DAY TEN: Dream 7

This one was a pretty narrow-scope dream compared to the rest of them, so there's not a lot to say.

I was in bed over at my mom's house in a room I used to have upstairs over there. Looking down from it, the backyard was visible. I could see a hot tub left out overnight and a bunch of pool toys laying around in close proximity to each other. Something about them evoked a palpable sense of dread, so I decided to lay back in my bed and pretend I hadn't seen them.

Still, curiosity got the better of me, and I peeked over the edge of the window to see the cylindrical toys beginning to conjoin with one another, gradually forming a humanoid figure. It's growing gargantuan, far beyond what I feel it could, with a rubbery square for a head. Intimidated, I try to lay back in bed, only to have a feeling of certainty that it saw me anyway. I hope it's going to head somewhere other than the backyard in case this massive monstrosity decides to wreak havoc on the neighborhood.

Instead, it lurches up towards my room, peering inside with its eyeless face. One of the arms comes in to jostle me, disturbing me from my false slumber. Terrified, I sit up in bed and look it full in the "face", where I ask it what it wants. It responds that it isn't sure, as it's just come into the world, and was hoping I'd have any suggestions. Knowing this is my chance to tame the currently-gentle giant, I lay hands upon a boombox in my room and begin playing music from it, quietly so as to not wake up my family downstairs. It takes to the music well, asking me what it's called, and on receiving a satisfactory answer scoops it into its arms and absorbs it into its being.

I ask it to wait just a moment as I cross over rooms and wake up my best friend sleeping in the room across from me, who's mildly annoyed and understandably skeptical of my tale until he enters my room and sees the creation crouched down down the street, peeking into other peoples' houses. He asks if we could puncture it and end it before it becomes a known quantity and a threat, but I'm against it because it seems to be having an innocent enough good time. i call out to it, asking if it wouldn't mind meeting someone new. Returning to the yard, it queries how varied humankind is, to which my friend responds there're loads of us and it'd be impossible to sum it up. Seemingly impressed, it asks if we could find it a place where it could live in relative piece until scarce amounts of civilization. We agree and head for the rooftop, where there's a helipad waiting, and attach it with cables to airlift it out of the yard, setting out for a massive desert. After affirming it doesn't need sustenance, we bid it farewell as we fly off in the chopper again. My best friend reminds me this might be our best bet to kill it and wanders towards a gun, but I shut him down entirely by swerving the chopper dangerously enough for him to almost fall out of it. He gets the message and stays inside.

As we're going back, we discuss a bunch of random nonsense. I remember tidbits of things like Kingdom Hearts 3 being the worst game in the mainline series and my buddy's occasional work at a carnival (this part's actually true, he does work at a carnival some seasons of the year last I heard). The dream from thereon is a lighthearted chopper right home before I wake up.

We're all on vacation in Australia, so all I need to do is hold onto hope that I can stay adrift until I loop around the world and get to Russia! This makes perfect sense and I pull up a GPS locator map on my phone to track my progress, which is, in nonsense dream logic, fast enough that I can see my blip on there constantly updating.

...

In this airport, I find there's only two practical destinations available: The United States and Egypt, though there's flights all over the world.

...

The trip is unpleasant before I have to sit next to some intensely smelly dude, but before too long the plane lands directly at my destination (not an airport, right outside the pyramid) and I get out.

I love this sort of stupid dream bullshit so much. The final punchline being the plane landing at the pyramid itself is hysterical. And of course the airport just had a flight "to the US" and not to anywhere specific. I'll bet you would've wound up on the White House lawn or something.

Terrified, I sit up in bed and look it full in the "face", where I ask it what it wants. It responds that it isn't sure, as it's just come into the world, and was hoping I'd have any suggestions.

"Man I dunno, you got anything? I'm new to this whole monster gig."

We agree and head for the rooftop, where there's a helipad waiting, and attach it with cables to airlift it out of the yard, setting out for a massive desert.

THANKFULLY THE SLUMBERING FAMILY WAS COMPLETELY UNDISTURBED BY THIS

The monster cracked me up when I woke up. I spent so long laying in bed scared during that part of the dream, which I didn't really emphasize enough, that I wouldn't've been shocked if that turned into a nightmare. It should have. Instead, it's just a derpy interaction.

DAY ELEVEN: Dream 8

We open off with me walking across some tarmac. I'm moving at a brisk pace because some friends of mine're playing a game that I didn't want to be involved in, though I don't have any elaboration on what this is. I step behind a building at the edge of it to lean against it and relax for a minute when a friend bursts around the corner carrying a running, noisy chainsaw. At this sight, I feel myself scrunching against the wall, but I call out to him that what he's holding isn't an appropriate implement for tag, now immediately understanding that they're playing tag. He responds that they're using stuff to tag each other with and it's fine, turning off the saw. I'm like "well if you have a running chainsaw how the HELL are you going to just tag people?" He seems annoyed, like I don't get the crux of what he's saying, but acquiesces to turn it off, insisting he's still going to hit people with the actual thing. Unsatisfied by this, I go along with him to talk to the group.

Next I remember, I'm standing amongst my friends, all of us carrying an assortment of hollow metal weaponry with light chains attached to them. I'm indicating that we use the metal as a weighty handicap and reach out to tag people with the chains for added reach. Once again, everyone seems annoyed by my rules, and someone suggests just walloping them with the weapons. Unable to convince them, I watch as they head off to resume their game, dumping my giant metal fist-on-a-chain with dissatisfaction and heading inside a nearby building.

Inside, my cousin's playing about on a forklift that uses a Nintendo 64 controller as its controls. I climb aboard once they're done messing about and have a blast of a time messing around, lifting boxes and throwing them around by flicking the controls. It's less like a forklift and more like a gravity gun with a giant operating mechanism, all things told. Every time I throw something, I jerk around wildly in the pilot's seat, which makes me nauseous before too long, and I clamber off of it to rest.

An unspecified amount of time later, I've regained my senses and headed to a computer science class, where the teacher's illustrating the effectiveness of transmissible viruses that can make the leap from a PC to real life. For some reason he's doing this in period dress as a schoolteacher from the 1800s.

He starts by demonstrating code execution that influences a real world bust of Teddy Roosevelt and a book to be touched in sequence and trigger a door to open. From there, he elaborates on how a virus can make the leap by holding up a star-shaped ornament as a proxy and loading up malicious code into it. It unexpectedly goes out of control, writhing about and wrecking up the place. The classroom empties out (no one actually seems to leave so much as they all vanish).

Before long, I'm the only one left. The instructor asks me if I can help him delete the virus, and I agree. We head up a steep slope and through a waterfall to reach a hidden terminal room, but the Starscorned (this is its name) is chasing us all the way. We get into a room that locks with a sealed bunker door, wherein I peer out a window to watch the star thrash around for a while as my new buddy does his thing with the computer. Unfortunately, the terminal he's using has already been corrupted. He lets me have a crack at it, but the system's old and outdated. It runs too slowly for me to do anything effective with it because every application I open takes too long to load and gets terminated by the virus. I bring out a laptop to connect to the local internet, only to find the virus is connected to it and it infects my computer. I'm furious beyond belief because I have stuff in there that I haven't made backups of.

I open task manager and close out the process running the virus before it can terminate the task manager. I'm not really convinced it's done, but I can at least access the program we were planning to use to deactivate it...and around here, I wake up.

I love how you went from extremely violent variations of tag to being in a shitty tech B-movie.

I'd play metal chained fist tag, that sounds like a fun concussive time.

The other twist is that the virus deleted everyone from the classroom.

This post was last modified: May 19, 2023 at 12:53 PM by Reeb.

Throwing around a bunch of hollow metal objects sounds like a good way to give somebody serious injuries. I'm kind of surprised I didn't go along with it; even when I grouse around something I feel like I have a tendency to try it, but I think the chainsaw thing was too much for my dream self's sensibilities.

I didn't even think of "everybody disappears" as the virus deleting them, but that makes it all the better as to why it was treated as such a severe deal to urgently be dealt with.

On another note, this has kind of been a failed garrison. There've been two dreams posted besides mine, so the idea of it being a community thing's mostly shot. I hope Fwd's project goes better. I guess I'm going to continue for now, though I'm no longer really adamant about hitting 31.

DAY TWELVE: Dream 9

I'm in the Metaverse - Zuckerberg's Metaverse. There's a handgrip device with a singular button you can use to project an entire world around you in a blank room which functionally allows your consciousness to travel indefinite distances in the space without fear of running into walls. At present, I'm navigating my way through the place when I come across an encampment.

Barbarians are here - the kind of people that kill others' projections. It's not elaborated on as to what that entails for the person in question, but I'm inclined to sneak around them regardless, crawling past a low wall to get somewhere.

I emerge in a grassy field nothing like where I was before. Here, Hillary Clinton is playing an oboe. I feel reluctant to approach because of a reluctance to engage with politicians, the second time I've just avoided contact with anyone this dream, and head into a nearby forest instead. Nothing much happens in the forest, it just serving as a space to deposit me in a new environment where I'm in a store full of bestselling novels.

I pick out a romance novel and take it to the storefront, where I'm treated to a long, draining speech from a child manning the counter as to how good the undercurrent of a subplot is. After the long dialogue, I'm pretty weary, and I go out into the parking lot to take a seat in a car. I'm pretty sure the entire Metaverse angle's been dropped at this point.

On getting to the car, I've got a pounding headache and shining clouds overhead're beating down on my vision, so I cover my eyes and take shelter in the darkness. Without any transition, I'm sitting in my room, constructing a new sliding office chair that looks exactly like one of the (decidedly not rolling) chairs in my mom's living room. Just about when I'm done setting it up and I'm about to try it out, I wake up.

Not much of a coherent dream where anything happens.

On another note, this has kind of been a failed garrison. There've been two dreams posted besides mine, so the idea of it being a community thing's mostly shot. I hope Fwd's project goes better. I guess I'm going to continue for now, though I'm no longer really adamant about hitting 31.

Sorry about that, I straight up do not dream 95% of the time I sleep. I posted the one dream I DID have that I remembered. I had like one other dream but it was such nothing that it wasn't worth posting. Something about visiting the cinema and seeing Magia Record characters ride by together on a bicycle using the sidewalk. I imagine it's like that for a lot of the members here. I'm impressed you're not only dreaming nigh daily but able to remember them at length too.

Barbarians are here - the kind of people that kill others' projections. It's not elaborated on as to what that entails for the person in question, but I'm inclined to sneak around them regardless, crawling past a low wall to get somewhere.

fucking civ

Here, Hillary Clinton is playing an oboe. I feel reluctant to approach because of a reluctance to engage with politicians, the second time I've just avoided contact with anyone this dream, and head into a nearby forest instead.

Smart move tbh.

Without any transition, I'm sitting in my room, constructing a new sliding office chair that looks exactly like one of the (decidedly not rolling) chairs in my mom's living room. Just about when I'm done setting it up and I'm about to try it out, I wake up.

Now that's a cliffhanger. How will ever ever know if the chair worked well in cohesion with your desk or not?!

This post was last modified: May 19, 2023 at 10:48 PM by Yrrzy.

I had like one dream that seemed worth sharing at all but i didnt want to make a whole ass thread for it so i just posted it in the discord lol

i had a dream that i remember but dont have enough for a thread
revolving around some extradimensional being building a "family" by plucking people out of various times (only the last 200 years tho really) and keeping them in weird manipulative situation where they lied to them about everything
dimension-hopping was also done thru windows a la problem sleuth
all i remember rly tho was one of the people being plucked from the titanic
the rest seemed fairly modern

otherwise it tends to be a lot of vibes-heavy dreams that end up being just "i was like, at school, but it was different and weird" in description

This post was last modified: May 20, 2023 at 5:50 PM by Reeb.

No dream today, but I figure I should post to just respond to some stuff.

Sorry about that, I straight up do not dream 95% of the time I sleep. I posted the one dream I DID have that I remembered. I had like one other dream but it was such nothing that it wasn't worth posting. Something about visiting the cinema and seeing Magia Record characters ride by together on a bicycle using the sidewalk. I imagine it's like that for a lot of the members here. I'm impressed you're not only dreaming nigh daily but able to remember them at length too.

I had like one dream that seemed worth sharing at all but i didnt want to make a whole ass thread for it so i just posted it in the discord lol

I'm not really bothered by people not being able to contribute. I understand most people don't vividly remember their dreams (I don't for long either, I usually just grab my cell phone off my counter and spew world salad into a text dump that I make more coherent later). Earlier, I thought this would garner more community engagement than it has, but I'm thinking in retrospect that it's kind of hard to expect people to actively participate in something where it's commonplace to forget what the hell went on last night within 15 minutes. I'm fine with how it's turned out; I'm just glad to've had a chance to try and learn for next time.

ive just not been having very interesting dreams lately, its kind of a crapshoot whats gonna happen

well last night i dreamt about an optical illusions exhibit(?) where everything was built to trip up your sense up direction, but it was too good at its job so it had to have so many safety features cause people would just be falling down shit all the time

well last night i dreamt about an optical illusions exhibit(?) where everything was built to trip up your sense up direction, but it was too good at its job so it had to have so many safety features cause people would just be falling down shit all the time

They'll be so confused that they'll wander into the hospital illusion.

This post was last modified: May 28, 2023 at 8:13 PM by Reeb.

After no dreams for over a week, I finally had one.

DREAM 10

This was a mess.

I'm in school, the end of high school specifically. The whole place is structured like a mishmash of the middle of my high school with the outer wings of my elementary school. To be honest, it looks pretty rad and I wouldn't have minded a building actually constructed like that.

At the earliest point I can remember, I'm putting the finishing touches on some biology homework after I have some time from acing a math exam. I get called up by the teacher and presume I'm in trouble, but he just wants to congratulate me on making it to the end of the year with exemplary grades and reminds me that the end of school's coming soon, and with the last day of the year comes a massive celebration where everyone's let out of class to do as they please (this is true to life, my school actually did celebrate the last day by letting us all roam around and have a day off with our friends and teachers). He hints to me that there's going to be a special prize this year, which gets me curious.

Cut to later and we're standing outside gathered around inside of what looks like an Olympic stadium, which I'm informed by a friend was just built yesterday afternoon for the purpose of the festivities. Despite the official nature of the surroundings, what's actually erected are a variety of carnival games and edutainment-style stuff like spelling bees. There's a list of prizes available, ranging from a life-size collection of moving Pokemon plushies to a brand new desktop computer to a paper-thin key swirling with purplish shadows. I'm immediately attracted to the last of those, instinctively knowing that it's the master key to the whole school. As someone with profound wanderlust, it's instinctively something I gravitate towards, knowing there're a few rooms left in the school that I haven't explored and this's going to be my last chance. I think of it like completing my internal map. In order to get the key, I have to ace at least 60% of the competitions going on. It's thankfully the least sought after possession, probably because no one cares about getting back in after you graduate.

Winning the competitions is a mixed bag. Most of the educational ones are easy to outperform people in, because I appear to have a much higher opinion of myself in my dreams than I do when I'm awake. The physical competitions look daunting, but I track down a few that I manage to do (most of these are pretty nonsensical, like wiggling your way out of a deflated balloon castle faster than the competition). In the end, despite all my effort, I don't place highly enough to get the key...but one of my buddies does, and not actually wanting it for anything, she just forks it over. Armed with the great power to now go wherever the hell I want, I set to exploring.

Around this point, my brain temporarily forgets that the building I'm in is supposed to be a school as the dream deteriorates, leaving me to fumble my way through ancient architecture reminiscent of an old castle. I'm also different, which is extremely rare in my dreams. Like most people, I'd wager, I'm usually myself, ranging in age from present to child. Tonight, I have the rare opportunity to be someone else, namely someone who used to be one of my friends from school. Instead of shifting perspectives entirely, as usually happens when I'm not myself, I stay in the driver's seat for having my viewpoint transition to a woman I know - We'll call her Raven for the color of her hair.

"I" forge ahead in the new building, still with the same goal as ever. I'm going to stick this damn key in as many locks as I can find and plumb the secrets therein, even though in my head I only see this as discovering the heating system and other mundane things. I should mention at this point that my bizarre insistence here is actually true to life yet again - I made it a habit of mapping out as much of my elementary, junior high, and high school as I possibly could, and my perfectionism haunts me years later for not having managed to track down each and every janitor's closet or whatever.

The first room I find is a back entrance to the auditorium, anachronistic with the outdated castle and complete with all the seats and the two balconies my school actually had for it. Peeking out from behind the curtain (which is made of an iron sheet for some godforsaken reason), there's someone I don't recognize on-stage reading poetry from her journal, mid-presentation of an insight into the teenage mind. My brain reminds me at this point that regardless of my nonsensical surrounding architecture, I'm still in the middle of exploring the school and I'll be interrupting her reading to her friends if I go out there, so I sneak back out of the room and gently close the door after listening to a few.

There're a few other doors with nothing of interest in them, which causes me to gain the extraordinary ability to pinpoint what are "boring" doors from "ordinary" doors. There's no exciting doors here, just ordinary ones, and the next Ordinary Door™ I come across is at the top of a long climb and series of jumps across a series of broken columns. I do some Breath of the Wild shit here to get all the way up to the door, nearly falling off at several points (which sets my heart beating hard). I finally scramble to a stable point on the destroyed bridge it's situated on, opening the door.

The door opens up to a replica of the area I'm standing in, but I'm staring at myself, by which I mean my actual self. Both of us are surprised to see the other, and the dream fills in the gap by saying we were both showing up for a date away from all the people nearby. I'm against the idea, because I'm staunchly asexual, and only on asserting that do I realize that it's actually weird that I've spent the last few hours of dream-time wandering around as Raven. I ask if the other me is actually me, to which he's nothing but confused and says yes. I tell him that I should be damn well aware in that case that I'm not interested in hook-ups and make to storm off, but the ground crumbles under me and gives way. He tries to grab me before I fall and fails as I tumble into a sandy abyss, with him falling shortly thereafter.

Perspective shifts. The poet from earlier's fishing in a small lake with her father when sand begins to fill it from underneath, seeping from the beaches and overwhelming the still waters. They scramble to row to shore only for the boat to be rocked by the grainy tsunami, finally knocking her overboard. She has a life jacket that she readily rips the cord on, only for it to carry her deeper into the water and pop her out not at the surface, but in a small nook between undersea waterfalls that barely gives her room to stand on. All around her is sand being buoyed away, billowing in waves as the water pushes it back. She pulls out the little journal I saw her reading from earlier in the game and begins feverishly scribbling, though it couldn't be more plain from the look on her face that she's panicking. The words in her book are incoherent nonsense, but the general tone is conveyed: She's writing about the sights with an interspersed tone that she believes she's going to die.

As she stands there, stock still in her tiny sanctuary, bodies begin to fall, pushed out by the sand. I don't see myself, but I know on instinct that I'm one of them, the "Stranded". All of them're frozen in suspended animation underwater, and they come with the somehow-known stipulation that if the water's touched at any time they'll all start swarming the unfortunate to steal a body for themselves. I get the sense that this is something I've already done and it's how I was Raven earlier; the vision of myself I saw genuinely wasn't me, but some specter of the sand come to try and reclaim my soul, something it succeeded at. Even though I'm a disembodied presence at this point, I start urging the girl, who I now name as Annie, to get the hell out of there and move along the passageway instead of freezing up like a deer in headlights. Whether she hears me or not, she obeys, scampering along the narrow walkway while doing her best not to touch the waves. The opening narrows the further down it she goes, and as it goes from oppressive to downright claustrophobic, she can no longer avoid tapping her elbow against the veil of water, which starts every body thrashing violently as they try to move for her, their spirits protruding from their mouths and reaching out to claim a new body.

Annie tumbles through falling sand with limbs grabbing at her collar and escapes with only her life vest ripped off of her and part of her shirt shredded up. Nonetheless, she's fine, having drifted into some underground cavern system. Down here, she finds the master key, by now looking like a keycard straight out of classic Doom. Out of ideas on where to go or what to do in the rapidly-filling cave, she leans down on hands and knees to poke the entrance she came through in, which lights it up bright green. She takes this as cue to climb in, which is another incredibly claustrophobic and heart-pounding experience.

Our new perspective character surfaces from the blind crawl of faith in a car park, flailing her arms around in an attempt equally to get the sand off of herself and to also widen the hole she's escaping through, actions which seem justified since the instant she comes through, it seals up behind her. She ventures outside, staring into the sky, and realizes she's on planet Saturn, colonized by mankind, and the year is 2448. Somehow, this new door's opened about 400 years into the future onto another planet. Annie approaches a human to find a way back to Earth, which costs $4.99 to get on a cryofreeze ship for the journey. Reasoning that if a door could take her to the future, then it could take her to the past, she gets onboard and goes to the pods for freezing, only to recognize they're made of the same sand. She's being prodded to get in by what she recognizes are the same specters that haunted her before, just in disguise, when the dream ends and I wake up.

what the fuck?

that sounds like a genuinely cool dream, if incredibly bizarre. i like how the master key to the school was this shadowy ominous thing that no one gave a shit about. also the reveal that you actually had a super metroid map of your school in real life. also enjoy how the plot got more and more convoluted as your mind tried to tie back different threads together to keep the illusion going.

dreamt i went to a Finnish friend's house and they had fish in their toilet
like, not even on purpose, it was like having mould or mushrooms
they were all gross and fucked up too

a shark. in your toilet

ｈｏｌｙ　ｆｕｃｋ

I'm picturing the mutant Simpsons fish.

I'm picturing the mutant Simpsons fish.

yea some of them were like tiny scrawny versions of that

last night i dreamt they discovered a new endangered species and to make people care about it enough to help preserve it they named it Squidbacon

Does anyone else have this experience where 99% of your dreams feel like they're taking place in a consistent alternate reality, with all the same people you know in real life but vastly different locations and situations? It feels like while I'm asleep my brain just tunes into a slightly different many worlds frequency. Most of my dreams are centered around traveling to/from different locations in this world, many of which have existed since I was a kid and which have aged in real time. I want to figure out which drug I need to take to spend a full waking day here

memories of dreams you've had get saved in your brain the same way as real ones so over time the brain is gonna pull from memories of other dreams when conjuring new ones

I haven't had dreams like that, Spritey. Sometimes I get kinda recurrent dreams or ones where I'm headed to similar places, especially if I've been fixated on the same thing lately, but none of that.

I didn't have much of a memorable dream so I'm only going to post the tail end that stuck in my head:

George Washington, King of the United States, was ceding the monarchy to King Richard the Lionheart. In order to become a king in America, you had to have your left arm tied up ib a tourniquet and chopped off with slow, surgical precision without making a single peep about it. Richard managed this.

Washington, meanwhile, was subject to execution owing to abdication, which meant the same process had to be performed on his right arm and then his head to be cut off - the decapitation was treated as if it was absolutely impossible unless they went through the arm, which was in the way. Washington had to grit his teeth and bear it to sustain his honor, and then his surgeon/executioner lopped his head off.

Sorry for the dream drought, by the way. I had a string of remembering them for a while there and then dried up. Hoping it changes!