giant green laser.

vivian:
some girl is trying to get revenge on my brother. not sure why. we spend the entire dream kind of trying to escape her. or maybe it’s not revenge; maybe she is trying to stop him in his tracks so he won’t do something. don’t remember. all i remember is the last part of the dream although the dream itself was massively long. we were trying to escape her and were in a pool (?), and i guess everything she did was futile (by the way, i think “she” was freaking jennifer aniston), and we’d basically come to the conclusion that she wouldn’t actually be able to stop him. but finally, she says she has a secret weapon, and her secret weapon is this giant green laser. the pool we’re at is like, surrounded by people, and when she pulls it out, everyone kind of gasps. green lasers are kind of weird in real life because some of them have been designed to be so strong that they can make people go blind or they can shoot into the sky for what seems like infinitey. anyway. this particular green laser was bigger than those laser pointers and yet another degree removed, because it could cut people in half, apparently. so. she pulls this green laser weapon out, and we’re like, “oh shit!” and dive towards the bottom of the swimming pool and try to stay there because the lasers are refracted by the water. as i was down there, it seemed like someone — i think my mom, although she was like a white lady, i think — had her voice in my head. it was like she was talking to me psychically, but the things she was saying sounded like thoughts coming straight from her head as opposed to things she was saying to me personally. weird. anyway, the voice was like, hoping i would stay down there because who knows where jennifer aniston would shine the laser and she didn’t want me to be hit by it and cut in half!

anyway, the dream ends there kind of, but then part two shows up. part two is like… the beginning of a new movie, whereas the end of the laser thing (although it doesn’t reach a real conclusion it seems) is the end of the first movie. in the new movie, i’m watching third-person ish, like i’m watching a movie. andy chen and someone else are in a kitchen, and they’re washing dishes. my feet touch the floor of the kitchen and it’s like mud; i’m not really there, i don’t think, because they don’t notice me. they’re talking and saying, “every time we move into a new place, it’s so dirty.” the end.

inspiration: walked by a club with green lasers (like you’d see at a rave) shooting out of its doorway, and i thought it was scary case those things are scary (some green lasers made people go blind at a rave in russia, ha).

zombies and a girlfriend: the story of the shell gas station on aurora.

alex:
i haven’t had a dream this crazy in years.

i had a really weird lucidish dream about being a survivor after a zombie infection destroyed everything. i’ve had dreams where you think ahead to what you’ll be doing later, and you just kinda teleport forward in time… but this dream involved teleporting weeks ahead at a time, spanning a couple months really. the dream became lucid whenever somethign scary happened, and was autopilot the rest of the time. theres tons more than i’ve written, but it had 3 main lucid phases, which i’ve written here.

my girl (i’ll just call her that) was visiting me at my house in greenlake when the united states experienced a zombie infection (28 days/dawn of the dead[2004] style). i’ve had a few zombie-apocalypse dreams before and they’re typically my most detailed dreams. so anyways, her and i are hiding in my house for awhile when we decide that we are gonna run out of food and everything else and we should quest out into the world. we run out to my car and there are no zombies around initially, but by the time we shut the doors and start the engine, shit is starting to go down.. the dream wasn’t really lucid yet, so i’m not sure what happened, but zombies came out of houses or out from behind whatever and we just shot off towards aurora/highway 99. there weren’t as many accidents as there realistically would’ve been.. but there were cars abandoned all over, kinda like seattle after a snow storm.

there was blood and stuff on windshields and signs of struggle, but overall, everything was pretty much barren/abandoned. it was sunny and there were fires to the south. i’m not really sure what the decision process that followed was, but we were going by a gas station and we thought the flat roof over the gas pumps was pretty much the only place that was safe. we stole a tent, an aluminum ladder, a pickup truck, a luxury car w/ a sun roof (ill skip this part of the dream), and next thing i knew, we were spending the night ontop of the awning over a shell gas station. the ground up there was gravel, i’m not sure if there’s gravel on these in real life. the environment up there consisted of a 24′x36′ rectangle (maybe bigger), one green tent and an aluminum ladder.. we left our cars parked down below by the pumps. from this point on, the dream was fully lucid.

the dream has numerous ensuing phases from here.

i. FORAGING / BUILDING / ESTABLISHING SYSTEMS FOR SURVIVAL

we started improving our lives as survivors. we raided a gun store on aurora. shotguns were my favorite, my girl had a carbine she had found behind the counter. we had filled a newly stolen car with ammo, and spent considerable time practicing. my girl was really good w/ her gun. zombies pretty much left us alone while we were home (if one saw us it chased us full sprint, but there simply weren’t many around), and we were ultra ultra cautious before we entered any abandoned stores. at one point my girl and i got into a little fight cause she wanted to go into the supermarket, but it wasn’t like any of the small stores we had been to. even at the gun shop, we could pretty much see to the back of the store from the street, so it felt safe to go in. the supermarket had so many aisles — what if zombies came from both ends of an aisle at the same time? i let her go and get fruit, cause in the produce section the shelves are only a few feet high and you can see all the way to the back of the store, so i could watch her with my gun and it was safe-ish. we evaluated numerous stores in this manner and and collected lots of things gradually. zombies would come out if we made noise, so if we ever dropped anything or made a loud sound we would just run back to the cars and leave.

just driving down the road is when we would see the most zombies. they would run out towards the car from wherever they were, and chase us down the street until they disappeared in the rear view mirror. i don’t really remember most of the details from this part of the dream, except that my girl and i developed an obsession with home depot for several reasons. the door by the loading area was HUGE, so visibility was great (and that was our primary fear entering any structure). you could also drive a truck straight into home depot. we took tons of stuff. we took these giant plastic sheds and basically made a house ontop of our shell gas station. we also had a really good system for bringing stuff back – cause driving around attracted too many zombies. we would steal two cars and i would let her go ahead of me, and she would go up ontop of the gas station with her rifle… and then when i showed up (always had some zombies running after me), i would just drive around the gas pumps while she took shots at them. this was our protocol if we had anything following us within 1 mile of our home.

she didn’t like the corpses lying around our house, so i had a way of cleaning up. i had this giant hook on a stick that i had taken from somewhere (a butchery? who knows) and i would drag the bodies away from our home while my girl watched me through her scope. everything we did basically followed this pattern: one person in a good spot with a gun would watch the other person do whatever it is that needed done. i remember a detail here: we had this plastic trough down at pavement-level which was full of tools, and it was full of bleach+water, and it was where we would put any tool that had touched a corpse. we had another collection of tools that we left up at roof level. i dont remember setting this stuff up, but its clear we had tons of preparation & thought put into most things, and very strict protocols about how to get between roof level and pavement level.

ii. STUPID SURVIVORS

the next phase of the dream concerned some survivors we encountered. this clearly occurred many weeks after the, dream started if tracking time in a dream is worth anything. we basically had a house ontop of the shell roof at this point, and a bridge going from the gas pump roof to the convenience shop roof. one day, we saw 3 women in their 20s waving to us from an apartment that overlooked aurora and our gas station. the apartment looked kinda like nordheim court, and i could see the front door of the apartment by looking into the living room window. they had furniture stacked infront of the door. they shouted to us from their window. i don’t remember what they said, but my girl and i concluded we should rescue them. this dream is already getting too long, so ill cut out to what happened. i went over there and killed 3 zombies in the apartment building using a shotgun. i broke out the girls’ window and we strung a rope from their apartment to the covenience store roof (15 ft lower) and they came to join us. it was quickly apparent that these girls were a liability and had barely survived until now. an unknown amount of time passed, and the dream became lucid again because someone was screaming. i ran out of my shed with a shotgun in hand to see two of the girls screaming and looking over the edge of the convenience store. one was screaming at the other girl to “help her” (presumably the 3rd girl was on pavement level where i couldn’t see her). the girls pushed one of our ramp/ladder inventions off the edge. my girlfriend and i looked at each other, exchanging angry looks. i already had my gun and my girlfriend went to get hers. not too surprisingly, zombies ran up our ramp/ladder contraption (one of the zombies was the 3rd girl). one of the two surviving girls died right then. the last girl ran towards across the bridge between the two roofs. my girlfriend shot her in the head. she wasn’t going to make it to us, and even if she was, i didn’t care; i would’ve killed her myself.

we were gonna close our makeshift front door before she’d make it to us, and anyways, fuck her. i was actually scared in this part of the dream, and it had a nightmare flavor to it. this can be contrasted to the previous ‘vibe’ in the dream, where it was more about my girlfriend and i overcoming everything. my girl and i were backed up in our shed with our guns aimed at our front door as zombies tore through. we shot them systematically, killing somewhere around 10 in total. i went over to the door, stepping around the pile of corpses, studying it for movement. i looked up at my girl and she was loading her gun. my fear paired with the overall lucidity told me i was about to be punished. it was one of those dream things where you try not to think something cause you’re scared that thinking about it will manifest it. another zombie came inside over the pile (he had lagged behind, i guess) and almost got to me. my girl was screaming, and i blew its head off, effectively repainting our “kitchen.” we didnt want to touch anything nor walk over the pile of corpses to get out the main door – there was blood everywhere. i cut a hole in the side of our multi-shed house and we ducked out through it. we concluded that survivors were as likely to kill us as zombies. i remember having a discussion with her that if we found any more survivors this late in time, that they were probably crazy. she said she didn’t want to find a male survivor cause he would probably want to rape her and would try to kill me. we decided to move somewhere very very remote, no people, no zombies. both of us were really angry, i think i woke up briefly.

iii. ABANDON EVERYTHING — NEW BEGINNINGS?

the last phase of the dream doesnt really hold up to the same standard of detail as the things before it did. next thing i knew, we were driving through the desert… the earth was orange. we had been looking for houses with nothing around them. we found a two story house surrounded by very flat land and no plants. we must’ve been in southern utah or arizona or something. we boarded up the windows on the first floor and made the second floor our home. it had a deck with good visibility. there was nothing out here at all. we didn’t really do anything. we made one trip in to a nearby city to pickup canned food and gas for our generators, and i wanted solar panels but i couldn’t find any. we did find a letter written on cardboard in sharpie, explaining how to contact some guy on radio frequencies. this cardbaord sign was sitting infront of a supermarket and had a box FULL of radios infront of it. i took one of them and set it up at our house (despite our previous plan to avoid people). i was talking to 3 survivors on this radio thing when i woke up.

THINGS I SKIPPED:
- really long time spent shooting/practicing
- obsessive construction of ladders/ramps
- basically coming back with a different car every time
- falling in love w/ a car that had a sunroof (openable by remote) that you could get into while the doors were closed
- destroying the barrier in the middle of aurora
- hoarding tools, honda generators, and ice(?)
- transition from fear to matter of fact killing of scattered zombies (did some drive bys for amusement)
- removal of “cover” from roof line of sight
- discussion regarding if other nations were gonna bomb US population centers

LATTER PHASES:
- putting motion lights around the desert house
- telling a survivor to fuck off, but giving him 2 gallons of water

dark, poopy movie theatre.

vivian:
i send out a myspace bulletin asking if anyone wants to go to a movie with me, which is odd behavior to begin with. i don’t recall anyone responding, but before i know it, i’m at lars’ apartment complex and to get to his apartment, we have to cross through a metal gate and then walk down this like, really shallow sloped hallway. he has a deflated ball the size of a baseball in his hand and holds it up, smiling. i’m not sure why, but then i see that he has thrown it town the sloped area and was trying to make it hit the button to the left of the door that automatically makes the door opened for handicapped people. he misses, so i try. then a couple other people show up — i think eugene and someone else equally random — and i try throwing the ball at the handicapped door opener thing. but there are all sorts of people out and about now, and i’m afraid of accidentally hitting someone. also, now the ceiling is lower and it seems near impossible to be able to throw the ball and hit the opener. i make a vague, weak attempt and fail at hitting it, by a long shot.

so eventually we go onto the movie theatre, which is in olympia. the quest there is not something that i remember; i only remember actually being there. it’s in an old movie house with dark carpeting and dim lighting. i’m standing around the snack dispensing counter area and now lenny is here… him, lars, and eugene (or maybe random guy) run off into another room and start chatting it up. i’m with some other people who i don’t know but i think i am speaking to? a lot of time passes, or at least it feels like it, and i’m not sure exactly what time the movie starts but i feel like maybe it has already started, so i run into the other room and tell the three boys it’s time to go watch the movie. they seem rather surprised.

we go to the rooms with the theatres, and they are these little tiny rooms set up like dining rooms. they have tables and chairs strewn throughout. we sit in the far right corner (upon first walking in). i need to go to the bathroom so i tell the three of them that i’ll be right back. i go to the bathroom. it’s white tile. it’s crowded. there are three people in stalls already and one girl in front of me, who soon goes into a stall. the girl behind me grabs a key from somewhere in that bathroom and leaves, saying she is going to use the kitchen bathroom.

finally a couple girls are done. one opens the door and the floor is all wet. i think that’s gross, but it’s no big deal. then she says, “i think i already clogged it.” i look and there is just poop all over the floor — these huge ass long ass poops. and inside the toilet bowls too. three other stalls open up. they are all the same. just fucking covered with shit. i don’t know if i actually go poop because it is all so disgusting. i see two mini-sinks and think about using those for pooping somehow but i don’t. fuck, it’s pretty gross. words cannot describe the grossness… although, strangely, it didn’t smell? O__o

i go back to the movie room and the three boys are still sitting in the same table configuration (lenny to my left, lars to my across diagonal, random person to my across), but the table is located elsewhere now. it’s no longer the corner table. lenny says, “you were gone ten minutes!” like that was a long time or something. him and lars are going to start a business together or something… the movie has amazingly still not begun yet.

giant dishwashing greenhouse.

lenny:
me and another guy are walking through a greenhouse, following a woman. to our left and right, there are dirty pots and pans stacked up high on tables. turns out the whole greenhouse is a giant dishwasher.

confusing food and phone numbers.

vivian:
alex, gareth, eddie, lenny, and i are planning to eat some food. we eat it. i forget what it was. shortly thereafter alex, gareth, and eddie want to go eat again. at some mexican restaurant. i’m not accompanying them but i’m trying to call the restaurant for them for some reason. the restaurant phone number information is mixed up with a bunch of other restaurant phone numbers, on what looks like an excel sheet or something (but it’s printed out on a piece of paper). the numbers are broken up into different sections, with all three “parts” of the phone number being in different places — (555) 555-5555 would be broken up with (555) being one place, 555 being one place, and 5555 being one place. of course, those weren’t the numbers in the dream; they were much more complicated than that.

so i was trying to put together the number for the restaurant and having the most difficult time. i called one number (that was like, more than the required number of digits long, i swear), and someone who sounded like dave liu picked up and apparently this happened to him all the time. he sounded used to saying that that wasn’t his number and said something about, try another number, even though i may never get it.

i think i tried another number after putting together another set of numbers on the piece of paper, but i don’t recall. then alex, gareth, and eddie leave, lenny and i decide to blow up an inflatable pool!?

and we put it on top of a table or something that looks like a table but is super sturdy, and i’m about to climb in (it’s TINY — like, made for infants), but it is devoid of water. i wonder how we will get water in. fill it up with a pail? seems messy, though.