sniffnoy | "The bluelight system can also be activated by screaming loud enough. This has occasionally caused

the subject to be too long." (bah)
problems during football games." (what the tour guide actually said)

Pft, nevermind. The whole thing I was writing about was resolved while I was writing about it. Well I can't let the subject above go to waste, so...

Harry Recounts the Weird Dreams He Had Last Night
(or what he remembers of them)
with comments in italics
and edits in bold

1. Our school is on a river - hey, wait, our school *is* on a river!. For whatever reason, our class needs to get to the other side of the river. All that's on the other side of the river is a big field, so I'm not sure what for, but we do. We're in room thirty-something - 36? 37? 39? Well, anyway, there's no bridge, so we can't get across. We realize we have to head either right or left, because if we go far enough, we'll find a bridge. I start to explore off to the left, along some sort of ledge (not sure where the ledge came from, it's not there at any other time). The teacher, whoever it was, says I can't go off exploring on my own, though, so I come back. (Bizarrely, during the ledge part, it looks like I'm in a 3D plat - not that I start seeing weird meters all over the place, but the ground looks tiled.) Anyway I decide to find someone else who knows. I go back into the room. At this point I should explain that none of the rooms had doors to the hallway - rather they were connected directly to each other, or connected to each other through narrow mazelike passageways. They all also had a door to the outside with a porch, so if you were lazy, you could just get between them that way. I searched around the thirty-somethings looking for somebody which way to go, though I don't recall ever actually asking anybody which way to go. I do remember at one point I ran into some acting class where everyone was wearing really scary makeup and I ran away. (We never did get across the river, I suppose.)

2. I live in a log cabin with Grimace (yes the purple McDonald's guy, although he doesn't talk with Grimace's voice) and some other guy. On some nearby road is a horse race - but the horses are racing on it while the road is still in use, and going down the wrong side of the road, so they have to be very careful not to be hit by cars. Simultaneously there is also a bike race on the same road, going in the opposite direction of the horse race. A bear attacks the log cabin, but then it becomes friendly and starts living with us (yes, all in the time it takes for the rest of the dream). Then the bear and Grimace enter the bicycle race, though we don't yet realize Grimace has entered, and no, I have no clue how they entered a race that was already in progress. Maybe it wasn't. Anyway, along the way, Grimace and the bear are both picked up by a bunch of really loud guys in a red minivan. (I only actually dreamed about the bear being picked up, but Grimace was in there at the time... yeah, I realize I'm trying to make sense out of it, but oh well. I still didn't realize that Grimace had been in the bike race at this point, actually. When I was telling this part to Elana, she asked, "Like in The Triplets of Belleville? (I'm sure I've written about how much she hates that movie.) Well, I'd say it's pretty different, but yeah, it reminded me of it too.) Grimace now though has a bunch of tattoos, indistinct but all black. Eventually Grimace and the bear return home. We tell the bear it's a good thing he *didn't* finish the race, because if he had, he would have died from exhaustion. Meanwhile Grimace starts talking about how he entered the race without us knowing and how he got the tattoos and what they did after they got picked up by the guys in the red minivan, but I'm not listening. Some guy in the bike race stops at some giant cabin to go get a Hot Pocket. (There's something important about advertising at this point, but I don't remember it.) Smoke starts pouring out of the top of the cabin, presumably due to something going wrong in microwaving the Hot Pocket. Josh Zelinsky (though he doesn't look much like the real Josh Zelinsky) is also in the bike race, and he's standing next to his bike in the empty parking lot of this giant cabin. He drinks some sort of soup out of a cup, and then gets on his bike and continues, riding off into the sunset - yes, really. It's a long straight road at this point, there are no cars on it, and the sun is setting.

3. This dream I remember the least well. I only remember a few isolated scenes. Elana is evil. She keeps trying to convince people that it's better to be bad than to be good. There's one part where we're standing on a beach, and there's some cave with a gate on the beach, and we're (not sure who "we" are) all standing in the shallow water, because if you stand on the beach, you get pulled into the cave. Elana's not in the water, she gets pulled in, the gate shuts behind her. I think it was supposed to be a gate to Hell or something. Scary thing to be in a dream. It's not the last we see of her, though. Later she's standing on a cliff, once again trying to convert somebody to evil, though I can't see the person she's talking to - the idea that this person is even there goes away after she stops talking to him. I start to push her off the cliff, then stop. I tell her, see, being bad can get you pushed off cliffs. In the background behind the cliff is a giant - I mean taller than the cliff - CD shelf, apparently intended for housing giant CDs. It's angled so you can see two sides of it. Both sides hold different CDs, despite the fact that this is impossible in a real CD shelf. She begins to explain to me now why it's better to be bad than to be good, and as she's doing so, a fuzzy white ⊕ and minus-sign-in-a-circle appear in the air (actually they were really horizontal ellipses, not circles, but anyway), one in front of each side of the CD shelf, apparently supposed to label one side "good" and the other side "bad". I don't listen. At the very end, Elana and I are standing in a field with a whole bunch of other people. There's an old guy, who looks kind of like a pirate, sitting on a pole. He throws down dirty, blue, crumpled, bundles of paper at people. Each paper is in fact a college admissions letter. Never mind that I'm only a junior and Elana a freshman. I suppose this is what looking at 4 colleges in 2 days does to you. The people leave as they get theirs. I'm the second to last to get his, Elana is the very last. I get into 3, all of which I've never heard of. Elana gets into only 1, which she's also never heard of (which is in fact one of mine also). We're both pretty annoyed, and Elana starts throwing a fit.

4. So, we're going to visit a college (see note above), although, the rest of my family isn't there, only I am. As I enter I see a guy standing in a... what do you call it? 4 columns supporting a dome, big enough to hold only one person. I can't see the walls of the building or the audience (he is speaking), though; all I can see behind him is blue. The exact shade of blue of this "sky", though, keeps changing. I can see one or two stars (?) in it. The guy is wearing a dark blue T-shirt and a black top hat. He may have been holding a cane, but that may be me just adding things as I retell it. He is talking about how he has just put a Curse on everybody who goes to the school. It takes me a while to realize just what the Curse is, as I missed the beginning, and it's an incredibly stupid Curse, hardly a Curse at all. (Why am I capitalizing Curse? I don't know, I just remember it that way.) Essentially he has split up the people into 4 groups, based on whatever. I recall one group was all the math people. Don't know how you get just 4 groups that way, but that's how it was. The Curse was that (*gasp*) each group was to get what one of the other groups wanted! He said it so that it sounded awful, but I could recognize that it was incredibly stupid. I mean, none of this stuff was actually *bad*, and some of it was nonsensical. How could a person who would never enter any math competition at all win a specific one, and how could multiple people - a whole quarter of the school - do so? And being "Cursed" to get good grades just because he didn't categorize you as grade-obsessed is just... utterly, utterly stupid. Oh yeah and the "math competition" wasn't a math competition at all, it was the USACO. Anyway, enough about how stupid the Curse was. He finishes speaking, and the unnatural blue background behind him disappears, allowing me to see that his audience, who are all wearing dark blue T-shirts, is actually sitting in an amphitheater *behind* him. After that I go inside (yes, somehow that other scene was outside). There is a stream running down the center of the building. It must be some sort of cafeteria or something, because people are sitting and eating. At one table I see (never mind that none of these people, or any of those who will appear later, really, are in college)... well, they're not specific people, exactly. Some are specific people, but not necessarily there the whole time, some might be one person but might be another... some may not even have been there. Anyway, Sara Raftery *may* have been there, Ben Hsieh *may* have been there, and Eric Johnson was there although his name was "Eric Mule", and there was one person there who was either the girl who plays Hermione in the Harry Potter movies (Elana told me her name, but I forget it), or Dr. Mayers' son's friend, the little guy who goes to math team. Anyway now the nature of the Curse is completely different (I think). They are talking and suddenly either Ben or the Hermione/little-math-team-kid (I forget which; maybe in the dream it was some combination) suddenly grabs Eric's leg, pulls it up, drags him onto the floor, and literally *rides* him over to the stream, burrows under the ground, and comes up on the other side, which is a grassy area. Apparently the Curse is now more of a blessing and has given whoever was riding him (which at this point was pretty certainly the Hermione/little-math-team-kid composite) the power to burrow under the ground. At this point the dream went off on a bit of a sidetrack - which is what it always does, I suppose, but this time, amazingly, it got back to where it was before - I'm looking at the ground sideways. It's sort of a graph. I can't really describe it very well - some filled-in parts are green or blue. I'm looking at it on a computer screen. I can edit it. I don't actually see the computer but there must be one because I'm using a mouse and hitting Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y. Then it changes; now the ground looks like a toothbrush. That is to say, the non-brush-end of a toothbrush - a green toothbrush - with a little tan thing going around it. I'm editing it the same way as before. Anyway eventually I return to the previous point in the dream, where suddenly Mrs. Cosgrove walks by. She asks the rider, who at this point might again be Ben, why he (she?) did this, and he replies, "Well I needed a literal mule", as if this is supposed to be funny. She laughs. Oh, note that the stream seems to have moved, as before it split the building in two, whereas now the side of the stream I was originally on seems to be but a third. Then, back on the original side of the stream suddenly, Hermione/little-math-team-kid asks her (in connection with the Curse somehow) "So do I still get that weapons cache?" Mrs. Cosgrove says "no" and walks on. Then 4 people enter the building, somehow related to the Curse. Apparently it's supposed to be one person from each group, or something like that. They're wearing dark blue T-shirts with weird numbers on the back (but no, no funny nicknames.) One was π, one was 3.14, one was something really complicated which started "3.14159π²*" (not much variation eh?), and the 4th I couldn't see. I forget who the people were, except the complicated one was Olivia Lee, the one I couldn't see *may* have been Diana Hsu, and one of the others just may have been Nat Probert (despite the fact that I barely remember what he looks like). Anyway I try to see the number on the back. Eventually I see that it is 00, though for whatever reason I think of it not as "zero-zero" but as "nought-nought". (Somehow I also have some idea that it was e, but it wasn't, it was 00.) Anyway the person is actually Emily Lu, and apparently the shirt is actually too small for her, because I see underneath *another* blue T-shirt with 00 on it, but this one is a much lighter, faded blue. It's clearly an old shirt (no idea why it's bigger than the new one). Anyway immediately I realize that this older shirt, despite the fact that I can see nothing but the blue and the bottom of the "00", is a Pingry shirt (you knew that was coming, didn't you?) (Yes, despite the fact that she goes to BCA). I ask her if she went to Pingry, and she just gives me an "Are you stupid?" stare. I explain that I knew she did, I just asked because... really I don't know why. I think I did give some stupid reason.

5. This may have been part of one of the others, but I definitely recall at one point looking down a stairwell and seeing Andrei wearing a God Hates Shrimp shirt. It just doesn't fit in with the others (not that it needs to, it's a dream, after all), and I don't recall it as being one of them, so I suppose it's just part of some larger dream I've forgotten nearly all of. Thanks to

forcemajeure for that being in my head.

So, yeah, that's all I recall from last night. I hope you are all greatly confused.

-Sniffnoy

--
"Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively."
-Tink