January 3:

• I was in a big auditorium waiting with a bunch of classmates. Groups were getting up on stage one by one to present their mini-plays. It was pretty informal stuff, we didn't dress up or have props and we read straight off the script. But I was still nervous. While waiting, I found some clothing under one of the auditorium seats. It was a bright yellow shirt that said "COCK" on it. I thought it was funny, but it was just referring to a sports team. (My head was probably thinking of USC's gamecocks.) I also found some green basketball shorts. When it was our turn to go, I wore the shirt. And I really fucked up the play even though I was just reading off the sheet. I had an insane amount of difficulty trying to keep the sheets from sticking together, so there were a lot of awkward pauses in our play where I was just trying to turn the page. Then at the end I was forced to give the audience a really half-assed explanation of the meaning of the impressionist movement. I think my best friend's mom, who had randomly appeared, was not impressed.
• I was sitting up against a wall in a darkened, shadowy hallway with Marilyn Manson. He was different from real-life Marilyn Manson. He didn't have the weird contacts in. He was younger, and his limbs were thin like he was anorexic. If you could convert a Beksinski painting into a sculpture, you'd have what Manson was wearing on his back. It was very creepy. Anyway we were talking and then Manson went in for a kiss. I didn't resist, but when he suggested we date I told him I found him utterly fascinating, but too creepy. I somehow ended up taking a ton of pictures of him with my Nikon in that shadowy hallway, until it became lighter and lighter and he left. I don't think any of the pictures were very good.

Jan. 4

• For whatever reason, grandma drove us to school. (we never let her drive us, she's too bad at it and it's scary.) She and Amanda were in my room when my laptop glitched and showed some porn I was looking at earlier so then grandma threw a fit and the two of them got in the car without me. I thought they'd leave me but a few moments later I went down to the car too. Once inside grandma went back to the house to get something, still ranting about the porn, and Amanda and I discussed how naturally it's easy for her to not watch it since she's old and probably has no libido. ANYWAY, we ended up driving down the road a bit and grandma had some close calls driving. Then there was a car facing straight into us. It was in the wrong lane, but it kept charging forward at us. We collided and spun out and as we went further and further back I watched as there was a domino effect of cars getting caught up in the wreckage and doing far worse than we did. The three of us in the car seemed fine. Then I noticed all the people standing around. This was part of their play. The wreck was fake. I was still pissed though because 1) it was scary thinking we were about to die and 2) our car was damaged. I got out of the car and started walking to school, but I tried to shout to the people standing by to address my annoyances. But everyone absolutely refused to acknowledge me, even if I yelled at them two feet away. They wouldn't make any eye contact. At the school I went to some storeroom and found my two roommates from senior year of high school, Nick and Brett. I somehow ended up laying on top of Nick since he had decided he was gay too. (I would NEVER in real life. NO.) Anyway he FILMED it with his laptop, so I had to go back in behind him and delete it. I told them about the whole porn-grandma incident too. I later went into an auditorium for class and sat at the back. The teachers were also at the back, calling out names to collect prizes. I won Photoshop! Right after, a strange girl with thick-rimmed glasses and long black hair asked to sit next to me and I said "sure." She made me feel a tad uneasy, but nothing I couldn't handle. She was a bit odd. She approached me with a sheet of paper with a lot numbers all over it. It was some sort of code. Some of the numbers were my school code, other were just numerical translations of my name or "I love you." We went to lunch after that, the girl still hanging around as I tried filling my plate. She just kind of hovered, waiting to see if I cared. One of the cafeteria ladies sensed troubled and scared her off. The food selections that day were pretty delightful. So much tasty, healthy stuff. I heard Nick (not my roommate, another Nick) from high school also at the food bar and looked up to see him with a hot half-Asian guy. They were talking about guys and were clearly both gay. (I *KNEW* Nick was gay. You can't have a voice like that and not be.) I greeted them and followed them back to a table. There I saw my old friend Marcela also. She was happy to see me but had a lingering resentment that I hadn't tried harder to see her last time there was an opportunity. (I could have, but I would have needed to have walked 40 min.--the dream told me this) She seemed to like me better as I was in the old days. She told this to the Asian guy since he was apparently interested in me. I heard her criticisms even though I was far enough away she thought I couldn't and came rushing up to my defense because I wanted this guy to like me. We ended up sitting next to each other in a lunch booth as we watched a movie with Marcela, Nick, and at least one other person. As the movie started, I whispered to the guy: "Last night I had this weird dream that I was in a car wreck but it was actually a play. I tried talking to all the people but they didn't seem to see me at all or were just really good at ignoring me." He raised his eyebrows a bit but said nothing. In the movie, we watched as a pair of detectives walked down the street discussing a case of recent murders in the area. It was a very gritty, heavy film at first. Then somehow there was a scene of one of the detectives fighting off a baby. Fighting for his life, on the ground. He had his gun and shot through the baby's hand, but it seemed unaffected. It left a gaping hole, of course, but it just grew it over again. After the baby killed him, it became paint again, splashing back onto the wood of the wall next to the scene. The killer of the movie was paint, light, and shadow, manipulated by some unseen malevolent force. The paint could slide across surfaces and then manifest itself as 3D forms. The movie shifted to a huge old factory which a family of 3 had made their home. It was made of wooden planks mostly and was very deep. I'm not sure how deep it was to the bottom, but the events I followed happened higher up. I think the villain, the one in control of all the paint, lived in secret at the bottom. I ceased to watch, and became another character living in secret. I was controlled partially by the man at the bottom. But in the mean time I wandered through the house of these 3 people. A man and wife, and their son, my age. I was invisible to the parents, but the son had some sight that let him see me when I wasn't in the shadows. We became friends. His mother and father were slightly overbearing. Time went on. I had an increasing number of close-calls as the mother kept almost detecting me...even though I was invisible, I'd end up getting trapped and having a hard time getting out of the room to avoid her. She'd get nearer and nearer and I'd be forced to do something stupid like knock over things in my panic. If she ever managed to touch me, she'd know and it would be over. In addition to the whole invisibility thing, I had one other power: I had this odd implement with which I could cut shapes into walls easily and see what lay behind them. The boy had it too, maybe he had it first and gave it to me. It was pretty necessary for living in this big old factory. Lots of pipes and valves and exposed tanks. One of which inexplicably made one staircase almost impassable. After one close call I was forced by the woman's encroaching presence to hide in a large closet. From there, I kept hiding further and further. The boy had given me a key. Doors led to doors and more rooms. I soon got lost, but was too fascinated to care. I saw rooms back here I had no idea existed. They must not have been used in months. I found a room with some gym equipment and wanted to use it, but I wanted to make sure I could get a quick getaway if the woman found me here and opened the door. So I took out the implement and cut a narrow rectangle into the wall. These holes were now portals to other parts of the house. Unfortunately this portal led straight into the main living room! The portals didn't seal back up, so they were sure to see this big new hole in the wall and come through it to investigate. I knew I had to leave, so I left the room and journeyed deeper. I soon found this absolutely massive room with high ceilings. It looked about as expensive as you can get. At this point, I knew I was dreaming and was having fun with it. I passed by fireplaces and huge cross-stitch like murals above them. I ended up sitting down at a desktop computer in the middle of this, then the dream finally ended.

Jan. 5

• Another dream with me in a cafeteria getting food. It started (the part I remember at least) with my sitting on a stone wall outside in the evening with a few friends. Couldn't say who. I wasn't really involved in the conversation, just hanging off to the side. Finally someone suggested going in to eat, which is what I'd been waiting for since I was starving. Once at the cafeteria, they all disappeared. The food looked especially good again, but I noticed all the plates were either missing or dirty. And I talked to the staff and they said they weren't going to be able to offer clean dishes. So I just said, fuck it, I'll wash my own plates, and carried a plate and a bowl to the bathroom to wash it with some hand soap. But I bumped into one of the workers in the hallway. She dropped fruit all over the floor and I didn't really stop to help. I'm guessing she thought fruit was a good idea since that didn't require a plate.

Feb. 27

• First, for whatever reason, Amanda is piercing her ear. She sticks a gnarly looking needle through it, asks me to lean forward, and then also pokes it through my eyelid. I can sort of tell what she was about to do, but it's worse than I imagined. There's not much pain or discomfort at first. Mom walks in and she finds out what happened and is very displeased, and suddenly I am too. It happened so fast I don't know how much I could have done to prevent it. There's now a big hole in my eyelid, much bigger than that needle point. It's about half the diameter of a hole-punch, which is still pretty damn huge for a missing spot on your eyelid. When I close my eyes, I can see light coming through the spot a little. The hole is slightly scratchy now.
• I hop onto the back of an odd man. I sense he's something out of a Seuss book or a children's show character or something. We are travelling somewhere. Beneath his warm persona, there's a sense it's just a mask for his less kid-friendly self. He drops me off in this stupid, colorful neighborhood and I watch a lot of bad Seuss movie adaptations drift along by. I am unimpressed. I find the exit to the neighborhood. The weird guy is still out there. I jump and manage to get back up on his shoulders again. HE takes me down a dark path (it's night) to his house, talking about other fictional persona types (something about Eight Leg Jack or something like that). In his house, right by the door, there are big stacks of DVDs and we talk about movies for awhile. Somehow this guy has turned into Joe. Joe and I get naked. At some point, his mom shows up in the driveway outside. He is holding my underwear hostage so I can't dress for her entrance though! Finally he gives it to me and I run to the bathroom, but to my horror she was looking through that window! And the window goes all the way down to the floor, so I can't even hide by ducking. She keeps looking, either confused or repulsed. We had expected her to come through the front, not mess with something back there...

May 15

• My family visits an old friend's family in the city. Their apartment is incredibly modern and minimalist. They have a large robotic dog. One of the girls of this family is hesitant to even let me in and I argue with her incredulously because a) I was already in there once years before, nothing bad happened and b) what am I going to do? draw on the walls? There are many highly awkward conversations in this dream about people's emotions and how my mother and I kind of want to die. At one point, my mom (somehow, a thinner, taller, younger version of herself) begins climbing up support cables (not unlike a bridge). I'm afraid she'll fall, and equally afraid that's what she wants. At some point I'm in a Google Docs document with her and I'm talking about how worried I am she'll kill herself.
• Some of this dream somehow involved classmates. I lent my exacto knife to somebody in an auditorium. Later on, I think in the same ultra modern complex, there was a contest, and whoever flushed the toilet on its 50th (or some #) flush since the contest began would win. I seemed to be the only one who cared and I even burst into a used stall to make sure I got to flush it. I won! Not sure what the prize was even. But I knew when they announced the winner I'd have to talk about gay rights.

May 22

• Danielle left me. As a friend, I mean. Kind of a big deal, we've been friends IRL since 2nd grade. We were at my house looking through some of my old things and came across something I had written months ago. It was a dumb alphabet where I had written something for every letter that corresponded to our friendship. (Don't worry; I don't do that sort of thing IRL.) I mentioned in it that our friendship had gotten a bit insubstantial and almost pointless, since we hardly ever see each other. She was silent for a moment after reading that, and I told her I no longer felt that way, it had just been a passing moment. But that apparently wasn't enough. She started gathering her things up. Things almost got heated, then she left. Meanwhile, my family was waking up. We were going to leave on a trip in about 5 min! I told Amanda about what had happened and she was pissed at me for scaring Danielle off. She was angry, almost hit me... then I explained my side of things out of earshot of my parents.
• I lived with some weirdly abusive redneck kids and their parents out in the woods. I remember having to run around on rooftops and across a field to avoid having them catch up. They'd have beaten me up otherwise.
• There was a large, white, brightly-lit room full of people and things. I was trying to keep up with somebody. I remembered I had dreamed about this before, and then it struck me I was dreaming now, but I knew if I concentrated on that the dream would end, as they do. So I tried putting it out of my mind, which worked. I still don't remember much of the dream though.
• Not a dream, but noteworthy: while at work yesterday, I remembered a dream from months ago. In it, I was working the same job with my friend Michelle. Utterly weird. In that dream, I was doing my job fairly unsatisfactorily. Not unlike yesterday, the boss was a bit ticked with me. When I remembered this dream (from months ago, well before I ever imagined I would apply to that job), I was dazed for a few moments.
• I've had a lot of barely-remembered Silent Hill-esque dreams. Meaning, brief flashes of darkness, blood, gore, fucked up shit in general. Things that shouldn't exist at all.

May 25

• On vacation with my family. The only two people who wanted to take a long drive in the mountains were my mom and me. We talked a lot about how I felt and it was a little depressing, really; I said I felt like I had missed out on my high school years by being emotionally absent and worse.
• In a large warehouse store (kinda like Sam's Club), fellow design students and I were split into groups. We had to make posters as part of a competition. We were trying to work out the composition. I know the picture involved mason jars and vegetables. Somehow we then ended up in an arena sort of deal, each person pitted against every other. We entered these colorful elevator tubes that took us to the different levels. The final level was very similar to the Hunger Games' cornucopia of weapons except at the center there were answers to questions being asked. There were 20 questions. I screwed up answering the first since I picked the color of my answer card didn't match that of the question.
• Maybe in the same sort of Sam's Club store, I kept trying to ask my friends for a ride but none of them could give it to me. Eventually plans changed or something and we all ended up in the same car.
• On vacation at a house on the beach. A lot of guys my age, some I knew from the past, like my roommate. One of the guys started taking measurements of the others, who were lined up single file in front of a scale. He'd measure height, weight, dick length, and then finally ask for their sexuality. Weird, I know. Surprisingly my old roommate Brett claimed to be gay.

June 9

• Kind of a haunted zombies dream. The world was falling apart. There were a lot of regular people still walking around, trying to survive. In the daytime, we were mostly OK. At a certain point at dusk each night, we had to run and take cover in any building we could find. The trouble was it suddenly became extremely difficult to move, like a huge wind was pushing us in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go. Once inside, we'd usually find some other normal people. At the beginning of the dream, I knew a few of the people I was with, but later that ended. They just became people I ran into. A little, loose 'family' of survivors.
• If you didn't manage to make it inside a building on time, you were fucked. You'd spend the first few hours in a trance, batting at the air furiously, apparently attacking some unseen enemy. By morning, you were one of the zombies.
• The first building I entered for cover at night was fairly large, but old and decrepit. I had my nikon camera, some other small black object, and my knife, the holster of which I kept attached at the belt. I had to use my knife a lot. It was maybe a foot long. Not the most powerful weapon in our troupe, but it worked for me. Even within the buildings we took shelter in, we were still vulnerable to the zombies that might be inside, lurking.
• The next morning we went outside again. We walked around, I had to kill more, then we ended up in a car which I was steering on a busy interstate. Lots of intersecting roads and train tracks. Everything was slightly miniaturized though. It was very much like we were sitting inside a cart on a K-Nex roller coaster kit. At one point it was so steep that I reached out with my hands to grab onto the track itself to help pull us forward.
• We next found ourselves in the MASSIVE manor of some woman, who was with us. She had it into her head that we could stay here indefinitely. I tried telling her that that was pretty inconceivable given the current state of the world. It was tempting to try though, this house was in way better shape. Still, it required constant vigilance whenever you entered another room. I never walked off without my knife. A few times I went off by myself. It was very dark in the extended wings of the manor. For whatever reason, the basement of the place was a department store. So I went shopping and found a nice bag of great shirts I'd been eyeing since before the world went to shit. As I was trying to leave, I noticed a hugely obese zombie walking slowly toward me. I didn't know how effective my knife would be on that, so I circle around the aisles to get to the stairs. I showed the guys upstairs what I'd found. For some reason this now included two cartons of potato salad... Anyway, I next ventured into the bedrooms. Here it was equally dark and shadowy. Something weird in almost every room. It wasn't just zombies; small objects and animals also seemed possessed. They would move a little and make sounds. They still seemed dangerous to turn my back on. I had to stab through many of these things and people as I went deeper. Using a knife, I had to stab several people multiple times in different places, until I knew for certain they were dead. In one case, I had a man trying to talk to me. He was telling me sick things. I tried stabbing him in the stomach, but he just kept talking until I sawed through his neck the WHOLE way, which took quite a bit of effort since he was putting up a mild fight. I watched as I cut through layers of veins and bone. When I was done with that ordeal, I went back to the main foyer, where my friends were fighting off about a hundred small threats. We raced to take further shelter behind a sign (which led to a big, hidden room). This worked for about a minute, then the things started to ram collectively into the wall, weakening it. They were threatening to break through as I woke up.

July 19

• There was some school event where we were being treated to unusually good food served in a buffet by some of the students' parents. It was all really delicious. I had brought my lunchbox but it was still full of some trash and wrappings from my last meal, so I headed to the garbage cans to empty it out. There was a huge line of students ready to be served, though the line hadn't started moving. They had decided to make it "ladies first" (dammit!). The start of the line was next to the trashcans, so when I stepped forward to empty out my lunch box, the parents assumed I was trying to cut in line. They told me I couldn't eat anymore because of that. I tried to explain, but they wouldn't listen, so I ended up shouting and cursing. I was denied all that delicious food. I watched all the other students take their food up the stairs back to their rooms. For whatever reason, massive stacks of McDonald's food was being brought up on trays to the rooms as well, but I didn't want any of that. Ugh. I went back downstairs to see if I could sneak in with the students who were now getting seconds. Naturally all the parents were on guard for me, but I managed to go through the buffet and quickly filled my plate with some really delicious stuff! There were even party favors, awesome little magnets we could take, stuck between some of the dishes. I pocketed a few. They were wonderfully designed. After filling my plate, I was quickly discovered and lead away by the arm. I attempted to stuff my face quickly, but I think my success was limited. My name was called on the intercom. Some sort of recognition. I noticed then that I was still thin while everyone else had grown obese. The dream ended with me crawling around on top of the lights above the buffet, dismantling the signs and breaking down the glass sneeze guards. I was thin enough I could fit there between the ceiling and the lights.

July 25

• I was in a tea shop. It was quite rustic and Christmas-y. Very attractive. I discovered I had the power to make the tea fall down from the ceiling at whatever rate of speed I wanted, with my mind. I would hold empty bags under the stream of tea and then hand the filled packages over to our big line of customers. I sped up the flow beyond its usual to accommodate them all. At the end, a 'dark' man who had been watching told me he understood what I had been doing, but that I'd messed up: that wasn't jasmine tea, it was bay leaves!

July 26

• I was in the middle of a huge auditorium. There was seating in the usual place, but also in the center, where I was. Around us, something like NASCAR but with smaller vehicles was racing around. I was amazed at the huge wheels of cheese stacked all the way to the ceiling! I mean, hundreds of feet of stacked cheese! It was all for the teams. But I was far more focused on the people around me. We kept having to switch seats and I got further from my friends. I moved to get closer and ended up with an acquaintance, whom I'm pretty sure liked me. It was awkward. I felt some combination of fun and regret. Then without me even noticing, we were all now watching a college student play. The play wasn't in the center of the auditorium, it was up on one of the sides. And now I was directly beaneath the stage set, which was pretty elaborate for a college play! It was a medieval era play and there were moss, boulders, holes, and graves crammed convincingly into this little stage. Two people in the play were burying a body. They saw that the corpse had something very valuable on her chest, and just couldn't help themselves. But at the same time, they could hear the approaching sounds of a knight, so one of these dirty peasants entered the grave to hide and to steal it. However, he immediately emerged from another hole looking incredibly clean. He was shirtless and because I was seating DIRECTLY beneath the stage, the final scene was awkward for me. The actor was dying (in the play) and started sliding and limping down the boulder right above me. I had to move to avoid collision, but I got really close. Even though he was clean, I saw that he had really gross acne all over his check and back. It didn't look like your regular acne, it was all too evenly spaced. Anyway, the play ended with his death. It was all very dramatic and well-received by the audience, but for me it had become almost too personal for comprehension. I ended up going behind the stage, shirtless, to clean up. I was recognized as having contributed to the play somehow. Behind the stage was a fancy restaurant. The director acknowledged me with a head nod. Then I was home... I had probably become the dying actor. My little sister really wanted to move to Alaska, and my mom wanted me to try to dissuade her. During this whole conversation, I was folding a really really big blanket in the hallway. When it was my turn to dissuade her, I ended up kind of encouraging her more. Mom came up and thanked me for being a jerk. I went out and sat on the edge of our apartment building and watched the traffic. I was filled with restlessness and sat on the front edge of a bus. Fairly unprotected, but I felt confident I wouldn't fall off and die. We reached a park. Lots of people walking their dogs and exercising. There were little dishes full of nice food at intervals along the path. I ignored them. I HAD to run LOTS, even though I had already been to the gym that day and biked. I was running in circles, and some little kid was being an asshole and squirting everybody with water as they went by with a big hose. After the second lap, I was pissed off and wrenched the hose from his hands and sprayed him back. His shitty parent, who had neglected to stop him, suddenly retaliated.

Sept. 25:

• Watching the most disturbing video I'd ever seen in my life. About 100 times more disturbing than any of the shit I've ever seen in real life. Maybe it's a good thing I don't remember specifics. I don't really recall anything too terribly gorey though. More, it was the ideas. Possibly existential ideas. Still, it was rough and violent.
• I went to a Harris Teeter (I thought it was the same one where I worked over the summer). I noticed that the deli looked completely different from when I worked there. I eventually realized this wasn't my old HT but was the cafeteria at college. I ordered a sandwich and they offered to give me a free Book of Mormon with my purchase. I turned them down of course, but was very confused. I saw that Chelsea Dulaney was working at the the register and said hi to her. Everyone was really nice, I was just thrown off by the random Mormonism. As it turned out, there were Mormons all over school. I walked across campus and saw that our auditorium had its roof randomly dismantled and inside, there was a super loud rock concert, very well attended, with a terrible vocalist. He was singing about Mormon values. I ended up sitting far away from the noise in kind of a dark dining area outside, and then Jenny came and sat with me. I was pleased to see her as I hadn't in a long time before that day (I had actually caught a glimpse of her that morning in the dream). We discussed the weird Mormons and I learned they had taken over the whole school administration. Nightmare!