Dice Club

I was hanging out with a teenaged Edward Norton in a high school. It wasn't any particular high school, more like a generic high school from some movie. We were trying to get into the locked corridors that that janitors used to move secretly around the school. We had managed to hack the computer security system, and enter in a fake PIN for a short period of time. As we were trying it out we heard some people coming, but we punched in the code and got into the room before they saw us.

I could hear the people talking, and realized it was the principal (an overweight fellow with dark hair) and the new janitor (who I'd never met, but somehow knew was a pretty-but-plain blonde lady). The principal was giving her a job orientation, and mentioned what her pass code for the locked corridors would be 2-0-3-6. This was great, because Ed and I now had a permanent code for the corridors, but it also meant they were coming in to the corridors so we had to high tail it out of there. We snuck through the secret corridors and out into the woods behind Charlottesville High School.

The next day in Algebra class at Walker Middle School we started organizing an underground student rebellion. Some other kid (an overweight pompous type) challenged us for leadership of the revolution, so we went down to the cafeteria to fight it out. The challenge was resolved with some dice game, which involved throwing the dice at your opponent. I beat the guy in the challenge. Norton and I were leading an angry mob of students into the locker area when I woke up.

But I was still dreaming.

I was in Jason McLeod's old room on Locust Ave. (East side), but it was my brother Kirk's apartment. I was waiting for Kirk, Mom, and Ryan to get back, and to kill time I was reading Cerebus #9, although the comic otherwise looked like Cerebus #51. After a while I stopped reading it and put it down on top of the plastic bag it had been stored in.

When Kirk and the others got home he noticed that the tape from the plastic bag had stuck to the cover of the Cerebus comic, and peeling it off stripping the ink from that part of the cover. He was really mad about it, and wanted to know who had been reading his comics. I owned up that I had done it, and promised to buy him a new copy of that issue. He pointed out that the issue is rather hard to find, especially since most of the comic shops have closed because of the recent economic downturn. He thought the comic shop near me might be a good place to try, though.

[Now this is interesting. The comic shop he is talking about is not a real comic shop: it's one that has shown up in several other dreams of mine. You get their by catching a bus at the corner of Monticello and Altavista in Belmont, which goes a few blocks out of Charlottesville and ends up in Rochester, NY. It's a big and wonderful comic shop that takes up several buildings, completely in contrast to the actual (sucky) comic shop in Rochester (at least when I was there)]

Ryan was confused and didn't understand what the problem was. We explained how the tape that hold comic storage bags closed often adheres to the comic itself, damaging the cover. By that time we needed to get ready to go to the rock concert at the bat perserve in Gainesville, FL. I put on my punk skull T-shirt that Kirk had made for me, which was drawn in a Southwestern Voodoo style. Mom was running around with a mesh bag full of orange onions, trying to make sure we had enough food.

That's when I really woke up.

Dirty Check Chashing

My sister Coleen and I went to a check cashing place together. It was a really dirty place. We didn't want to wait in line so we watched two TVs that were hanging from the ceiling. They were showing a news report of an earthquake that happened somewhere in South America.

We got tired of standing there watching TV, so we went back into the waiting room. It reminded me of the lobby of the hotel the Kurgan stayed at in Highlander. I got the comfy chair, or what would have been the comfy chair if it hadn't been ripped to shreds, with stuffing poking out and holes going down to the wood frame in places. Coleen got a folding chair that was a weird combination of a plain metal folding chair, a beach chair, and those canvas folding chairs people always take to outdoor events.

In front of us was the door to the bathroom, and to our right was a bed. There were two homeless guys on the bed. One was sitting up in bed, with a watch cap pulled down over his eyes. The other one was curled up under the covers at the foot of the bed. I was talking to the watch cap guy about the guy under the covers, and watch cap said the guy's name was Frankenstein. I thought that was odd because Frankenstein wasn't the guy who was there last time Coleen and I went to the place. Then Frankenstein poked his head out from under the covers. He had curly, light brown hair and a full beard.

I looked back and Coleen was gone. I leaned over and looked into the bathroom. Coleen was on the toilet in underwear and socks, but it looked like some badly manipulated video putting Coleen's head on someone else's body. She stood up and jumped to grab an overhead pipe so she could swing over an especially dirty part of the bathroom floor.

Missed the Bus

Just a fragment last night: I was waiting for the bus at Shady Grove station, but I had to peer through the bushes to see if the bus had come. All of a sudden I saw that my bus was leaving. I knew it was my bus because it was the Redskins bus: a RideOn bus painted in Redskins colors.

Three Evil Geniuses

It was a sunny day in Belmont, and I was playing in one of those yards on a hill that is flat on top but slopes sharply down on one side to meet the hill. That's when an evil genius drove up the side of the slope in a VW Rabbit and tried to run me over. I figured it was just random chance and didn't pay it any mind until another evil genius tried to run me over. Pretty soon I was being chased through Belmont by three evil geniuses trying to run me over.

Eventually I managed to break into a house by the lake, which I crawled through like a soldier under fire. I made it through the house to the patio, where I hid behind a chair watching traffic. Someone I couldn't see whispered a hint to me, and I dashed to my right through a hedge, and into my brother's neighborhood in Richmond. The evil geniuses were still after me, but I managed to get into one of the alleys and finally evade them.

Once I made it to a safe house, I was shown a comic book for each of the three evil geniuses, detailing the particular way in which that evil genius is considered a pathetic loser in the evil genius community.

Later in the dream I became an evil genius myself, but I don't remember that part very well.

Bicycles, Cats, and Drugs

The dream started out with me riding my bicycle. It was a warm sunny day, and I was riding down a long straight two lane road with almost no cars on it. The road went up and down hills much like the stretch of 29 north of Charlottesville. However, the sides of the roads were more like the area around Gainesville Florida. I was riding along incredibly fast. It was mostly under my own power, but when I went up hills I could feel some sort of powered assistance pushing me along.

I rode my bike down the road for a long time (this part was one of the best dreams I've had in a long time). Eventually I came to a large building on a large artificial hill with a flat top. At first I thought it was Ash Lawn, but it turned out to be some big, blocky University building with a neo-classical front. There was a warning sign saying not to approach the building, but it was ambiguously worded so I rode past it up to the building.

When I got into the building I found that Chris had finished breaking into the safe with the prescription drugs. I took two pills back to the cats who were on the bed, and fed them the drugs. I figured I could get them addicted to the drugs and then they would do whatever I wanted. On my way out Chris showed me the drugs, neatly pinned down and labeled like a butterfly display. I reminded him that we needed to get to New York before the cops showed up, and went out for a jog.

I went out onto the flat top of the hill and jogged around top on a macadam path. I got a look at myself I was a man-cat. I was thinking that our latest projections showed that global warming would destroy mankind, but we could still save the cats. We just needed to trick the humans into thinking that preserving enough salt would save them, when really it would save the cats.

When I got back from my jog I was on Wisconsin Ave. north of Dupont Circle. All the lieutentants of my gang had gathered there, and I had the drugs in my blue backpack. I started handing out the plastic baggies full of white powder to my lieutentants, and then set the open backpack on the ground between two parked cars so the others could get their own, and so I could look around and make sure no one noticed.

Unfortunately someone had noticed and police started pouring into the street. A huge gun battle started, and I grabbed my backpack and ran around the corner. There one of my lieutenants, a Japanese guy in a blue jacket, got chased into a store by two police officers. It was one of those stores with a small inventory of incredibly high priced items that look completely empty. I chased them in, two pistols blazing. I shot both of the police officers, but not before they shot my lieutenant.

Then I saw an undercover cop running toward the store, another Japanese guy, but this time with orange streaks bleached into his hair. I tried to keep out of his view behind a section of wall, but he saw what I was trying to do. As he dove into the store we shot at each other. I missed but he hit me square in the chest and I went down. He then ran out the store to deal with the rest of my gang.

Of course, I was wearing body armor and got up after he left, grabbing the evidence off my lieutenant as I snuck out of the store.

Then I woke up with Michael Jackson's "Beat It" stuck in my head.

Three Fragments

Last night I kept waking up and falling back to sleep, so I had several dream fragments.

In the first fragment, my old friend Jason was giving me advice on playing poker against a porn star in a black lace teddy.

I wasn't even in the second fragment. It was a scene where David Hasselhoff is playing poker against a Russian gangster. Hasselhoff was trying to play it cool, but it was obvious he was desperate to get the gangster into a game, and that he had some scam he was going to pull on the gangster. But the gangster was saying that even though he folded in the last round, he would have won because he had a five in the hole. The cards they were using were really strange. They were covered with diagrams like teeny tables of numbers that were blank except for colored bars across them.

The third fragment was me getting ready to go to Bethesda for work, except I was in the house I grew up in on Concord Drive and it was the middle of the night. I went out front, and then realized I had forgotten something. When I went back into the kitchen I realized that the back door had been wide open all night, and anyone could have come in the house. Then I walked back to my room, but I hadn't turned the hall light on and the light in my room wouldn't come on, so it was pitch black. Then I realized that someone else was in the room and it was too late.

Teleporting Kobold

I was playing live action Dungeons & Dragons with some friends, and I was the dungeon master. So I come up with a plan where a tribe of kobolds will put all of the children in the town to sleep and kidnap them.

Keep in mind that from this point on, I am a kobold.

We (the kobolds) shoot our sleep-poisoned arrows way up into the air from Concord Dr. I run around the back of the house I grew up in, past one of the children and on to the one I am supposed to kidnap. This is really disturbing because the children are all dead. They all have arrows sticking out of them as if they came straight down out of the sky. The kids are standing up, held up somehow by the arrows, but with dead, zombie-like expressions, and red splotches of blood covering them like the spots on a cow.

But not wanting to let incredibly distubing imagery get in the way of a good plan, I grab the kid and run toward the other end of the back yard, where the player characters are hanging out. This may not seem like the brightest thing for a dead-child-kidnapping kobold to do, but I still have to steal the bicycle part, which is near the rickety and rusted jungle gym we used to have. I am quickly spotted by the frisbee playing swords and sorcery characters, and pursued at high speed out into the street.

Seeing as I can somehow run about 40 mph as a child and bicycle part laden anthropomorphic lizard, I quickly out pace them. Behind me I can hear the cleric (an older woman I don't know) yelling a spell at me. As the sound chases me down the street I realize she is casting teleport hold on, because she knows that kobolds can dimension door. [Note for those who do not play D&D: kobolds cannot dimension door.]

I manage to outpace the sound of her spell, but keep running until the duration wears off so that I can use the dimension door to teleport the hell out of there. I manage to do so, ending up in Belmont near the intersection of Boling Ave and Monticello. I teleport onto the shoulder of the road, and I am almost immediately run off the road by a large truck. It is a truck for a shipping company whose name I can only read because I studied Russian in college and therefore know the Cyrillic alphabet.

Then I woke up. It was about three in the morning and I had to take a piss.