I was on a plane to Hong Kong through Canada, when I watched it get shot from outside and crash onto a little island. It was an enormous plane, with a very round girth, and after it crashed, I could see it in cutaway as completely hollow and burnt out. In news-style recreation animation, a bullet from the sniper was shown piercing through and exactly hitting a tiny fuel tank in the middle of the ceiling before fire spread out in both directions along the plane. Of course, I was immediately worried that I was dead too, and frantically called my dad. He said he saw the news, and that they feared that millions of passengers were dead (in fairness, it was a gigantic plane). I went to my sister's place and watched the news with her over the next day. It turns out, what I saw happen was just the sniper's imaginative hopes, and that when it actually took place the next day, he only managed to shoot one person despite aiming for the fuel tank. I was very relieved that I wasn't dead and that my family would also be safe on their flights since they caught they guy.

Afterwards, there was some kind of new documentary I was watching on TV about karate. I recognized my old teacher and several former classmates (who I think were real). I nonchalantly boasted that I knew most of the people there and had gotten up to blue belt, but my nearby friends ignored me since it was a pretty low rank. I was suddenly in the dojo watching the demonstrations with my sort-of boss Ron. Fred Villari himself, the founder of the dojo chain, was showing off moves on the narrator. Fred looked to be in his mid-30s with a chubby, rectangularish head (the real Fred Villari is in his 60s). I asked Ron what his opinion was as a blackbelt himself (in real life he is a Tae Kwan Do master), and he shrugged it off. Next, I was in a loud party in a dark nightclub where all the students had gathered aferwards. There were bright orange drinks all around, and I had one.

After getting safely out of the plane form the earlier part of the dream, I stayed the night at a bed and breakfast run by a kindly older couple in Canada. They had a fairly large, modern house with comfortable beds and a light, tasteful decor. We met in a spare, unfurnished bedroom that the woman explained was no longer used for sleeping ever since the plane shooting. I walked to the end of the empty room and saw that it was a loft with a glass railing overlooking a clear, gorgeous pool. I could see the sunlight scattered across the small waves and it was very peaceful. The man came in with an orange netted bag of ping pong balls, and a ping pong table had appeared off to one side. He gave me an ice cream cone, so instead of playing a match, we played catch. The balls were rather heavy, just somewhat lighter than a golf ball. At one point, he threw it far left and it landed back in the bag, and I teased him that he should play basketball instead. He said without a smile that he was good at that too. As I ate the ice cream, I could see that whatever was left was always very spherical and that if I tipped it over (as I did when I picked up the bag after he threw the ball in), the ice cream scoop wouldn't fall out. I ate the tiny last bite before the cone and could actually taste it and feel it melting in my mouth. A table appeared with a plate of fries, and they said I should grab some since dinner was still a while away. Surprisingly, I could taste this too.

In another dream, I was watching a dating game where a big fat black man was out on the beach with a young-Meg Ryan-look alike with very long hair. He said on voiceover that he was both nervous and confident, and kept edging closer to her, telling her all the while how hot she was. Finally, they were hugging and kissing a little. Later, it showed him in the studio with a white guy, both in their bathing trunks. The host revealed that the girl was actually the guy in disguise, which had included large sunglasses (though the guy had a completely different body type than the girl, so I was skeptical). To everyone's surprise, the two men kept talking in a very friendly manner and the contestant admitted that he would be happy to have a second date. The white guy said he was surprised, since the last five contestants he had done it too had gotten very angry. Someone I was watching with commented that these kinds of MTV-style dating shows usually resorted to these cheap tactics when they were close to cancellation.

posted by Larry at 8:58 AM

I went back to an apartment I had lived in about five years ago (entirely imaginary), which was one of those complexes with long, low arms of units and an uninspired grassy stretch just outside. Mine was about the third one in, and I immediately found a comfortable familiarity once inside. The furniture was covered in plastic wrap, and I went to the side closet to see if there were any interesting things I may have left behind. The closet was entirely full of old ill-fitting clothes, mostly brown jackets and long-sleeve shirts. I thought to myself that I couldn't possibly bring it all back as my current closet is full already - yet I also had a satisfying feeling that at least now I knew where all these clothes were after all these years. On the top shelf were lots of random junk. There were a couple menus I must have stolen from a local place (related to a dream I had last year - but never wrote down - about always visiting the same little family restaurant whenever I drove past it) and a pristine pack of cards in a plastic bag. That was good, my current pack in real life is quite shabby. I wanted to keep rooting around, but decided that it was late and that I should prepare for bed. When I started brushing my teeth in the tiny bathroom to the left of the entrance, I was flooded with a feeling of nostalgia. Ahhh, I thought, I've used a bathroom very much like this so many times before - apparently I had lived in a similar unit for a long time before having moved to this one for only a brief period. So it was a pleasant sensation, but eerie in retrospect since it looked nothing like any bathroom in real life. It was a darkish green all over, with only a sink to the left of the door and an old-fashioned toilet - with the tank suspended above it on the wall - set back to the right of the sink. There may have been a little stall shower on the opposite side.

My high school friends, about five of them, came to visit and to help me move or get rid of my stuff. We started putting things out on the lawn - maybe to have a yard sale - when Mike and Tim discovered a dead body. It was a Hispanic woman in her early twenties, topless, and didn't really look dead at all besides the lack of movement. They moved her, on a little tarp, over to my items and started to contact the police. Just then, a rocker-type who must have been a neighbor walked over with a couple friends. Mike stopped him before he got close enough to see and asked whether he knew the girl (we had somehow figured out her name). He said he did and what of it. Mike then told him she was dead. The guy slowly walked over to her body, knelt down, and looked as if he was about to break down in tears. He suddenly jumped up screaming "Yeah! Finally! Wohoo!" while his friends looked at him horrified. It looked like genuine surprise on his part though, and I had other suspicions as to who the killer was.

That night, we played football in the pitch darkness outside (everything had been cleaned up). I could only dimly see people unless they were wearing bright clothes. I had a dread that came from further down the yard, that seemed to me to be rolling towards us. I knew then that this was the real killer, some kind of fog or spirit that came to possess people. I saw Mike's face turn a bright yet pale white as he ran about with the ball, and his body became blurry. I ran for it, and tried to get Scott, who was nearest, to run too. I didn't get very far before things changed abruptly, though I don't quite remember to what.

After a while, I was standing in the middle of traffic on a nearby road. This part of the dream might have been half dream-half imagination; there were bits that I can't visualize realistically even though I knew they happened - so I might have filled bits in during the dream with more abstract imaginings. Probably because I realized it was a dream by that point. There was the source of the evil standing in the road with a gigantic Lego head (affected from Dead Rising 2, which I've been playing recently with my sister). I was recruiting other people to fight him, and traffic stopped randomly around us as people crowded around with bats and hammers. The villain didn't react as a couple people started to bash his head, causing the plastic to crack and crumble. I knew that he was trying to trick us because his real head, which was a smaller Lego head, was inside and that once they reached it, he would start his counterattack. But I outsmarted him. I had a long towel with me as my weapon, which I whipped at him in such a way to encase his real head. I pulled with all my strength, and then I woke up somehow knowing that I had won.

posted by Larry at 10:35 AM