Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Evil men in black

I enter a dorm room, the room of Taylor Layne and Taylor Lane. Taylor Lane is out, but Taylor Layne is in the room and allows me to write a message for Taylor Lane. So I start to write a message for her, on a poster on her desk (I have no idea what it's about... most likely to thank her for playing violin in my songs.) Taylor Layne, however, becomes bitchy and annoyed at me for staying in her room for more than 5 seconds, since she does not know me. Suddenly Taylor Lane appears behind Taylor Layne; she had simply been hidden from view until now. We greet each other and talk for about 5 seconds; then, I exit the room.

In the hallway I run into a short Asian kid. Perhaps "little kid" is more descriptive; he looks like he's in middle school, and he is dressed in a tall tee and other gangsta-like apparel. To be polite, I assume he is a student.

"Hey, uh... what year are you?" I ask.

"Actually... I don't really go here. I'm not even in the Cal band."

I am not perplexed as to why he mentioned the Cal band, since, according to my faulty dream-logic, most people who live in the dorms are non-students who happen to be in the Cal marching band.

Suddenly the little Asian kid is taken forcefully by a group of men dressed in black armed with revolvers. I look at my watch: 8:02pm. Damn, for some reason I knew that evil people would be here at 8:00pm, but I didn't think they'd be so timely! I run away, towards my room. The man holding the Asian kid backs up the other way down the hallway, towards the stairs, and fires a couple of rounds at me with his revolver. Fortunately, Jeff has propped open the door with our magnet door-holder so I quickly slip into my room safely.

I take out the magnet and slam the door shut. I get this vague feeling that Jeff may or may not be in the room with me, but under all of the adrenaline I can't really tell for sure. Jeff may or may not have asked, "what's going on?" When I hear a knock on the door, I know the evil men dressed in black are after me, so I jump out of the window and wrap my arms around a diagonal support beam on the exterior wall of the dorm building, just as the door bursts open. Jeff may or may not have been killed.

I slide down the diagonal beam. About one story above the ground, I land smoothly on a narrow very ledge that protrudes from the exterior wall by about 12 inches. I am lying on my side to meld with the wall and avoid being seen, propped up on my left elbow and watching carefully for hostiles. I see nothing but a couple of people taking their dogs for a stroll.

At this point I am aware that I am dreaming, and thus become bored. I decide to do a little test; I zoom my mind out of the dream and try to move my muscles in real life. I discover that although I can feel myself moving in bed, the movements are very uncontrolled and spastic; I am still mostly asleep and do not have very much control over my muscles. This discovery reassures me that my subconscious is still very dominant, since I am more asleep than awake. In other words, I can still continue to dream up a decently interesting dream without exerting very much conscious control over it. Encouraged, I zoom back into the dream before it fades away.

So I'm propped up on my left elbow lying on my side, on a ledge in the wall of Unit 1 Cheney. By some whim, I decide that I should go back to my dorm room, get all my stuff, and move it somewhere else so I can live safely in a secret location without being bothered by evil people dressed in black.

I make my way to the front entrance of the lobby. A girl sits in the security monitor booth. I fish inside my wallet for my ID card, so she can swipe me in, but I discover that it has been taken. The security monitor girl reassures me that she has been keeping it locked inside a safe box ever since I'd gone missing. Apparently, in the several seconds I spent trying to wake up, I was absent from the dream world for several dream years.

She takes out a beige metal box, opens it, and hands me my ID card. Closer examination reveals that the card has been tampered with: there is a giant red arrow pointing to my chin and a block of printed text that makes a silly joke about my face and maybe has the word "Muslim" in it (alas, I forget the exact wording). Noticing that my ID card has been vandalized, she offers to print a new card for me on the spot. Little do we know, the evil people were the ones who vandalized my ID card, and they have been monitoring the ID card printing device for years, waiting for this exact moment. Now, as my new ID card is being printed, our coordinates are already being sent to the team designated to assassinate me (I know this because of dream omniscience).

I quickly run up six flights of stairs towards my room (because I still want to get my stuff), but I can already hear them climbing up the elevator shaft. When I reach the second floor, I am but halfway down the hallway when the first evil guy pops out from the elevator shaft and begins firing at me. I decide that maybe going to my room is not such a good idea, and dive for the emergency exit, tumbling down some stairs, and performing a judo-style breakfall on the ground (side note: I am a white belt in judo, in real life).

"Someone is playing piano," I notice. While running away from this guy shooting at me, I begin to conjecture that maybe the piano sounds are not coming from the dream world, but from real life. Perhaps my sister is playing piano downstairs, and I am asleep in my bed at home (But I was disoriented in my sleep: I was actually asleep in my bed in Berkeley, and it must have been a student playing piano in another building with the window open).

Turning my attention away from the piano music, I shove open a pair of glass double doors, veer left, and run in a line parallel to the glass wall of the building. The evil guy has caught up and now begins firing at me from inside the building. Each bullet shatters the weak glass, passing through easily and missing me by inches.

At this point, I decide that the glass wall should instead be a concrete wall, so that I don't die.

But the double doors can still be made of glass.

Ok, resume. Now he can't hit me with his revolver, because the bullets can't pass through concrete, haha.

Okay, too much control; this dream is getting boring. The visuals are starting to fade away, anyways. Time to wake up. I zoom out and feel myself in bed, trying to move my muscles -- still spastic like before, but I am already quickly waking up. In just a couple of seconds I have already completed a full "normal" arm movement and completely woken myself up.