Poison and Spiders and Bombs, Oh My!

Really weird dream this morning.

It started out with me lecturing to a class (oddly all the students were male), and the classroom was in the old engineering/physics wing at CSU. I started hearing an odd noise, and eventually realized it was coming from the ceiling at the back of the room. It was a strange sort of ticking. I listened to it for a moment, and the more I listened, the more I became convinced that it was a bomb. I yelled for everyone to get out of the room, now. The door was stuck.

After enough of us slammed into it, it finally opened, and I saw that someone wedged a cloth under the door. I wondered if the device would have released poison gas rather than exploding. Then I noticed a very short, slight woman, with dark hair cut in a bob just past chin length. Her face reminded me of Ro Laren from ST:TNG, but she was much thinner and smaller, with angry red eyes and vaguely Asian features. She glared at me, and I knew that she was behind the ticking device. Before I could do anything about it, a missile crashed through the ceiling and into the corridor, exploding maybe 20 feet from where I was standing.

When I woke up, a female doctor was treating my wounds, which seemed to be mostly healed. There was a strange, x-shaped scar on my belly. For a moment I thought the missile had hit me directly, but then I realized I wouldn't be waking up if it had. The doctor would alternate looking at my wounds with petting a large spider in a jar. When she stuck her hand into the jar, the spider would act as if it was going to bite her, but then she would reach her fingers around to scratch the back of its abdomen, and it would act very happy. The doctor seemed obsessively interested in the spider, and there was something in her eyes that reminded me of the presumed bomber. I was convinced the doctor was under her influence.

*flicker*

The bomber-woman now tries to put a spell on Greg Dean (of Real Life Comics). It will make him obsessed with something (I think it was a black MP3 player) and allow her to control him. If he manages to pick up the object, he will have no chance to resist. For some reason, this is out in a grassy yard, and the object is sitting on a picnic table. I grab Greg and keep him from going for the object, trying to save him from the spell. The further I get him from the table, the easier he finds it to resist the urge to go back, but he still looks like an addict in need of a fix. We're going into the house to warn Liz when the bomber-woman appears.

That's when my alarm went off.

A few of the elements I can trace back. The spider looked a lot like a plastic spider I got to use as a D&D prop, and yesterday at Fred Meyer I came across a larger toy spider that supposedly "felt alive." Now, they were using the rubbery squishy material that does feel vaguely like "flesh," but spiders do not have flesh. They do have exoskeletons, but the only way you could feel the soft bits inside is if the exoskeleton were cracked, and the spider were either dead or dying. Claiming that a squishy spider "feels alive" is completely ridiculous.

I'm not sure about the sorceress/bomber lady. If you take Ro Laren and cross her with a professor at ISU (Gironella), you might get someone who looks like she did. Why she wanted to attack me and use mind control on everyone else, I don't know.

but then a missile crashed through the ceiling and into the corridor maybe twenty feet from me. It exploded and I blacked out, and woke up to find a doctor treating my wounds, which were mostly healed. There was a strange x-shaped scar on my belly that made me wonder if it had been put there to mark me as a target for the missile.

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Ring Dream

Last night I dreamed that I was working with Gandalf to hide the one ring and construct a character for a decoy to run a fake ring into Mordor. The real ring, we recoated in a dark grey metal and, I think, stuck inside a skull with a bunch of other similar looking rings. Then we started working on the character sheet for the decoy. All I remember for sure was that it wasn't a halfling, and he had lots of "hide" abilities.

I think that in this version, it wasn't possible to destroy the ring at all, so concealing it was the best bet. *shrugs*

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Vampiric Pizza Delivery, Seaside Edition

Very odd dream snippet from last night:

Fibonacci had ordered pizza, and was trying to offer me some. I asked if it was gluten-free, and it wasn't, so I told him he'd have to eat the whole thing himself. Despite the pizza already being there, there was a knock at the door, and it was a group of people there to deliver the pizza (counterwise pizza delivery, maybe?). There were four of them, and they started in on an odd sort of street theatre performance. Eventually I realized they were vampires, because they could move in ways that no human could. Also, there was some sort of "vampire look" in their eyes. They weren't threatening us; just dancing/performing for their tip, I think.

*flicker*

There are footsteps in the sand at the bottom of a shallow sea, and apparently human bones litter the floor, following the footsteps. A master vampire in black with a cape tenderly picks up the skull and sends some sort of magic into it. The bones partially reassemble, and the flesh/clothing reforms on those bones, revealing the face of a woman. The magic is not enough to bring her back; the light goes out of her eyes and the vampire screams his frustration into the sea.

[End Dream]

It was a fairly odd and eclectic mix of elements. I was not reading about vampires any time yesterday, though I did make some GF English muffin pizzas on Tuesday. *shrugs*

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Dream

Bit of an odd dream segment last night. I have no idea why, but I was driving a van, and Fibonacci and Abe (Shenron's OOC counterpart) were passengers. It was late at night, and we were in the parking lot of a veterinarian. I had received a notice that I'd been hired by this place (and even in the dream I was puzzling over (a) the fact that I'm not remotely qualified for such a job and (b) the fact that I couldn't remember applying for a job there), and if I didn't respond quickly, I would lose the job opportunity. The problem was that I was still under contract to teach at ISU, so there was no way I could take the job right then and there.

So I go into the vet's office. It's after midnight, but there's still someone on duty keeping an eye on the place overnight, and there are hundreds and hundreds of games, CD's, and DVD's on shelves lining the walls in the office, presumably to help this caretaker stay awake. That's all I remember about the inside of the place. Fibonacci complained that there was no place there that he could practice his speech for the next day and was very agitated to get some place where he could practice it. I told him that if he was that antsy, he could walk, but that I had to get this job-thing settled right now. I remember a conversation to the effect that he might as well wait, since the walk would take at least as long as getting the job sorted out. Not sure what Abe thought about all this. He mostly seems to have been set dressing.

I have no real idea where any of that dream came from. The van might be Andrew/Horgta's van, and the shelves of DVD's reminds me of the one time I was at an astronomical observatory on nightwatch (might have been interesting, except the equipment was cantankerous and the head researcher swore at it nearly continuously), but the rest? No real clue.

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Sleep Paralysis, Again

I was thinking that this was take two, but hunting through my 'dreams' tag posts, there was one other instance of sleep paralysis that I'd forgotten. Anyway, this dream started off perfectly happily. I was sitting on the floor of my grandma's old house watching Mythbusters while my mom puttered around in the kitchen. I remember hoping that she was going to cook sausage the way that Grandma used to.

There was a running gag through the Mythbuster's episode, where someone kept trying to kill the narrator. This would be illustrated by cartoons or sound effects. The only one I remember in detail had the camera focused on the interior of a boat. As the narrator spoke, the screen slowly started filling up with blue-tint, and cartoon fish started swimming by. When the screen was mostly full, the narrator made gasping noises like he was drowning, but then it drained again, and everything was okay.

Mom came in and shook her head, complaining about the number of explosions in the episode. I frowned and told her this one had been pretty tame that way. I was standing up at this point, and turned back to face the tv again.

*flicker*

Next I found myself on the boat that had been in the Mythbusters scene. It was careening all over the place, spinning around in the water, etc, and I grabbed the steering wheel, trying to right it. I couldn't get the steering wheel to budge. The boat was about to crash into something, maybe a bridge pylon, and I tried even harder to turn it. It did turn this time, but, well, momentum kept it moving towards the pylon. I braced myself for the crash, but just as it hit...

*flicker*

I found myself in my bed in my room. At first I thought I'd woken up, but Sawyer from Lost appeared for a moment, then disappeared again, so I decided I was still dreaming. I realized I couldn't move, and I wondered if I was having another bout of sleep paralysis. As soon as I wondered that, something dragged me off of the bed, whirled me around, and flipped me back and forth, as if warning me that it could have dashed my head against the floor. I tried to call for help, but no sound came out. I was whipped around some more by the unseen force, but I finally managed to make a sound. It was nothing more than a wordless yell, but it broke the paralysis and woke me up.

After waking up, I realized I was still feeling dizzy. I think maybe that's why I kept dreaming about being lurched around: that's how my head felt anyway.

Sleep Paralysis II
Sleep Paralysis I

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Is that like botany?

Random fragment from a dream, where someone told me that she and my dad were both majoring in "foliola". The closest English equivalent I can find is foliole:

1. a leaflet, as of a compound leaf.
2. a small leaflike organ or appendage.

That's the only bit of the dream I can remember now.

Hmmm... folia is also close, and it seems to be the name of a melody which gave its name to a particular chord progression. Or, well, just read the link.

For the record, my dad actually majored in physics.

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Heroes, Gothic Shadows version

Strange dream last night. Part of it was based on a game I played last week, Shadows Over Camelot, but the characters were more like the characters on Heroes than Arthurian knights. We lost the first round badly due to the Traitor; like Shadows Over Camelot, one person could randomly be assigned as the Traitor at the beginning of each round. The Traitor I'll call Madden (no names in the dream, but he was a creepy old guy who reminded me of Madden in one of Charles de Lind's books); if you picture him something like Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, that would be roughly right.

Unlike Heroes, people's powers didn't come out automatically ... or else came out horribly wrong. Madden was the only one who already knew how to use his power, and thus made a particularly troublesome Traitor. He supposedly showed Peter (looked like Peter in Heroes) how to make a "Seeing Eye" which would allow him to take over someone's mind, as Peter's power would allow him to make use of this. Naturally, Madden messed up one important detail in making it, so Peter was powerless, but didn't find out until it was too late. Madden's own Seeing Eye worked just fine ... mostly he seemed to enjoy using it to make people say things that they normally wouldn't.

The first round ended too quickly for most of us to learn anything at all about our powers. In the second round (essentially, a restart), we kept our memories of the little we did learn, and it didn't take long to determine that Madden wasn't the traitor this time, though Peter still wouldn't trust him, and wound up taking apart Madden's Seeing Eye to figure out how to get his own working. I was looking for the equipment I needed to get my power working (cutlery, mainly; no clue what I was going to do with it), and being followed around by a floating hag of a spirit who wouldn't shut up, but I must have succeeded in ignoring her as I can't remember anything that she said. While I was distracted by an oddly shaped knife (Imagine a mold for making very flowery tortilla salad bowls. Cut off one or two of the flowery folds and stick them on a knife handle. That was the knife.), and I think she must have then turned into a rather large, floaty, tarantula, with maybe an 8 inch body and 22 inch span total including the legs. The tarantula began attacking some random person, but I still hadn't found a decent knife. Someone else stepped in to get the tarantula off with his bare hands (looked like one of my 123 students).

That was about the point where I woke up, but there are a few other random details from Round 2 that I can remember. When we were in Madden's room, we found a sort of piano bench, but it wasn't rectangular. It was as if someone had tried to construct a perspective rectangle into a bench to make it look larger (so it was much narrower at one end than at the other). A whole bunch of cats kept gathering around the bench. Someone opened it (maybe me), and it was stuffed full of dead, almost mummified, rats, birds, mice, etc. The cats were quite happy about this ... I just wanted the thing closed again, and managed to slam it shut. This was yet another reason none of us wanted to trust Madden even if he wasn't the Traitor this time around.

Though I think I did get a glimpse of who the Traitor for that round was. He looked like Chris Sarandon (think Fright Night, not Princess Bride), and could apparently fly (or float, depending on how you look at it). During the quick glimpse I got, he seemed to be turning one of the other players into a green-skinned zombie.

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Cleaning and Driving

That's what I've been up to the past two days. On Sunday, I got my living room 90% clean, which involved rearranging furniture. I hadn't actually planned to do anything beyond moving the recliner so that I'd have a place for the Christmas tree (which I will likely put up on Black Friday so as to avoid the Blackness). However, the more I looked at the couch, the more I thought that it was time to move it. As I didn't want to move the bookshelf/plant-stand from its spot at the south window, my options were limited. It finally wound up at an angle, facing the northwest corner, where I put the tv stand. The cats seem to like it in that locations, as there is now a cubbyhole behind it and they can climb through the VCR/DVD access area to get there.

As for today, I went to Idaho Falls with my mom. I'd originally planned to go back down to the Whole Foods and Barnes and Noble down in the Salt Lake area, but my mom wasn't acting very enthused and I didn't relish the idea of 6 hours of driving just to get there and back...so I scaled back. Downside: No GF/Soy-free chocolate chips to be found, but I can order those online. However, the Wealth of Health Nutrition Center on Woodruff has a surprisingly large selection of gluten-free items. Much more than the last time I stopped in there, which was 2 or 3 years ago. They didn't have the Enjoy Life chocolate chips that I was hoping to find, but, again, those are available online.

And now I'm seriously considering just going to bed. I seem to have worn myself out. I did wake up to an oddly random dream this morning. I was with the Mythbusters out in a desert canyon somewhere. Carrie was telling everyone to be careful not to draw the attention of "The Alpha," as in the leader of the wolfpack in the area. However, someone was speaking too loudly, using too many "ow" sounds, and we heard the howl start up. The wolves came in. They were... very small, and strangely doglike. One of them looked like a cross between Buster* and Socks*: the size and shape of a small terrier, but with tight black curly hair. The other one that I saw looked like Scamp*. This one I successfully distracted with a rotten piece of fruit (either a tomato or an apple), which he happily started eating. That was when my alarm went off.

*Socks: the first dog my family ever had. Small terrier with a spring in his step. Literally. He had some sort of neurological/genetic thing that made one back foot move like he was skipping.
Scamp: cockapoo; second dog my family had. Sort of. He was really Dad's dog. He tolerated me, but hated everyone else (including my mom). Well, not quite. A cat had adopted us around the same time we got Scamp, and they became buddies. The cat (Indiana) died a few years before Scamp did, and I remember how sad it was to see him looking around, checking all her favorite napping spots, trying to figure out what had happened to her.
Buster: Dad's current dog. Larger than the other two. Terrier-mix. He's a much sweeter dog than Scamp, though more mischievous.

As I'm pretty sure I'm rambling, I'll stop there.

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Dreaming of Electric Police Cars (and Stealing Them)

Weird dream this morning. It was Saturday. I went to meet up with Melissa to go to taiji, only she'd decided to have a philosophy club meeting...in a room that looked very much like my old bedroom at my dad's house (only many times larger)...that was apparently now part of the university. At about 7:48 am I decided that I'd rather go to taiji and bid her and the club fare well. I went out to find Jean Luc (my car).

There was a huge parking garage (and a random descent into lucid dream territory, but all I got out of it was a better pair of shoes). I couldn't see Jean Luc anywhere, so I tried hitting the "panic" button on the remote (which is supposed to make it honk up a storm until the button is pushed again). No honking. I did hear a sort of buzzing/whirring, and followed the noise to an odd looking police vehicle.

I knew it was a police vehicle because it had the light bar on top, but it was shaped vaguely like a dune buggy. I hit the button on my key-remote again. The lights flashed and the thing buzzed again, so I shrugged and decided I might as well take the thing. I got in, and found what was apparently the throttle...at the bottom right of the single seat. It was a small plastic lever, say one inch by a quarter of an inch. Pulling up on it made the car go forward, but I couldn't get it above about 20 mph. Some guys came along and tried to help, but they couldn't figure it out either.

At that point, I woke up.

PM ADDENDUM: At some point, and I'm not sure if it was part of the dream or after I woke up, I decided that the car wouldn't go because it was an electric one in need of a recharge. Hence, the title.

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Tired

I've been unusually tired this week, and I'm not sure why. I think it might be either a minor cold or middling allergies. So while I'm working on waking up, I'll maunder a bit about my week.

Tuesday I fell asleep in the afternoon. I often take an hour nap on T/Th. When the timer went off, I was in some deep stage of sleep, and knew that waking up all the way would be near impossible, so I reset the alarm for 40 more minutes. Then when it went off again, I made some Yerba Maté tea, which kept me awake through my evening class.

Wednesday I woke up to an odd dream. I don't remember details now, but Tip from SkinHorse was the POV character, having issues with a talking lion (and there was a talking lion in the comic a month or two back). So far as I know, this is the first time I've dreamt about a web-comic or its characters.

Then last night was the last Symphony concert of the season. Also the last guest conductor. When Dr. George walked out, they didn't have time to find a permanent replacement, so they've been playing musical-conductors (no pun intended) this season, but it looks like they've got someone lined up for next season. He's got a good reputation, and the preview of the schedule looked pretty good. Also, they've moved the Symphonies to Friday night instead of Wednesday. On the one hand, I'll never have an evening class on Fridays to interfere. On the other, I always get up early on Saturdays to make it to my taiji class in IF. Ah well.

Anyway, I need some more calories if I'm going to make it to my first class and give them their last in class test.

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Titanic Puzzle, with Monsters

Weird weird dream, verging on nightmare. It started at "the" mall, which vaguely resembled the local Pine Ridge Mall. I was there with the Scoobies from Buffy. I went outside in what would have been Shopko's parking lot, only there was no Shopko, to check out some loud noises we'd been hearing. I was actually expecting it to be monsters, but it took me a while to spot them. They were on the western horizon, slowly coming towards the mall. I ran back inside.

"Uh, guys...? You're not going to believe this." Er, why not? They were the Scoobies, after all??? Or maybe they didn't have an identity in the dream until I'd seen the monsters, and then they became the Scoobies by default? *shrugs*

At any rate, once they'd decided that, yes, monsters were coming, we ran around in unproductive circles in the mall. My POV character became Willow at some point and she/I yelled at Xander for running around in circles...and then ran and hid under bed. No, I don't know why there was a fully made bed in a room immediately off the mall that did not seem to be a mattress store

And while she/I was hiding there, we saw this huge HUGE spider shadow, and I thought that one of the monsters was a giant tarantula and it had followed us under the bed...only it turned out to be a trick of the light, as the actual spider was about an eighth of an inch in diameter, and we squashed it with a book for scaring us. Naturally, at that point, one of the semi-humanoid monsters made it into the room.

Despite being under the bed, I had a clear look at him from above. Think zombie/Frankenstein-like monster, about 1.5 times as big as a human, with greyish skin, tattered clothes, and lots of stitching. He/it seemed to know that I/Willow were under the bed, and I had a "memory" of this "episode" and was waiting for the knives to come tearing through the mattress to get us. They didn't. If anything, it seemed he/it was going to bounce on the bed as hard as he could and hope it crushed us.

*half-wake-up*

I wake up enough to see that I'm on top of a bed, not under it, and that my alarm clock has just started glowing (the light gets brighter and brighter for a half hour before it goes off, simulating a sunrise). Then I drift back into sleep, but not quite into the same dream.

So I stay on top of the bed in the new dream, and Bataan (one of Cheng Manch'ing's students, who leads the summer taiji camps that I go to) is there, directing a tour of a very weird Titanic museum. The bed floats by a table of artifacts and two catch my eye. They're both pendants, maybe 2-3 inches across. Before I pick them up, they both look like glass cut/faceted to look like a gem. One looks that way after I pick it up; the other, when I turn it over, has a glowing, spherical amber stone set in the middle. It feels like the stone is looking at me, so I hastily put the pendant down.

Meanwhile, a large puzzle has been put together to cover the entire floor. I say the bed must have been floating, because otherwise it would have torn up this puzzle. Parts of it were of fish and things swimming by the wreckage; parts were probably bits of people's lives who had died aboard the Titanic, one part was this, for no obvious reason... And either the floor was uneven, or the puzzle didn't quite fit, as it's starting to go up a wall in at least one corner.

I'm sure there are some details I've forgotten, but not long after I noticed the corner-thing, my alarm went off.

Incidentally, last night I had an odd dream, but there's less detail-recall. My mom and I were heading into a new restaurant in a dark, omnious brick building. I was hoping there was a menu posted, so I could see if they served any food I could eat. But as soon as we walked into the building, the dream changed. A woman was standing in Jeremy Irons' office, smiling at him. Apparently he was a dentist, and she was supposed to be bringing her young son to see him.

"He'll be here in a few minutes," she said.

"If you wouldn't let him run around in traffic, he'd be here now," Jeremy Irons retorted.

Meanwhile, in one of the pictures on the wall behind the woman, her little son was peeking out at a man in a chair. There was a sense that this had been going on for hours, this game of hide and seek in the pictures (think Harry Potter pictures), and that the boy was deathly afraid of the man in the chair...

And that's all I remember of that one.

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Nonlinear Dreams

I was riding on a rather odd bus. It did not have the customary rows of seats all lined up neatly. Instead, everything was fluid and curvy, and the back ring of seats was elevated above the front-most ring. The arrangement might have made sense for, say, a series of heated pools, where the topmost pool got the hottest water, and it had cooled off some before it made it to the lower level, but there was no water. Just these odd seats made out of some sort of plastic that looked rather like rock. It was white with grey speckles, and not particularly comfortable to sit on. Oh, and unless the bus was smaller on the outside, it was rather too wide to fit on most roads.

At any rate, something happened to the driver. Not sure if he got shot or had a heart attack or what. Then three friends (one of them my POV character) notice what time* it is, and realize that they have a perfect opportunity for a heist. One guy takes over driving the bus. The other guy secures the other passengers (there seem to be quite a lot of them, despite the fact that every time I saw the seats they were empty). Me? I don't know what I'm doing there. Eventually we get to wherever we were going.

The other two leap out and leave me to deal with the passengers. I'm not very happy about this. One guy is insistently trying to get out. Finally I whisper at him that I'll let him go, but that we have to put on a good show so that it looks like I tried to stop him. So he makes it off the bus and I tackle him, but he's not fighting back. I can't very well just stop fighting, but without any resistance I don't know how, exactly, I'm going to be able to let him go.

Finally he turns into a grey cat with crooked ears (I think it's called a "scottish fold"). So do all the other passengers. They're quite beautiful cats, in fact. I think they all start to wander off at this point, but I'm not really sure.

*This detail tells me that it was inspired by an episode of Monk that I watched yesterday, involving a heist of an armored car that required people to be in the right places at the right time. No clue where the rest of it came from.

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Dr. Seuss, meet Harry Potter

Weird dream just before I woke up. It's a bit fragmented.

It started in some sort of huge sports complex at a high school. My POV character was "Not I," which is the name of a chatbot that I work on. This chatbot mostly speaks in Confuction/Taoist/Zen sayings, though the dream character didn't seem to. At any rate, this school was something like Hogwarts, as there were a lot of ghosts that hung around... and Not I did something that offended the ghosts somehow. The details have fuzzed out on me. But he/she (there was a bit of gender confusion) wound up invited to the ghost's table, where they set him/her up as the "King of Fools," with various accoutrements thereof. Part of it was eating the Fools' Cake, but there were some other things. One of Not I's friends had gone along and insisted on keeping some of the items, so that Not I could not officially be proclaimed King of Fools. Apparently this would be a very bad thing.

So they needed a way out. From another ghost, they learned of the existence of a book that the ghosts feared. If a mortal read it, it would result in a devastating flood. Not I and friend got a copy of it and started reading. It was a Dr. Seuss book, condensed down into maybe four pages of tight text, with another story after it. There was no flood in the Seuss story; apparently the flood was in the next story after, which Not I never got to read since I woke up about then.

(I can't think of anything from yesterday remotely related to any of that. A few days back, I did see the original "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" cartoon, but I haven't watched or read anything involving ghosts or Kings of Fools. *shrugs*)

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Hellhouse

I dreamed a new episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer last night. Well, half an espisode. I woke up before the resolution.

It begins in an old house. Three or four vamps are gathered there. Spike is also there, but not with the other vamps. He seems to be mildly insane in this episode, a la the beginning of Season 7. He's also got a beard. A force moves over the house, and everything inside it. It changes the vampires. They're still vampires, but it's a new kind of vampire. It changes Spike, too, but possibly not in exactly the same way. When the transformation is complete, the black vampire picks up a book. It looks like a copy of the Bible, but it was also changed. "We got oursel's a new religion!" the black vampire announces. "Time to go spread the word."

(At this point, I seem to have been on the set while they were shooting the episode, as I ran up and grabbed one of the new bibles to see what they'd done to them. I was disappointed to discover that it was only a mockup. The first half inch or so of pages were vampified bible verses, but the rest was advertising and random garbage that had been thrown in to fill out the thickness of the book. Back to the episode...)

Spike's close enough to hear the announcement, but remains unseen by the other vamps. He's crawling deep into the house. I get the impression that he knows exactly what's going on, and that...either it can't last or that the transformation isn't what it seems to be. There's a sense that the change is all on the outside, that the inside core is as rotten as ever.

Cut to Buffy. She's on the third floor hallway of a university building that is also, in some sense, the same house that the vamps were in. She's sitting behind a table full of candies and little trinkets to sell, and has chosen the third floor specifically because almost no one ever comes clear up there. Enter three or four college students, one of them from my Math143 class. They come up to buy some things from Buffy. A door is open across from her table. Vaguely Germanic hymn music comes out of the door. The customers glance at it and make a face. "Not them again," one of them says.

"Them?" Buffy asks.

"Oh, this new religious group on campus."

The music suddenly changes. It's something with a pop beat, though the minor tones remain. Suddenly Buffy's customers are interested in what might be going on behind the door. The furniture and people have changed from their last glimpse. It was dark and shadowy the first time; now there's light. Also, all the people in the room now have white skin. The customers walk right inside...and disappear. Naturally this gets Buffy's attention. She follows them in.

It seems like an ordinary enough room, but it's somehow closed off. It works by making people not want to leave. At the right, the first slayer is, er, sitting. Sort of. She's in something like a cocoon, so it's hard to tell what position her legs and feet are in. She looks like an artistic representation of the crescent moon with a woman's face, somehow. There's a piano or organ somewhere near the first slayer, but mostly the room feels like a library. Lots of books on the walls. Colors all browns and beiges.

...and that's where I woke up...

I do know/remember that it was possible to leave the "house" once you'd entered it, but the house made you not want to leave. I also know that the changed vamps were going around preaching their "good news," which probably went something like "Drink from me and never die." And the "house" seems to be more of an essence of a house, so that it could come upon any structure and that structure would become The House. So we've got overtones of the First Evil, the Haunted House from Season 4, the time they got trapped in Buffy's house by Anyanka's best friend, and probably others that I'm not noticing yet.

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Dangerous Popcorn

I have a very vague memory of a dream. I was at one of the philosophy club meetings. No clue what the topic of discussion was, but we'd branched out into "experimental philosophy." To that end, there was a nasty deadly virus contained in what we called a "vial" in the dream. However, it was the exact size and shape of a tube that I bought this summer, containing "a yard of popcorn." As you might guess from that name, it was three feet long, and maybe 2.5 inches in diameter. Why we had a deadly virus in it, or what philosophical point it was supposed to make, I don't know. I do know that if we'd released the virus, it would have killed a whole bunch of people. (And this dream would have surprised me less had it been right after the mid-season-finale of Heroes, which also involved a deadly virus)

Back to the real-life popcorn tube. It had three kinds of popping corn in it. The topmost foot was black popcorn, which was my least favorite. The flavor was kind of blah, and the kernels popped up very small. The next foot was yellow popcorn. This was very, very good. The last foot was red popcorn. Not quite as good as the yellow, but it popped up nice and fluffy. I've still got 2-3 inches of it left, in fact.

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Dreams...

I remember a few, oddly random, vignettes, most likely from different dreams.

In one, I was looking out over a vast plain of tree stumps, where a forest had been only a day or so ago. Above each tree stump was a glowing blue dot. I'm not really sure what it represented. The soul of the tree? A mark made by those chopping them down? No clue.

In another, I was in a huge mansion that I knew (in the dream) had belonged to my grandma. From the feel of things, it was an underground mansion. It was cavernous. The living room was in a space with at least 300 feet between the floor and the ceiling. To make it seem cozier, a metalwork ceiling had been suspended from the main ceiling at a more usual height for a room. The metalwork also had lights built into it. Along the walls were various outcroppings and catwalks. I remember one sort of shack sticking out of a wall. It looked like the wood was starting to rot and I wondered for how long it would be safe to climb through it.

In the last that I remember, I was sitting in a desk in a classroom...behind Spike from BtVS. No clue what class it was, but Spike was going a little nutso. He kept holding up his right hand, which looked perfectly normal, and asking me why I'd stolen his fingers. As all his fingers were there, I had no clue what he was talking about. As he seemed rather distraught, I tried to show him that his fingers really were there. Somehow, I could tell from touching them that there was no feeling in them.

And that's all I remember. If there was any continuity between these snippets, I've forgotten it.

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Warring States

Odd dream segment last night. I was in some sort of impromptu prison camp with maybe 8 others. One of the newest ones to be thrown in with us had a key with him. Despite looking like the key to an overgrown jewelry box (brass, with a heart at the end), it turned out to fit the lock on the door. Though, now that I'm not dreaming, I'm reasonably certain that the door and lock were both flimsy enough that we could have just broken through, which means we should have at least tried to free the two prisoners who chained to something inside the prison, er, tent. I'll bet the locks there were just as flimsy.

At any rate, I got out of the "cell" and started wandering around...well...something that looked an awful lot like the old Fred Meyer, before it moved over to where the Pocatello Mall used to be, except there were areas set off behind the retail areas displaying national(?) treasures for the people running the prison camp. Several times I went back over to the cell, looking for a way to free the two we'd had to leave behind. The last time, I went back into one of the treasure areas. There were crystals and statues on shelves and nooks in the walls, and all sorts of tiny drawers, like someone had lines the walls with normal chests of drawers...except that all the drawers were jewelry-box size, say, 1 inch high by five inches wide. Out of curiosity, I opened one of the drawers. Whatever was inside was so sparkly that I couldn't make out its shape, and seemed to be encrusted with diamonds. Anyway, it was as I made my way along the huge jewelry armoire that I accidentally bumped something and made a noise, and got the attention of a...guard, presumably.

She was Asian, black hair almost to her waist, wearing some sort of lavender-grey business-skirt outfit and didn't seem too concerned by the noise, but still came out to investigate. I tried to hide...but there weren't very many places to hide. As soon as she saw me... well, she looked surprised, but then I was tackled by someone else entirely. Not sure if there was a sudden character swap or what.

Anyway, the guy who tackled me was also Asian, with flyaway hair maybe 4-5 inches long that stuck out in every direction. He wound up pushing me down the corridor in something of a dance....with a musical interlude where it really was a dance...then we went back to fighting.

Then the scene cut away to black. An ominous voice declared that the plan was proceeding. Soon California would be known as the Citrus State, but first they had to quell any opposition from Florida.

About this time, the alarm went off. So apparently I was in a Chinese prison camp, inside Fred Meyer, being run so that California could steal the title of "Citrus State" from Florida. ^/^ That one's odd even by my standards.

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It never helps...

Brief dream snippet from last night. It was a sort of...game, I think. Where people took turns in various roles. A guy who teaches in the math department with me, Russ, had wound up with the role of evil, demonic villain for that, er, round. The amusing thing is that Russ is one of the most soft-spoken and polite people I've ever met, so casting him in that role is a trifle...disconcerting. Anyway, buildings were blowing up all over the place, monsters were attacking, and at some point Russ turned into a giant cobra, which was sort of a relief since THAT was an obvious menace. There was a slightly smaller giant cobra with it; I have no clue where it came from.

Anyway, all through this, I'm trying to find a functioning restroom. It's rather irritating when the buildings that I know have restrooms in them keep blowing up. When I do finally find an intact restroom, I wake up. I think that this would have been a nightmare, except that I was too focused on finding a restroom to be overly concerned with the scary stuff going on. Also, there was that sense it was a game...

My title comes from the evil overlord list, btw. As best I remember, one of the bits of advice was "Don't turn into a giant snake. It never helps."

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Chinese Restaurant at the End of the World

Weird dream. I was on a date with a guy who looked like Owen from BtVS (the normal guy she tried dating in season 1). That wasn't his name. His name was something odd that I couldn't remember, and still can't. I think there was a 'k' and an 'n' in it. Anyway, when we got to the restaurant, he went to get us a table. Then I had to try and find him, which was difficult since I didn't know his name. I wandered through several ornately decorated rooms several times. There were huge chandeliers made something like the Chinese architectural lanterns that you see in restaurants, but the paper/filters were mostly red. There were curtains on every doorway. The seating was rather plain, consisting of wooden chairs and tables or of vinyl orange booths. I finally gave up looking for not-Owen and sat with some people I recognized.
*flicker*
No rhyme or reason, but I've gotten up again, and I wander through the restaurant and into a room through white swinging saloon doors into a mostly white room. The floor tiles are white. The tabletops are white, as is the old-fashioned drugstore countertop at my left. The stool cushions at the counter are white vinyl, as are the cushions on the more conventional chairs, but both have frames of shiny chrome. Anyway, there's not-Owen, sitting at one of the white tables, eating pancakes. I sort of try to explain/apologize, but the sight of the pancakes disgusts me.
*flicker*
As I leave the restaurant, I notice that the lines are even worse than when we got there. They're starting to get violent, too. Then I'm getting into a car at the front of the restaurant; my mom is driving. There are ten-foot-tall foo dogs guarding the front columns. She drives us around randomly for a while, and suddenly I'm in the back seat and Dad's in the front seat. Even in the dream, this sudden change confuses me. I come up with an explanation... something about not abandoning Dad to the chaos (not yet visible in the streets). Apparently we're trying to get out of town, to a safe spot.
*flicker*
I guess we didn't make it out of town, because next thing I remember, I'm investigating a sort of "cave": really a hollow between two rough, mortared basalt walls, There's enough of a hole in the frontmost wall that I can crawl through. I do so, and hide a half-full water bottle in there for later use. I hear it starting to rain, and immediately start trying to find something to catch the water; we'll need it later. Before I can crawl out and try and gather water, though, I hear a commotion just across the way from my hollow. From the noises, I can tell that a bunch of people are fighting, and conclude that they've found a food source of some kind. I peek out and see that they're fighting over an itty bitty sparrow.
*alarm clock goes off*

Analysis: Uh, mostly this seems to be a random assemblage. The restaurant is every Chinese restaurant I've ever been in rolled together and scaled up by a factor of ten or twenty, except for the little drugstore room. The next sequence is essentially the typical "try to escape the city but roads are too crowded" bit seen in most disaster movies. I suspect the last sequence was largely inspired by watching too much Survivor Man on the Discovery Channel. They put a guy in an extreme environment with limited supplies, and he gets to survive (and lug camera equipment) for 4-10 days, depending on the show (favorite lines: "Mmmmm, grasshopper," "Mmmmm, rat."). The basalt hollow might have been a reworking of the Mythbuster's frontier prison, though.

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Update and a Dream

First, the dream: It started off as a sort of high-school/college reunion. Only things went all pear-shaped, and somehow I got sucked into an alternate dimension version of the reunion. Faith (as in the BtVS character) was the primary speaker, only in this dimension she was sixty or more pounds overweight with dozens of earrings dangling from her right ear and (I think) a rather nasty scar down her face. The dimensional stability went, and left a group of us stranded in a sort of wilderness environment. Sort of, because there were man-made things scattered amidst the rocks and trees. A door appeared and everyone tried to scramble through it (this was a shortcut across the rockiest, most difficult terrain), but I didn't quite make it. So I started across the rocks. Parts of it were like the lava hike, but my last memory was of grabbing onto some windchimes (very sturdy ones, apparently, and long) and using them to climb down a cliff face. When I was about five feet from the bottom, there was a gust of wind strong enough to knock me loose and the wind chimes...chimed. Not a metallic sound: more like the way bamboo chimes sound. [/dream]

On Friday, I decided to dig out the paving stones in the front yard that I had once used to make a path. They didn't actually follow the path I usually walked there, and some of them were more than half overgrown with grass. I managed to buy too many hexagonal stones last fall when I was making the backyard path, so I used the leftovers to make a contiguous path from the stairs to the driveway, with a sand substrate. A tirepump would have been useful for moving the sand...

Since my wheelbarrow had a nearly flat tire. I now have a tire pump, so this morning I'll probably rectify the situation. On the other hand, moving a hundred pounds of sand in a wheelbarrow with a flat tire was an interesting experience.

I have also developed a hi-tech filtration system for removing excess gravel from the dirt in my front yard. For $2.10 (plus shipping and handling and tax), you, too can be the proud owner of a soil-gravel-filtration system! The first component is a white bucket with heart-shaped perforations all over it. This first filter catches the larger rocks and sticks, and the holes must be heart-shaped, uh, because, uh..., the mystic Caballeros say so (alternately, because it was the first thing I found at the dollar-five store). This first part of the system also helps break up larger clumps of dirt. The second part of the system is a plastic bowl covered in 1/8" holes, also known as a 'collander' or 'sieve' depending on where the intended use is. Anyway, with the two pieces I've been able to get most of the gravel out of the soil where I planted the flower bulbs.

My older neighbor from across the street came by while I was doing this to find out why. He's the classic neighborhood gossip, and I found out from him that my one-legged, drug-dealing neighbor had been sentenced to eight years (minimum five). Apparently he was technically still on parole for something else when he was arrested... *sighs*

Back to the yard, the leaf on the black raspberry plant is in the process of becoming a twig, and I bought some more perennials to plant when it starts staying above freezing at night again. One is thyme, one is a viola (looks sort of like a pansy, but with the leaves overlapping differently), and one is a "hen-and-chicks", so called because of the way it spreads.

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