and then he repeats it and it makes sense. And Sasha and Ellen laugh. We walk into an airport.
Somewhere in all that, there was this as well: in class, someone tells me, "Find the biggest purple berry." and I have to click on these little squares with pictures on them and they "grow" into berries. Then we are "not allowed to do homework" and we have to do other things, which seem to involve a crossword with no clues.
He comes back to life. His body resembles the dollhouse that is still in my old room, with a head sticking out of the top, first disguised as my brother's head (which gives me a chill; he can disguise himself, I know that now), but I make him change back into himself. I'm terrified but desperate. I try to pull his head off of the dollhouse. It can't be done. I finally run out and downstairs to my dad. I hug and explain. At one point I think his face changes to Roger's, but he isn't Roger, although it is a trick of Roger's. I look over the back of the couch, looking for him. There's a midget hiding there, and it's him, and I chase him off, but I know I'm going to have to face him again.
Are we superheroes? But we seem to be living in an almost The Village-esque type setting. Traveling through the ground. Traveling through walls and ceilings. Turning on the machine. And I wait, knowing someone is coming soon that I have to kill. I know I might not be able to.
I'm sitting with someone on the ground. We're both wearing latex gloves. He reaches into a hole and pulls out a rat, tosses it brusquely aside where it dazedly wanders off. He's explaining to me the entire time why this procedure is necessary; I get the impression it's for their own good, and although I'm skeptical, I keep my mouth shut. Finally he tells me to do it. I'm wary of being bitten but I look into the hole. I can see a mole-ish rat scurrying towards the surface. I reach in and grab it, then nudge it off. Some rats try to get back into the hole but I shoo them.
I am speaking to Amanda, and possibly Jessica, in a large crowded ballroom/gymnasium. Amanda is part of the interactive play that doesn't formally start until later in the evening. She's also wearing some kind of formal dress, not quite old-fashioned but not modern either. The part that makes me think it was Jessica (who I had breakfast with yesterday) was I idly asked her how long she thought the IT people would take, based on her own experience. She told me she didn't really know in that cheerful, chatty sort of way she has. The part that is definitely Amanda is all out of chronological order the way I remember it, or at least, the way I dreamed this part implied I was going back and forth from the ballroom to other places I either can't remember or just dreamed that I had done those things in the past. Hanging above the stage is a rack of lights, and hanging from one of the bars is some sort of messy black wig. It keeps moving positions, although it's so high up I don't know how it does or who is moving it. Amanda tells me it's going to be part of the play, that its position is significant, at least if there are people watching and noticing. Shady might have been around. I get the sense that the people in the ballroom were "SO" type people.
Then Reema and I are walking down an impossibly long, narrow hallway with gray carpeting, talking. I don't remember what about. At one point there's sort of an open room on the right where trophies are displayed on a white faux wood type stand. At the corner, hidden among the trophies, is what looks like my stuffed animal rabbit. It's the same color and it even has the same cloth collar around its neck that Meredith sewed me when we were little. But I'm confused, because I'm holding that same bunny right now. Reema and I go over to compare the two and Reema points out it has some differences here and there ... okay. We continue on our way eventually.
My door seems to be at the large corner of hallways. There are some people hanging around who we ignore -- security types like the people from CHS and some nervous-looking secretary-type woman. I fling open my door but Reema doesn't come in, because the security people are now shouting at her to leave so she does. I'm pissed off but then they're shouting at me to go inside, so I do. I can hear a lot more shouting through the door. They're yelling for someone in the room next to mine to come out. I go and stare through the eyehole, trying to see what's happening, but the security people actually yell at me for that too, apparently they can see me. So I back away from the door, still kind of pissed, and listen.
I can hear them saying they have to go in. I hear them bust the door down. And then I hear an explosion. The floor rocks upwards violently, the walls gently buckle in, and I can feel the panic right in my knees as I fall over and the wall falls down on me -- no pain, as is typical of my dreams. But things go black. I'm not unconscious. It's more like things have become movie or story-like.
Micha. It was Micha. That's the girl that lives next door, and it was her all along, the culprit of my investigation. (I don't know what her crimes were. Those are never clear. Explosions, for one, and she may have been responsible for the bunny.) I don't know anybody named Micha, and I don't even get a dream glimpse of her, just a vague image of the girl I saw knock over a chair at Shriver. I see into her head. I see she was in pain. It was Micha.
Again, no sense of chronology; I blink and here I am outside on a lawn. There's hay strewn about for some reason, and a backpack full of drinking straws still in their wrapper. Mom comes over and sits down by it, slowly looking younger and younger, and I take the straws that have spilled out. She asks me how many there are. I count them: 9. I give them to her. A squirrel runs past us and up a tree that was short when I was further away from it, but when I stand at the base and look up, it's tall.
A doctor has come. He has a bandage over one eye as a result of the explosion. I go to see what he is doing. Dad is there too, and as I come nearer -- I don't see it right away, I have to look down, which is hard -- as they are shaking hands, I see he's missing his leg below the left knee. It's not rounded off like an amputated limb. It's just flat on the end. He's carrying his cane in the wrong hand, although as I notice that, he switches it to the correct one. He lost his leg in the explosion too, I suddenly know. And the girl in the room between mine and Micha's (although there wasn't a room there earlier) died. I don't know why I'm alive. I also know that I should have figured it out earlier. I know that if I'd investigated everything better, no one would have died in the explosion and my dad would have his leg. I'm about to scream and I can feel the tension building up behind my eyes.
I am waiting on one side of a door. The walls are white.
Some adult authority figures are then like, "Oh man, you killed a shark..." but I explain like three times to different people -- one of them is actually a professor -- that it was trying to kill Erin, and they say, "Well, that's foreshortening, and I can't argue with that." (Foreshortening is actually an art term I learned this semester.) Ellen asks if we're in trouble and I say no. Then one of the adults says they want to take pictures, so Ellen and I go off to rejoin the others, who have turned into the IT class. We have to pass through an area with tables that have umbrellas in the middle. My trident thing is still covered with mutated shark gunk so I reach out and open one of the umbrellas, which causes water to start, and wash it off on the way. Jon Grove shows up and asks what happened because, like in real life, he was never around during IT. I'm not sure where Ellen went, but she might have turned into Reema again, because her presence feels different and she is much taller than she is in real life.
Later, there is me and someone who is like a monk but isn't. We are on some kind of quest, a personal quest in a way but it involves doing things as well. He sits on the ground in a field while I go do things. The last thing I remember is sharing some tin foil with him. We are eating it; it's necessary. The tin foil tastes strangely good.
Somewhere between all of this is a dream where I am not myself, I am some guy -- but I am also myself at weird times. My friend and I climb down from the roof. We talk to my friend's family, then we go out into the hall; suddenly the whole building is like a huge dorm. We are going to stay with someone else for a while, because we have to hide who I am. I follow Ellen into a large room, then down these stairs which go nowhere, they just stop at this machine embedded into the wall. She turns it on. It's a washer. It makes a lot of noise. This will help hide me.
And then the small girl and I fall into a dream the god has put us in. Everything is somehow small, plastic, brightly colored; I have the sense we have been put into a doll's house, not even a large old-fashioned kind but something more like a smaller, flatter Barbie house. I am in the little girl. She lives with her father. But he father decides it's time to leave. The little girl doesn't understand, is upset, and I can hear God -- who is the dollhouse father, who is there separately, and who is a large presence outside the dollhouse, blurry white fuzziness that takes up the entire missing wall where a hand could reach in at any minute and manipulate us -- God saying/thinking that this is an interesting ... not experiment, that's not the word, but situation maybe, or scenario.
The boy, but now me, walks down the path and there are trellises arching over the path, and spiders have woven webs everywhere. I am clawing it off my face, everything, balling it up and throwing it to the ground. Police have arrived. They release water into a certain portion of the garden and then some predators to kill the pests, including a marmalade-colored cat. I try to point the mouse out to the cat but it doesn't see it. The water is rising. The chipmunk races around the rim of the bath but the cat doesn't catch it. The white mouse has been drowned. The cat is sodden and thin-looking. I go to lift it out, and I can feel its wet, thin legs scrabbling at my arms before I wake up.
At this point dream chronology becomes confusing again. I start dreaming about a strange feud my family is having with another family, who seem ... Spanish? They have a blond son my age, and we definitely hate each other. The first thing I remember is that they attack our house. In the basement, we're fighting, it was some kind of ambush. My father arriving turns the tides, and we manage to beat them/humiliate them in some fashion. Later, however, when we're going out to eat, the other family manages to upset/put us in disarray as well. It's all a very annoying situation. Apparently I take a Chinese class with some of the children from that family, and neither of us can agree to not attend? The mother is threatening me with hacking, and with stealing my DNA.
Going back to the big gray corporation, it seems we've decided to rebel and break out. It's a mealtime and some step of the plan is accomplished there, but I can't think what. I go out into the hallways to scout. I can escape because I can send my mind through the walls, and then move physically, but either I want to help my friends escape or there's something stopping me from leaving altogether. I send my mind through the walls and it's like the first part of the dream with the haphazard flying. I follow the twisting architecture of the corporation. I can see people but they can't see me. The village is nearby. I circle the slippery glass of a long hallway on columns. Sands is inside. I go back into the building and I'm lying on a wall.
Back to the gymnasium. The current inane task is constructing some kind of shallow, topless box, like a miniature pool table, and rolling metal balls inside to a certain rhythm of a child's tune. It's a silly form of brainwashing, and we're being judged on how well we do. The boy from the other family is there. We make our peace, because all of us want to get out of here. Later, when it's time to leave the gymnasium, we somehow manage to stay behind, but then we get locked in all night. What happens then is unclear.
