#1: I dreamt about attending what can only be described as a highly interactive concert involving pop music star Madonna, as well as using a public restroom. Both activities do not deserve a further response.

Commentary: I couldn't sleep and so I took some Valerian root to aid with that. This is what I get.

#1: You know that MP3 album I downloaded from you, the one that was supposed to be ethnic middle eastern or Indian music, but instead was clearly listed on the ID3 tag as Muslimgauze? Well bitch, Bryn Jones is/was British and the one track I actually bothered to play wasn't even him, it was the In Slaughter Natives' "Transcendental Carnation", which sounds ethnic but only an ignoramus would confuse the work of a Swede with real ethnic music.

Commentary: Yes, this was my dream. The Indian theme probably came from the fact that I ate at a dosa place yesterday, and the annoyance was directed at someone who wasn't my fellow diner.

#1: The dominant portion of tonight's dream has to do with how I spent a portion of Monday night/Tuesday morning: gazing at this year's Leonid meteor shower. Instead of being off by myself on a deserted road between two barbed-wire-fenced orange groves in a part of Irvine Donald Bren hadn't gotten around to ruining yet, I found myself in the driveway of my grandma's house in Green Bay, WI. The meteors were the standard fare at first, until I started seeing some that were red and had a diffuse glow that lasted much longer than normal. The celestial weirdness was interrupted by a very low flying two-seater airplane. The plane apparently was owned by the police, and was flying so low that it barely cleared the top of the neighboring houses. It kept circling as though it was looking for someone, and this erratic behavior caught the attention of my grandma's 'neighbor' Dora (who is actually my mom's cousin, and who never lived next door to my grandma) who came out to watch it with me. Eventually, the low-flying acrobatics catch up with the pilot when he passes overhead and gets snagged on the top of my grandma's garage, bending his tail fins all to hell as a result. Dora walks over to examine the damaged aircraft on the roof and appears fairly unconcerned by the events; meanwhile I'm freaking out and run inside to call 911.

Flash forward to another scene, I'm sitting with Dora in a room somewhere, eating homemade salt water taffy or somesuch that she keeps shoveling at me. Turns out this was no ordinary plane crash: Dora tells me she has been abducted by extraterrestrials her whole life, and that this was another of their visits. That's why she was so calm about seeing the plane stuck on the roof, she knew it was them and that in a moment they'd bring her up for examination. In fact, she told me that it's likely there was no plane crash at all: that the airplane scenario was probably a 'cover' memory they implanted in my head so that I wouldn't remember what I really saw.

Commentary: I'm actually a little freaked when I see owls around at night, since according to Whitley Strieber - an author who wrote a book of his own experiences with entities that may have been extraterrestrials - remembering encounters with owls is a common 'screen memory' used to block what actually happened. What made it more believable is that he was able to tie the owl imagery, as well as other aspects of the 'visitor experience' in with world mythology. If you need a good mindfuck before bedtime, I highly recommend reading "Communion". He clearly took the lessons he learned as an author of horror novels and kicked everything up a notch with that one!

#1: Bits and pieces, should've made notes when it was still fresh... The most dominant portion had to do with winning a $250 gift card to any restaurant of my choosing. Technically, my mom won it and was going to use it at a French restaurant but in the illogic of dreams I'm the one dining, not her. Anyway, I'm not sure on the actual name of the place but it's understood I've been there before, or at least I know there's one entree on the menu that I'll eat. From the look of it, it was some sort of breaded fish with steamed broccoli, served in small portion sizes as you see in parodies of Haute cuisine. Apparently my waitress has a photographic memory because after finishing the main course, she automatically served me the dessert I would have ordered. A flashback revealed that I had eaten there once before, and she simply remembered my selection. Naturally, I was impressed and was going to leave a larger than normal tip, also in part because I had to spend the full $250 in one go (I think I even offered to pay for the women at the next table over, just to use up the cash). Well, turns out the waitress has other plans because she brings me a second dessert selection, followed by several main courses. As I'm sitting there trying to get through the third main course - which had more than a slight resemblance to the spicy chicken and corn soup I ate in real life the previous evening - I wondered how close I was to the $250 mark since she hadn't provided the bill and I also tried to calculate an appropriate tip, which I fucked up by using 10% as the base. Why I didn't realize that I could just multiply by an integer to get the value for 20 or 30% is beyond me, but I felt that I needed to do the whole calculation over again.

After that I found myself in a 'classroom' - actually, it was just my lab with desks placed in the aisles between benches - and was asked by my ninth-grade English teacher about what things in life I hated. The desks were arranged in a circle and after others had answered, I decided my answer was that since I don't hate anyone or anything I'd answer that I hate, "the Amish, Mennonites, and other local craftsmen." For those who don't know, the Amish are a sect of Christianity who shun modern technology and live like its the nineteenth century, so they do not own televisions, cars, or other modern contrivances. They mostly make their living through farming or through traditional trades like woodworking, though some own stores. So...what was my warped logic behind hating them? Since they're serious about Christianity, and since Christians are supposed to turn the other cheek if you wrong them, you can treat them poorly and you don't have to worry about possible retribution. They're the perfect people to 'hate'...I mean, there's nothing forbidding a member of a minority ethnic group solely on the basis of being a member of a minority ethnic group for beating you to a pulp if you say you think they're crap. Religious types, on the other hand, have to answer to their deity for doing you harm....and of course, we all know that every Christian knows by heart - and slavishly follows - every last esoteric bit of their belief system! As happens all too often in real life, no one understood the subtleties of my joke and we moved on from there.

Commentary: My dreams tonight reveal how little I know about French cuisine...and how willing my brain, instead of just admitting that it doesn't know either, instead tries to fake it thinking I wouldn't notice. Also the line, "the Amish, Mennonites, and other local craftsmen" is from a furniture commercial that aired many years ago.

#1: I found myself in this dream initially interacting with some sort of 'invasion' scenario taking place on a war ship, or perhaps a windowless military installation. In the sort of hazy, shifting reality of dreams at times it was for real, and at others just an exercise. The persons I was fighting were not real flesh-and-blood, they highly resembled people and talked like them - they decided to go out for a break and told me so, which led me to the conclusion this wasn't for real - but I knew there was 'nothing' on the inside and therefore whatever you did to them didn't matter. In any event my rifle didn't shoot bullets but some gloppy brown stuff, so it seems likely that this weapon was slightly less dangerous than your typical paintball gun.

I then recall finding myself fishing in a small aluminum boat in some large body of water. The water had a greenish color to it, much like Green Bay in Wisconsin. Apparently, I hooked something and it turned out to be Lan's 'sister' who was...I dunno, swimming?...out there. Anyway, I hooked her just like a fish and her mouth was bleeding from the hook. She was naked and half-drowned, and I dragged her on board and some unseen person set a course back to land. We did manage to get her back in one piece and found something to wrap her in. She didn't have much to say for herself, but I suppose given the situation it was understandable.

The last fragment had me prowling around a college campus. I was with my friend Nico, and we were walking down some steps in a parking structure. I found a service door when we reached the bottom landing; since it was unlocked I broke out my pocket flashlight to explore. It turns out to have been a passage into a dry irrigation ditch. The ditch was about six feet deep so it felt enough like a tunnel to warrant my exploring it, but it was during the day and I could see the lawn on both sides sloping down. Nico naturally wanted nothing to do with it - there were cobwebs and debris - so she stayed behind with an unidentified person.

Commentary: The second portion is strongly reminiscent of my fishing trip on Green Bay, when I was 9 or 10 years old. I never managed to catch anything, just drowned a few worms trying. I still recall my dream from that night, and it involved staring at green water, feeling the boat get knocked around by the waves (an exact replay of my day). One interesting thing I've noticed is how the body retains a memory of being tossed about by waves...after I've gone bodyboarding, I can still feel them whenever I lie down, even if its many hours later.

#1: I'm positive I had at least one, and perhaps as many as three, dreams tonight before the one I remember. When I briefly regain consciousness, I always manage to convince myself that I'll recall the salient points when I fully wake up...and yeah, it never works out. Anyway, the first element I remember from this one is being at some sort of career fair. It was in a courtyard with wood paneled structures surrounding it, enough to let some sunlight in but not enough where it was oppressive...very reminiscent of the location of UCSD's campus pub and radio station (KSDT). Lan C., a reclusive ex-labmate of mine whom I tried to date (with some success), was there and scouting for a job. We had a very brief conversation and stopped at a recruiter's table before things morphed into me walking along UCI's ring road on the way back to my lab.

Along the route I encountered Kristina S., who is a friend and fellow grad student when I was at Milwaukee. Apparently, one of her sisters had a job in Irvine and she came out this way to live with her as well as finish up her degree, when it turns out her sister bailed and moved elsewhere. She had been living alone in Irvine for months, was leaving in the near future, and I was either not aware of any of this or as is more typical of me, was tangentially aware but chose not to act on the information. The end result is that I felt guilty, but promised to hang out in the near future.

Fast forward again - now I'm in my lab. For some reason, I feel the need to remove my pants and am wandering around in my boxers and a shirt. I'm hanging out in one of the equipment alcoves and wouldn't you know, all these people come barging into the lab. It's a small army of grad students, and 4 professor/administrator types. Turns out a new faculty member has arrived and wants to set up her lab in this space RIGHT NOW. Of course, no one has bothered to inform me that I should have been packing things up in preparation for her arrival, so now I'm having this distressing conversation with her and her 10 grad students. They've literally and figuratively caught me with my pants down (I'm actually squating down with my legs pressed together to hopefully make it less obvious the position they've found me in). The tone of the conversation was civil, though I was annoyed by the suddeness of everything and all the while was trying to figure out how I could get my pants - which were across the room by my desk - back on without being so obvious about it. Another cutscene - I'm in a prep room across the hall struggling to put them on (how can it be this difficult?) and I look back into the lab and see a girl taking all my biological samples from the freezer and putting them on a cart, where they are quickly defrosting. I'm about to express my annoyance (bio samples go bad if you leave them out) when I promptly wake up.

Commentary: Lan will always be something of a mystery to me. She was guarded with what she'd tell about herself, though with time I think she would have opened up more. Unfortunately I caught Lan at an awkward moment in her life, right after she crashed her car and failed out of grad school - she was allowed to save face by earning another master's degree - but before she was sent packing to China. It's a damn shame because she liked to drink, was full of cute sayings, and from conversation seemed willing to make up for lost time spent growing up in a sexually-repressed culture. It's been my lot in life to catch the attention of women when I'm not in a mental state conducive to engaging in sexual activity. I truly wonder how things would play out if I had invited her up to my apartment and fixed us both drinks now that I've got my 'groove' back, for lack of a better word. But enough about my southern Chinese fetish. The appearance of Kristina reminds me of the fact that she contacted me on Facebook months ago and I let it slide. Finally, I'm still occupying my former research advisor's old lab space and I will have to let it go to a new researcher coming in winter, who incidentally is a woman. While I am friendly, even gregarious at times, I place a high premium on solitude and so intrusion in all its forms is something I constantly have to contend with.

unrelated: I love giving wildly inappropriate greeting cards to people on their birthdays.

#1: Lost. This may have had something to do with a parade?

#2: The beginning is gone, but I do recall ending up in the basement parking-level of an apartment building. I was dumpster diving and managed to score a bunch of books and records. It was mostly noise and industrial stuff, nothing I really wanted - seriously, how many Merzbow collaboration records do you need? - but since it was free the price was right. I also stumbled across a number of books concerning the Metroid series of video games...I didn't realize there was that much to the story line where you could write anything longer than say, 10 pages on it. From checking Wiki, my imagination clearly got the best of me. My friend Alex showed up later to pick through the detritus as well as several others. Thankfully I had been given a headstart so I cherry-picked the good stuff. Before waking up, I saw my little pile of treasures and wondered how I was going to carry it all home.

Commentary: One of the neat things about being fairly indifferent to whatever is going on in mainstream culture is that when I do pop my head up from under the rocks, I'm amazed that there's ALL THIS STUFF to do. Case in point, television shows and movies. I've spent a good portion of my life starting Fall '08 watching six seasons of '24', four seasons of 'Lost', and every episode of 'The Shield' (among others) pretty much back-to-back. So while every other person was left hanging in Spring with 'season finale' episodes until the Fall programming starts, I just loaded the opener in Megavideo and thought nothing of it. I mean, it's almost as good as being put in a state of suspended animation, then thawed out 5-6 years later. All this stuff that you knew was going on then...well, now its all come to fruition. Anyway, the point of this is that video games are in a similar category. I've always wanted to 'geek out' on a long-running series, like Megaman or Final Fantasy and play them all back-to-back, cover-to-cover. Considering the price of the Mega Man Anniversary Collection for PS2 (it's the first 8 games, plus 2 Japanese titles), I just might have to do so.

#1: I grew cells, lots and lots of E. coli cells. I also apparently said or did something that pleased my research advisor, which is always a good thing.

#1: Had something to do with the surprise one feels when you see a video of someone you know engaged in activities you wouldn't expect of them. Pornography hitting close to home, in other words.

#1: An undefined mess, which ended in a semi-conscious dream of a sexual nature. Details not forthcoming.

#1: Tonight I decided to unleash some Grand-Theft-Auto-style violence on an unsuspecting community. I recall stealing an SUV which I had previously vandalized with a foamy substance, perhaps shaving cream (smart idea huh?). Before this I ran over at least two people with a different vehicle, and I'm sure other mayhem occured. My crime wave came to an end abruptly, which was never fully explained, and my lawyer told me I could expect to do at least 15 years for my crimes. I guess its swell that they didn't hand me the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole, just "at least" 15 years behind bars.

Anyway, I was taken to the jail and was processed. Most of this made sense: I had to strip down, shower, do the usual stuff you do when you pass through the penal gauntlet. It was smooth sailing until I got to a waiting room. There were several changes of clothes on a table, and the room had numerous observation windows that looked out onto a large activity room. The floor was covered with those blue gym mats that get used when you need a softer surface to land on instead of a hard concrete floor, such as when you're studying a martial art and get tossed around a lot. On these mats were two obstacle courses formed by use of large, soft blocks of various shapes and sizes. They were spaced in such a way so that your feet should land between them, the idea being similar to making soldiers cross through rows of tires to improve their coordination while wearing heavy battle gear. Navigating these obstacles was a mandatory part of processing - in essense, I was trying to "test into" the prison - and I promptly went into the main room and ran both courses. However, those runs didn't count since I didn't change into the clothes in the other room. I went back, stripped, and saw what I had to change into: a dress. I felt kind of humiliated - but I assumed that was the whole point - so I sucked it up, ran the first course, apparently passing. I then had to go back and change again, this time into a skirt and top. Note that while the first outfit was technically a dress, it was very utilitarian; almost more of a hospital gown than anything else. So, now that I'm really doll'ed up I run the second course and apparently fail. It turns out that I was supposed to run and jump but keep with my hands firmly by my side the whole time until the end at which point I was supposed to extend them outwards. There were other rules to the game and they showed me charts and videos on how to properly do it. It was much more choreographed than the first test! Later I learn that the point of this intricate procedure isn't to humiliate per se, but to help temper violent personalities and to mitigate the tedium of doing time...picture jails offering synchronized swimming in lieu of bible groups and you'd have the right idea as to what was occuring. In my memory, I recall seeing a psychologist recite his psychobabble on why this rehabilitation program works and just before I wake up, I was flashed a memo in my mind calling for the immediate end to the program, owing to state budget cuts. Presumably, this allowed the prisoners to get on with other, more pressing tasks like stabbing each other and raping the new guys.

Commentary: Fifteen years has shown up again...that's the time it took the hotel worker from 11/4/09 to work her way up from cleaning floors to making peanuts as the front desk person in the hotel.

Commentary: I had three separate dreams tonight, but since I did not bother to write down my impressions after they came to me - I woke up between dreams - the earlier two were mostly lost.

#1: All I recall from this dream is my labmate Silvia working in a library. She was sitting at the rightmost computer, at a bank of them. The room was large and rectangular, likely this was the reference section from the low bookshelves present. Stacks surrounded this space and I drifted around the room's circumference several times, glancing at Silvia and other objects and students passing through. The color scheme was drab though reasonably well-lit, all brown wood and perhaps olive green (or some other color that somehow worked in the seventies). I feel that this library has appeared in other dreams, though not this particular part.

#2: I spent a portion of this dream in a house. I ended up in a teenage girl's bedroom, apparently snooping around but not looking for anything in particular. I recall passing through a door and finding it led to another set of rooms, or rather a room shaped like the letter "E" turned on its side. Assuming we look at the letter as written, the top and bottom bars were freely connected through the vertical portion, and the middle bar was a separate room as it had a door. Turns out these were the rooms of the girl's two younger sisters, whom I was surprised to encounter and vice versa. The next snippet involved a gas station. I was spending time with two teenage girls, who were English and tended towards deliquency. While the other wandered off, I spent time inside an automated car wash with the other which we somehow damaged. Apparently we rode out of the wash on the equipment that moves a car through the unit...how that works is anyone's guess! There was some backstory with their male friends, as well as walking to the station at night (from the house?) but I can't recall what it may have been. I also recall being inside the station's store and I think my dad was there. I recall standing near him but any conversation that transpired is lost.

#3: This one involved tracking down a 'cricket', which was chirping away in an HVAC duct. I noticed it since one of those ubiquitous false-ceiling tiles was pulled aside and the duct was cut open, presumably because of work being done on it. Anyway, I get the cricket out of the duct and it morphs into something resembling a scorpion, then when I look away it loses the tail, becomes green, and grows eye stalks (though the right eye is missing). It becomes an injured Daniel Johnston 'frog', in other words. Given the bizarre, shape-shifting nature of this creature I was very glad to have my friend Dave magically appear, since he's a biologist and could help me to figure this out (as well as help keep me collected, since I was freaking out a little). In the meantime, the creature has morphed into a cat with blue and white fur, when it then changes before my eyes into beige and white. While petting the 'cat' Dave decides this lifeform is sentient and can read our thoughts, which it then uses to decide what to morph into next. I think it changed into a cat to help calm me down because it knew I like cats. So while Dave's relaying all this to me and snapping photos to document it, our beige-and-white 'cat' loses the cat nose and grows a small beak instead. We then find ourselves outside in the desert beside a road, at which point we leave the creature to go on its way. As we walked to a gas station, passing a highway patrolman, I wondered why Dave and I were content to release it and leave with photos being our only documentation. I knew we couldn't convince other scientists, much less publish on the phenomenon with so little evidence and I was about to comment on this when I promptly woke up.

Commentary: I didn't have time to write these dreams up, and as I don't want to put words in my own mouth I present the notes jotted down shortly after waking, with minor editing for (some) clarity:

#2: drifting. silvia "surrogate" + friend
documentary on poverty -> based on book (by michael j???)
silvia: "[his] writing puts you on edge, like deciding whether to kill yrself"
poor buying cars cant afford -> marketed to them like rotten subprime loans (occurs before hotel scene)
documentary on ways poor are exploited (hotel worker -> 15 years to reach front desk, prev job: cleaner. earns low dollars/hr)
20 numbered buildings (chose 18: numbered streets, NYC??)
main character from book thought to be dead, police report drowned at sea
looking at cds
messy bedroom (don't want silvia to see)
fan powered by peaches in hotel

#1: grandma died, did not make it back in time
more drifting

#1: Seems to be a continuation of the war theme from last night. Actually, let me back up for a second - initially there was snippet that involved getting people older than myself involved in the political process for the first time - or more to the point, directing them to HuffPo and other trappings of a liberal - as well as using relevant technology to do it. I remember being pretty stoked watching the proverbial lightbulbs turn on, and the event wasn't ruined by Glenn Beck fans or the like showing up. Concerning the main event, I was still involved in some sort of conflict apparently. This time there were no dudes in uniform, just a bunch of white boys wearing blue clothing. The conflict was over in that area, my unit was waiting to move out. The inevitable process of gathering and processing the war dead was underway, a task I wasn't assigned to participate in. In what I can only call a moment of morbid solidarity I pester my commanding officer until I get his verbal consent to assist with that task, and since the 'dead' look more like a bunch of passed out frat boys than real war dead it wouldn't have been that bad. However, fate had other ideas for me and I found myself assisting in gutting a house for renovation instead.

When I say we gutted the house (which I later learn belonged to my grandmother, who I also learned had a Spanish background no one ever told me about), we took our mission to the fullest possible extreme: when we were done, all that was left was the 2x4's composing the frame. We even ripped up the actual floorboards, so that you could see into the basement. Then someone, possibly my roommate Larry or a Larry-surrogate, suggested that since we got the job done so quickly, why not just keep at it and renovate it ourselves? Considering this took much less than a minute, perhaps seconds to go from fully furnished to stripped, everyone agreed. In the meantime there were still a few demolition tasks to complete, namely ripping out a cooling unit mounted in the ceiling above the entrance. Being unskilled at this I just start tearing at the hoses and metal fins until a coolant/water mixture is spraying all over myself and fellow workers from the ruptured device. I realize that this system is tied into some nearby water meters and after adjusting these devices, the liquid stops spewing out: crisis averted. At that point, several hispanics show up to pay their respects and assist where possible, and I'm shown the grandmother angle in a flashback or dream-within-the-dream. They've taken it upon themselves to decorate her nursing home extremely festively and lend a hand with the interior of the house. So now it's like some liberal's wet dream: white kids and minorities working together, painting the house with garish hippie and mexican patterns. I end up making my way to a bedroom, which turned out to be my old bedroom when I was living in New Berlin, WI and people were painting my walls, which were the same green-blue color I picked out when I was twelve, back to the original sky-blue except they were painting around everything (and sometimes over things) on the walls without regard for how this might look when you removed the posters. All this activity in the house had a feel of sponteneity, and long-term consequences of actions were not considered. Anyway, what troubled me the most was when someone started painting over paintings I had stored and was not displaying. They agreed to leave at least one untouched, and I had a feeling that the novelty of this would wear off midway through touching up the second painting and they'd move on to some other task. At this point consciousness kicked in, reminding me that I had pressing labwork to complete tonight and a car to track down that I left behind at school. The labwork is underway, my car is presumably where I left it.

Commentary: Man, this dream was such a habberdashery of things. The white kids were probably the light blue shirt wearing idiot Greenpeace hucksters that I had to pass today. Larry spent the summer in Romania working on his deceased father's house, so that may explain that. My hands-on lesson in hydrodynamics may have come from reading about the Sutro Bath ruins as well as indoor water parks in California. The initial dream drlikely came from an article I read discussing the difficulties of accepting friend requests from your parents on Facebook and subsequent discussion of this later that night.

#2: Tried to catch some sleep between work shifts and wasn't able to completely pass out, so whatever I was channeling was never really focused. One fragment had me drifting on wreckage again, and somehow engaged in selling things (telepathically?). I was communicating with a woman throughout this. Sometimes one deal can make or break you in the business world and in this case, so could one really strong wave. Another fragment had me following a woman throughout a tall building - at least 70-ish stories - with white granite throughout. There was much riding of escalators and usage of stairs and elevators, and she was always on the search for something. I knew finding whatever it was was time-sensitive, and I have a feeling she may have simply been looking for a way out.

#1: A classic unprepared-for-the-big-test college nightmare. I dreamt that it was time for my advancement exam - which will happen for real in April 2010 - and I failed to accomplish anything in the six months preceding it. I even failed to write and submit the two papers on which I'd be judged! Of course, everyone was there beforehand to offer encouragement, even this nineteen-year-old undergrad I had/have the hots for. We were sitting around in a big, dusty high school science classroom while someone made a speech before the exam. In the meantime, I'm wracking my brains trying to put together two 45 minute talks on the spot...trying to turn the project I stumbled through when I first came to UCI into something coherent. Bill E. and Suzanne B., two of the people on my practice exam committee made it onto this one as well and were going to lead me into the exam room. Just before I woke up, I wondered when they were going to notice that I never submitted anything for them to read beforehand. In other words, I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Commentary: I spent the previous week backsliding...not getting anything done in lab as a result of showing up at weird hours and missing the people I needed to connect with to move my project forward. Considering I had this dream on my lab's couch, I think this was my subconscious trying to remind me that if I fuck this up the second time around, there won't be a third time.

#2: Some sort of war dream, a la WW I. I think for a while I was at sea, drifting on some wreckage. I somehow regrouped with my unit, and from there my mission turned into bomb-planting and espionage: counter-resistance, in other words. I recall there was a set of stairs and tunnels connecting my 'side' to the enemie's 'side' (or perhaps I was just travelling between basements of buildings?). Very utilitarian affairs, stark concrete and pools of water here and there. I remember moving materiale from one location to the other, walking point and alerting my team members to passing enemy soldiers. If I was planting bombs, the detonations never occured with me present...it was just understood that they happened. Eventually, we were found out and had to make our exit. The other members fled through a door, down some stairs and presumably to safety via navigating the tunnels. I think at this point there was some flooding, due to our actions behind enemy lines. Unfortunately, the dream becomes very non-linear here. I alternately chose stay behind as a rear guard, and captured (and in the next frame was captured!) by the enemy forces persuing us. There were elements of holding the door shut so they couldn't get to me, to throwing back live grenades when they managed to force the door open enough (one genius threw the pin at me instead!), to them being in the same side as me holding me hostage (which they really sucked at), to escaping... I think I was quasi-lucid dreaming, suggesting elements and watching them play out. It ended with me being conscious and day-dreaming about grenades...wondering if you accidentally pulled the pin and activated one if several mattresses, doubled-over, could absorb most of the shrapnel or if the only thing to do to save your comrades would be to jump on the grenade and die, as has been reported from oral histories of soldiers.

Commentary: I see clear elements from Verne's "Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and Marquez's "Autumn of the Patriarch", which I'm currently reading. Also brings up a recurring thought I have, if I'd be willing to forfeit my life if I knew I'd definitely save others...and that if I chose not to act my own chances of survival were, at best, slim (i.e. the "grenade in the trench" scenario). Would I choose to die like a man, even if it meant paying for it with my life?