Evil Spirits in Stanford

This dream occurs on the same night as "deep-throating locker room girl" but much later.

I am biking with my family. The bikes have a motor with an adjustable speed, so the user can choose to use the motor, pedal with the feet, or both. I pass a building and hear a couple of little 8-year-olds exclaiming in awe, "Oh, look, Stanford!"

We approach the edge of a steep cliff. Below where we stand, there are buildings with roofs of varying height that just might allow for safe passage to the floor via ninja-jumping. Alternatively, we could simply enter a building at our level to our left, take the elevator downwards, and exit the building at the ground floor.

Remembering that there are "evil spirits" in this aforementioned building, I lift my heavy motor bike and consider ninja-jumping all the way down. Then I realize it's not feasible while holding a heavy bike, so I relent and enter the building.

Inside, we say hi to the "children" of the manager of this Stanford building. One of them looks like a little-kid version of my friend Kristen. They are baking deserts for the Amador Valley Marching Band. One of the deserts is a brownie with ice cream on top, and looks very yummy.

I feel the approach of the evil spirits. Come to think of it, this entire dream I've been feeling the approach of the evil spirits. Maybe even since the "deep-throat girl" scene. But now, they have finally caught up to me in this unholy Stanford building, which is their home.

A colorful man wearing a colorful exotic oriental hat strolls very slowly towards me from the adjacent room. He is one of them, I realize. "He's here, he's here!" I wail to no one in particular. Everyone in the room thinks I'm crazy, because only I can see the spirit. I try to explain that I am about to be killed, but that only confuses people further.

I quickly search for a weapon that might help me defeat the evil spirits. I quickly find one of these popsicle holders lying around (without the popsicle, so that the tip facing outwards is a popsicle stick) and attempt to slit the colorful man's throat with it.

It works. His eyes bulge. He gags, "We are trying to protect you!"

The actual evil spirit bursts from the adjacent room and runs towards me. It is skinny, has four legs, and is much more evil-looking. It looks somewhat like my friend Poom. As the evil spirit runs towards me, I attempt to slash it with my popsicle stick. It passes right through the monster. I yell to the Kristen kid in dismay, "My weapon works on my allies but passes right through the evil spirit!" The kid is bewildered by my apparent insanity, because she cannot see the spirits.

Fortunately, the monster is intercepted by another benevolent protector spirit, the son of the colorful man. At this point, name labels appear above the spirits' heads, much like in a computer game. I learn that the colorful man's actual name is "Innkeeper," and he has been keeping peace and order within this Stanford Inn for years, defending against every evil spirit that happened to wander here. The boy is the "son of the Innkeeper."

The boy and the monster are engaged in battle. He yells for assistance, but the Innkeeper is still recovering from a slit neck, due to my folly. Again, I try to slash the evil spirit with my popsicle stick while he is distracted by the boy. Again, the popsicle stick passes right through the monster. I become hysterical and beg to the normal humans around me to realize that I am about to die, but they have no idea what is going on.

Finally, the monster has killed both the Innkeeper and his son. The monster now turns towards me and pinches a tendon on my right shoulder. I am dying, but I also acknowledge the chance that this might be a dream and I might not die.

I feel my heart slow down dramatically.

I wake up.


Inspiration for the creature must have come from House of the Dead, the arcade game

The deep-throating locker room girl (non-sexual)

I enter a locker room, in search of my regular clothes (I am wearing work-out clothes). I realize that I cannot remember which locker I put my clothes in, or even the whereabouts of the locker, because I always use a different locker every time.

In one section of the locker room, there is an aisle of pens, pencils, paper, and other such school necessities on sale. It seems that the locker room is slowly being transformed into a store. The only explanation is that the school year is almost over; they are cleaning out the lockers, replacing lockers with school supplies, and temporarily using the building as a student store.

I ask a nearby girl, "Have they cleaned out the lockers already? Can I still get my clothes back?"

She responds, "Yes, they've cleaned out the lockers, but you can still get your items back from the box in that room."

She leads me to the "box," which is actually a girl kneeling on the floor. She demonstrates how to use the box by sticking her hand deep inside the girl's throat and retrieving an apple from the girl's stomach. Deep-throat girl tells me that she has a gift for identifying people based solely on the contour of their arm, as they reach into her esophagus. Her super-human throat sensors can always correctly identify the individual and allow access to only the items that belong to that individual. This is a neat and secure way to allow everyone to retrieve the items that they left behind in the locker room, as opposed to simply throwing it all away.

Green Dot Scam

Winning the $100 prize at the talent show has given me the opportunity to add one more thing to the long list of things that I hate: The Green Dot Visa Prepaid Card. I don't even have the card yet, because I am supposed to "activate" it before they mail me my debit card (in 7-10 business days).

The instructions state that I can activate online OR by calling 1-866-443-6227. However, after completing the long, tedious activation process online (they even made me give me social security number!), the website informed me that I have to call 1-866-443-6227 to "complete" my activation. So I called this number and the automated voice-recognition computer answered me and told me my name was "Ooh!" even though I said my last name is L-O-H. I hung up when I realized that it was just asking me the same exact questions as the online activation, forcing me to do the entire process all over again.

So if the instructions said activate online OR by phone, why did the website want me to call the phone number even after I finished online activation? Why does the process of claiming my money take longer than it's worth? I am beginning to think that this is all a big scam. I have temporarily given up on redeeming my troublesome $100 prize.

As expected, google yielded some satisfying results of others who hate Green Dot:
http://www.lockergnome.com/tuxedojericho/2007/11/04/greendot-more-like-scamdot/
http://www.howardforums.com/archive/topic/1048788-1.html

On a lighter note, the shirt that I won, which says "Most Talented Berkelean in Unit 1," is quite awesome.



Edit: I finally received the card. But today I found out that someone had secretly signed me up for "premiere membership." I have not used the card at all but my balance is now down to $70.10, from the original 100 dollars. This "premiere membership" is nothing that any sane person would ever purchase, so obviously the workers there are instructed to sign every customer up for it, even though I decidedly refused EVERY special offer.

Consider this: Someone put 100 dollars onto a card as a gift for me, for winning the talent show. Now, only 70 dollars remain. 30 dollars have already been STOLEN by the company.

I believe that the company is made of highly sophisticated scammers. It offers services identical to most debit cards, but they slowly steal your money with secret fees. I do not believe they are affiliated with VISA, although they stamp their cards with the VISA logo. It is impossible to sue them because they are a rogue company with no known location (only a P.O. box).

I will be contacting customer service soon and hopefully resolve this problem. I doubt it will work, though, since their primary objective is probably to steal social security numbers and money.

Crocodile Intestines

Short dream sequence:

I had recently attempted to zip-line across a great distance of water, via a rope connecting two separate islands. I had accidentally let go and dropped into open water. Now I was swimming backwards to try to get back to the island.

I turned around while swimming backwards and discovered that a large crocodile was waiting for me with its mouth open. It sprung forward to try to eat me. I remembered reading somewhere that it is impossible to hold a crocodile's jaws open, but possible to hold a crocodile's jaws closed. So I made sure to clamp my arms around its jaws before they had a chance to open again.

The crocodile struggled in my grasp, trying unsuccessfully to open its mouth and eat me. I realized that I had to kill the crocodile or it would continue to struggle. At first, I tried bending its snout/mouth. Surprisingly, its mouth gave way and folded in half. However, the flexible-mouth crocodile was not wounded or deterred at all.

Then, as we were drifting towards the island, I picked up a nearby piece of cooked beef (lying on the beach of the island) and attempted to stick the small piece of beef in the crocodile's eye. This was ineffective, so I opted instead to stick my bare thumbs into both of its eyes, a maneuver taken directly from a gory scene in "28 Days Later," a zombie movie. This not only destroyed the crocodile's eyes but also caused it to die from pain.

As the crocodile died, it rasped, "My intestines will find you and take revenge!" Then, numerous flat egg noodles sprung from its torso and wriggled towards me. They looked edible.

The end.

My WoW bot got banned :(

Just thought I'd like to bitch about my problems here.

My friend claims to make 30-40 dollars per day running his bot* on World of Warcraft and selling the gold he earns for cash**. This inspired me to write my own bot, because I need money. My parents are always watching how much money I use via bank statements and they get suspicious when I buy too much food (they think I'm buying drugs with it or something).

*bot: a program that does shit for you automatically so you can go to class or sleep or have a life while your character does shit in the game.

**lots o' people like to buy gold (World of Warcraft currency) with real cash using techniques such as Paypal.

So I bought WoW for 20 bucks, wrote up a pixel-detection fishing bot, and started to make some money.

At first, business was slow and I only earned 5.50 US dollars worth of gold in 2 weeks. But I had GLORIOUS PLANS to improve my bot and automate even more tasks to earn up to 10 US dollars per day.

Unfortunately today I received an email from Blizzard Entertainment informing me that my account had been banned on the grounds of "manipulating the economy." I find it highly ironic that they banned me for flooding the game economy with little fishies, but not for botting, which is the more serious offense!

I got so depressed that I sent them this confession email as a small joke. I doubt I will get a response:



[Dear WoW account administration,

Today I discovered that my account (theguy126, US) was banned from World of Warcraft without prior notice, for "economy manipulation."

I know you do not condone botting or selling gold or any sort of that thing, but please realize that WoW is my only source of income. I am a UC Berkeley student with an inadequate mealplan, and I often need to buy food with my own money. As a student, I do not have the time to find a job or to work part-time. My parents provide me with cash, but they become suspicious that I am spending cash on other dubious things when they see the bill (even though I only buy food).

My bot on WoW earns me a very small amount of real-world cash below minimum wage (at best, 2 dollars per day). It is a pixel-detecting, intelligent fishing bot that I wrote by myself after hours of tedious hard work. It is self-sustainable and "learns" to adjust certain variables to reliably recognize the fishing bobber, and does not require specification of whether it is "night" or "day" or what color the bobber is. I was planning to improve its effectiveness by having it automatically auction the fish, and also automatically alternate between multiple realms -- this would earn maybe up to 10 dollars per day. I was very depressed when I discovered that my account was banned. The hours I spent working on my masterpiece Auto-it bot were wasted.

Please do not take away my only source of income for food. I am dead serious when I say that the only things I buy with my money are food, milk, and orange juice. Since my mealplan is inadequate, I have no cash to spare for extra things. I don't even play WoW for fun; in fact, I bought WoW for the sole reason of making cash. I was inspired by my friend who claims to earn 40 dollars per day botting on WoW.

Please, reactivate my account so I won't have to go hungry. Like I said, my parents provide me with cash, but I need to earn some of my own money in order to eat as much as I want without feeling remorse or fearing suspicion from my parents. The amount that I earn is hardly worth anything to you, but it helps to keep me from starvation. I am very serious about this (I weigh only 140 pounds and need to gain weight).

Sincerely,
Max

P.S. despite the somewhat joking tone of my email, everything I say is completely true (my parents will still let me buy food, but I really do want to eat whatever I want without feeling remorse, and I only weigh 143 pounds), and I really would appreciate it if my account were reactivated.]

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.

Zombies vs Nerf guns

Late at night, when there are almost no cars on the streets, I find myself driving my way up Bancroft Way (which is odd in itself, because Bancroft is a one-way street going downhill). Ahead of me, two police cars are driving in the same direction. They are carefully escorting what appears to be two cars of gangsters. One of the police cars drives ahead, ushering the two cars onwards, while the second police car trails behind, with a police officer looking backwards (at me), waving in my direction, and telling me to back off and stay away from the volatile situation.

In an act of spontaneity, instead of staying away from the situation I gun the throttle and drive at full speed past the convoy, swerving and hitting multiple walls, before finally reaching my destination: a gathering of multiple police cars at some sort of crime scene. At this point I realize that my car happens to be a police car. As I get out of my car, I also realize that I just so happen to be a police officer. The "crime" had taken place at a lower, underground level in the city, which could be accessed via some flights of stairs leading downwards.

A girl tells me she has to pee. This is bad news, because the only bathroom in the vicinity just so happens to be inside this lower level, where the crime took place. Since we don't know what happened down there, and it could still very well be dangerous, my job is to escort the girl down the stairs, to the bathroom, and bring her back.

As we descend down the stairs together, some normal-looking people -- crime scene investigators, perhaps -- pass us by. As each person passes by, I jump nervously, half-expecting some sort of dangerous killer, only to realize a moment later that the person is normal.

As we progress deeper into the area, however, the atmosphere becomes drastically more frightening. It's late at night, everything is deserted, and I feel like I am walking in an underground ghost town. I draw my standard-issue 6-shooter revolver and hold it in my hands for reassurance. I ask the girl if she wants me to follow her inside the bathroom and wait just outside the stall, to make sure no one attacks her inside the bathroom. She says she'll be fine.

All the while, I have this nagging feeling that something is wrong. As we approach the bathroom, men and women can be seen sitting on office chairs, lying on the floor... dead, bloody, and pale.

The girl I am escorting is now frightened. "What happened here?" she breathes.

The dead man sitting in the office chair starts to move. We begin to run away, but soon, zombies are all around us. I have a fleeting thought of the girl, but it seems to be a lost cause to save her, since she was already inside the bathroom by the time the zombies came to life. So I run towards the narrow escalator leading upwards (but turned off and not moving, of course). A zombie woman who is blocking the escalator runs at me. I bring up my 6-shooter and fire one shot, which seems to kill her just as she is about to bite me.

As soon as she dies, her body continues to drift behind me, in the direction she had been moving, in zero gravity. Then I realize that the whole world has turned into zero-gravity mode, just like in Dead Space (a game I recently played), and now I have to escape by pushing against the floor at an angle to propel myself forwards. Then, as I drift towards the ceiling, I flip over repeat the same process for the ceiling. In this manner, I bounce between the floor and the ceiling, propelling myself towards the safe place, while a multitude of zombies are chasing me.

While drifting forward, a zombie finally catches up to me, but suddenly dies from a shot fired in front of me. Looking forward, I see that I am nearing the safe house: a small room filled with soldiers armed with automatic machine guns, shooting at the zombies behind me. I drift into the opening of the safe house and land on my feet, because the safe house now has gravity. The group of approximately 20 soldiers continue to fire their nerf guns at the incoming zombies, which crumple as soon as stricken by a nerf dart.

Unfortunately, my presence disrupts their firing because I have unintentionally brought a magnet with me. The magnet spawns ribbons that tie together the guns of the soldiers, forcing them to break formation and preventing them from taking aim properly. The entire group is stalled for about 10 seconds before one man is finally able to wrench the magnet away and throw it away. By this time the small room had just about filled with zombies coming toward us. Just as the front line of zombies is nearly upon us (at point-blank muzzle distance), the soldiers resume firing. Since the firing rate of the nerf guns is very fast, and the soldiers are trained to stagger reload times, they quickly clear the room of zombies and resume control over the entrance to the room.

By sheer luck, one stray zombie slips past the entrance and wanders into the room unnoticed by the soldiers. he begins to grope at a nearby civilian. I desperately point at the zombie and yell, and the soldiers quickly dispatch both the zombie and the victim of the zombie groping (because zombie-ness spreads by touch instead of bite, apparently).

Someone pokes me on the shoulder to get my attention. I turn and realize that IT'S A ZOMBIE POKING ME! I yell, "AHHHH! KILL THE ZOMBIE! KILL ME!" The soldiers comply, and some soft foam nerf darts land on the zombie and me. I feel the darts on my shoulder and gradually give in to death.

I wake up next to Fernanda (my girlfriend), and quickly try to recount the details of the dream I just had. Fernanda then tells me she had the same dream. She says that she was the girl that I was escorting in the dream. While fondling my face, she tells me, "During the dream, the face of the zombie in the office chair I saw was your face, in real life."

I wake up for real.