World 8-1
Strange Dreams

Last night I was at a giant flea market/convention with my girlfriend.  We split up at one point to look around through various used goods.  I spent most of my time in the used-game section looking for specific games to add to my collection in real life.  I ran into many, many old friends and ex-coworkers there.  Eventually the flea-market was going to close down, but I was unable to get a hold of my girlfriend on her cell.  It took several hours to track each other down because the market was so big, but eventually we reunited and went out to dinner with other people we had run into.

Dreamed I was imprisoned at a low-security prison where I was allowed to walk around with my backpack, however there were no civil rights, and guards would flip out and attack prisoners for no reason.  I met a dark haired woman who agreed to help me escape.  I was signed on for a relocation to a work camp, where prisoners were secretly taken out to “work” at night into a cemetery and killed.  At night when I was chosen to attend this work session, I was to slip back into my tent and wait until the others had left.  Afterwards I crept out and met the dark haired woman by the fence, who helped me get free.

Dreamed I met a tiny, old woman who wanted to give me her house upon her death, on the condition that I care for her pets, and notify her mentally ill son when she passed away.  Her house was an old, small wooden shack, with an indoor pond in the back, and two massive furnaces in the basement.  In the pond was a large great-white shark who crawled its way out of the water to greet visitors like a happy puppy, as well as several sentient, flesh-colored plants which would walk around on their roots and calmly nuzzle you affectionately when you approached.  The rest of the house was a mess, but I recall reading the womans last name from the dream on one of her bills, which was something like “Absony”.

A long dream last night involved restaurants that were actually alien spaceships in disguise, waiting to trap human beings to be harvested for food.  Already aware of this, I still managed to be abducted with several other people.  The spaceship took off soon after, but I was able to escape relatively quick by distracting the alien captain of the ship and ruining the navigation computer with a small magnet I was carrying in my pocket.
After escaping I began seeking these alien traps out.  Ultimately destroying several other ships, I managed to make friends with the surviving aliens who were now trapped on earth.  I led them to a cave in some rural plains where we set them up to live happily away from human beings in secret.  I was worried at first about the happiness of the last remaining pair of Yip-Yips, who’s sole purpose was to drain the life from human beings with their tentacles, however they found peace settling happily near the top of a waterfall with one another for company.
The area of the alien’s new home was so beautiful, after I gave the aliens the key to the front door of their cave, I spent the rest of the dream sketching the surrounding landscape.

A short dream had me developing a game with old colleagues in the middle of a forest.  We used fallen logs as our desks and arranged ourselves an office in a thicket.  My responsibility was for character concepts, and I modeled small characters out of clay with twigs.  Each morning I arrived for work, I would first check the trees near my desk for mountain lions.

The birthday card I created for my close friend Unika.

I dreamed that my best friend from highschool and I had somehow been enrolled into an army in a post apocalyptic world.  We were supposed to defend a coastal area from some organization, however when we arrived at the “base”, it was actually a large artists studio where many other people were already hard at work building models and sets for a film.  My friend and I were put to work concepting out and preparing to build the model for a small-scale city that would be the foundation for most of the films special effects shots.  After meeting the other artists and working for a small while, we were all called into a meeting where we were given military hardware in the form of large pocket organizers.  Afterwards we journeyed outside with an old lead-artist of mine to survey an island off the coast.  Evidently a major event had happened on the distant island some time ago, and our mission was to reclaim it with the other soldiers.  I can’t recall how the dream ended, other than my friend went wading into the water, while forgetting about his pocket organizer, and destroyed it.

I had a zombie related dream, in which I was moving through dark, gothic corridors while acquiring multiple weapons and allies. One of which was a girl I had to protect from the zombies, though she would constantly wander off on her own. The zombies themselves were the typical, decomposing gray-flesh type. However some were possessed by greater demons, which would appear after the zombies were initially shot at. The demons could also be seen ahead of time when the possessed zombies were illuminated with a flashlight. The possessed zombies would appear to have a glowing, translucent serpent wrapped around their upper torso.
Later on I acquired an unreliable ally in the form of a man dressed in black who, when not feigning death at random times, would constantly run off on his own. I was upset that he would kill most of the zombies, leaving few for me to enjoy.

Weapons I collected in this dream: a flamethrower which only held enough fuel for 3 seconds of use; a fully automatic pistol; a rocket launcher which I never used; and several other strangely shaped weapons I can’t recall the function of.

Had another TV-related dream.  I was the doctor from the series Lost.  In it I was pulled back in time to a moment before the initial plane crash on the island.  Arriving at this point in time with future knowledge, I tried to escape the plane out the back.  I ran through several miles of fuselage in the form of an empty metal hull with floating platforms.  I had to balance on small platforms and girders while running as quickly as possible, as falling from them meant death.  I burst through the back of the plane, no parachute, and fell spread eagle.  I was still over water, but the island was in sight, and I was able to regain altitude by riding the wind currents, which was very exhilarating.  Ultimately I landed just outside an area with buildings.  There were other unfamiliar people around, so I hid huddled in the jungle a short ways off, clutching a Wii-remote as a weapon.   A girl I knew from gradeschool came over, but I shooed her off, citing my need for discretion, but I was noticed anyway when a small boy came over to play with the Wii I was carrying.

Had an amazing dream that I had purchased an interactive DVD set of an alternative version of the Firefly series. This set of DVDs allowed the viewer to make decisions throughout it, changing plot points and the order of certain scenes to an extent. When viewed, I became part of the series as one of the characters. Though in structure it was more like a video game, the dream maintained a pre-scripted, episodic theme, as though watching a familiar show.
In the show itself, instead of space pirates, we were mercenaries trying to run our own business, and the cast was very large and varied. Every character in the dream was fully fleshed out, from the depressed soldier who continually screwed up his missions, to the inexperienced but responsible head of the company, who was closed off to most people but was a close friend. There were the girls who handled more sensitive missions, one street-smart girl who talked straight about everything, and one technical girl who couldn’t stand her. There was the gonzo ex-marine who was hardly ever around because he was constantly out on missions, and had a reputation for strong-arming all of them. Several of these characters were portrayed by people I’ve known in real-life, some whom I haven’t seen for over 10 years, strangely.
The dream went through several episodes, each one completely different. Some I would play multiple times over, as they were favorite, “classic” episodes to the series which carried a lot of atmosphere, emotion and weight. Throughout the series there was a sense of close, personal relationships, camaraderie and friendship. By the end of the dream, the DVD medium element came into the show itself, and I found myself as a character in the mythical show, showing DVD’s of the show itself to the other characters.