Had this dream last night featuring most of the people who would see this post on idkfa. I dreamed we were all planning a move and were debating where in the Middle East to move to. It was narrowed down to Dubai or Qatar. Some people were also arguing for Africa - either Zimbabwe or Dakar. We were all siting around Mike & Kristen's house with brochures arguing about it.

So, I'm on a massive, industrial ship. Almost as big as a cruise ship, but fitting more a fishing or shipping purpose. Lots of metal piping and corrugated metal walkways.

In this case, though, the ship is no long an industrial ship. It is instead a "university" ship, where all of the facilities have been converted into classrooms and lecture halls. Aside from a skeleton crew of workers and university staff, the ship is populated by college students.

And, as students tend to be, they are incredibly lazy. Rather than walking up the stairways from student quarters to the classrooms, a few dozen board the freight elevator and ride it up. Students rush on to make it before the slow-moving elevator starts.

"Oh hey, look at that ancient history." Somebody is playfully going through my wallet, and looking at my old student IDs as we ascend.

"Yeah," is all I have to say in response. "Pretty old."

Suddenly, there is a noise, and the freight elevator jolts.

"What was that?" somebody asks.

The sound from the elevator rises.

"It's the last hop before a gymnast jumps," I say.

Suddenly, a student leaning on a rail passes out. Then another, his eyes rolling back in his head. Something in the air, I think.

Another one goes limp, and tumbles backward. I breathe in and hold my breath, and dive forward to try to catch them.

I lose consciousness just as I catch them.

----

2:26AM

It's exceedingly rare I have any sort of dream I can remember for long, but Josh's continued and occasional posts reminded me on one last night.

A big group of us are wandering around something similar to one of those indoor/outdoor malls. Mostly it was the same group as was just in Vegas. Someone mentions being hungry and they know this great milkshake place up ahead. So we all make our way to this really strange restaurant, it was decorated a little bit like Willy Wonka's factory from Tim Burton's version.

The specialty was milkshakes there, but they would put either dead or unconscious kittens in each clear cup. The cups had some kind of stirring or vortex system that would twist the kittens around in circles and you could see them spin around and around. When you ordered your drink the server would hand you your kitten to hold and pet while you waited, then when the cup was ready they would take it back and somehow incapacitate it. Then hand your drink to you with this swirling kitten in it.

I think the milkshake did taste really good, I ordered chocolate malt and got a tabby kitten in it.

So I'm moving my parents out of their old house. The place is huge, more like an apartment building rather than a house. In fact, other people lived there, renting from them (apparently). Helping them move out, there is a ton of stuff left behind by previous tenants, especially in the shared storage space in the attic.

So I'm tasked with cleaning out the attic. In it, I find the storage unit for a person I vaguely remember: a Bulgarian composer. I open his unit to find a small, darkened theater, filled with dusty seats and a small stage. Of course, the light switch doesn't work.

My parents tell me that there is an entertainment center in here that I should look at to see if I want it. The guy was strange, and the theater is pretty creepy, but I walk in further. Free furniture, after all.

I walk further, peering into the darkness, when the stage suddenly comes to life. Strangely real animatronic creates start dancing and gyrating on stage to some bizarre, otherworldy ambient music. The characters follow me with their eyes.

I wake up. 3:30am. Write an email to myself. Subject line reads "Nightmare."

So I'm on the space station. Only it's more like a resort for smart people than an actual space station to do science on. Like where the Battle School kids would go if they needed a vacation.

There are, inexplicably, reflection pools, a full service bar, and (somehow) a panoramic night view of all of the planets. No beds, though. Only sleeping bags. And you slept in the halls.

Anyhow. It was kinda boring. All anybody ever did was talk back and forth to each other in lines from Shakespeare. I don't know why I rated enough to make it to the vacation station, but I felt a little out of my element.

So I'm in the room I lived in during college. The house has become a dorm, strangely enough. A bunch of college kids are hanging out in the hallway, and the room itself. I'm moving back in.

Josh: "I used to live here. Back when I went to school. For three years."
College Kid: "Yeah? Cool, dude."
Josh: "Before it was... all of this."
Other Kid: "Cool."

So I get selected to be on some sort of reality TV show. To pass the first round, I have to come up with an original song. This puts me at an extreme disadvantage, but I try for it anyway. I imagine what sort of sea shanties the Borg would sing on their cubes as they dominate the galaxy.

I don't remember what eventually happened, but I do remember my first line was:

We are many, we are one!

I imagined it to have sort of a "yo-ho-ho" vibe to it.

So Major Kira is telling me about why she and Odo thought it was a good idea to put a huge, McDonald's-style drive-through window in one of my second-story walls. "It lets in the light," she says.

Dax agrees, and says it's for the best.

Pregnancy gives you crazy dreams and mine have been epic.

Last night I dreamed I had the ability to slide through dimensions to alternate realities through portholes I could see. Sometimes when you slid through a porthole it was by accident, othertimes on purpose to run away from danger. And sometimes you were still yourself, but most of the time when you slid through a porthole to a new reality/dimension you were someone new. Thus for most of the dream I was Captain Kirk going between versions of the Enterprise and other starships. At one point I stole a gun that allowed me to create my own reality/dimension portholes and it created a bubble atmosphere so I could fly through space without a space ship. So awesome. Because I kept accidentally trying to fly my spaceship through portholes only to discover on the other side that my spaceship was now stuck inside a building or cave or what not.

I woke up sad that it didn't exist even as a tv show. I've always loved alternate reality stories, episodes of tv where they go to an alternate universe, and even Sliders (well up until the third season).

So I'm getting out of my car. It's raining, and I'm late for work. I'm wearing a Sherlock-esque high-collar trench coat. Danny Concannon (www.imdb.com) is getting out of the car next to me, equally hurried.

The problem is, I forget to set my e-brake. And my car starts rolling towards the beach. I sprint after it, but lose track as it gets redirected by a guardrail into a wooded area. I follow after it, but it leaves a trail of destruction through the forest. I pop out on a beach. A lady is fishing. I ask her if she saw my car. She says no, but puts down her fishing rod and offers to help me find it.

So, I'm visiting a family member, somewhere off of Northern Lights Boulevard.

I'm waiting for them in some lobby. People are bustling. Turns out: it's the green room for the Blue Man Group. A man in blueface is smoking, reading a magazine in between acts.

Someone sees that I'm out of place, and walks up to me.

"You a fan of the show?" she asks. She isn't dressed like I performer. I assume she is a stage manager, or an assistant.

"I'm just waiting for my cousin." I realize too late that I have marshmallow in my stubble, and start trying to pick it out.

"Oh. Well, you should wait for number 253," she says. I have no idea what she's talking about, and I guess my face shows that fact. "You haven't seen it before? I'll show you."

She proceeds to walk me out of the building into the parking lot. Cars are going by, but in the wrong direction for Northern Lights. I try to make a comment, but she's already doing flips.

Another performer walks up to me and gives me a hug, then sets me down on the bench while the stage manager is doing backflips. "She likes you. You treat her right, you hear me?" the performer says.

I dreamed a parrot was attacking my spine.

So, I'm walking through a memorial/museum for the nuclear explosion that destroyed the city.

A vine is playing over and over, captured just as the explosion hit. There is no audio, but shows four teenagers lining up for the camera just as the bomb goes off. A bright light flashes behind them, and they turn around to face it. They hold hands as a wave hits, graphically disentigrating their bodies. Video corruption and compression artifacts follow. The video stops, then repeats.

Another video is playing beside it. A professor talks about the likelihood of it being a sophisticated forgery, conveniently capitalizing on the media frenzy and political aftermath. Another man talks about how it is a single, brilliant, shared magical moment at the end of the lives of four strangers.

---

4:30am, terrible headache.

In the same dream:

• I was informed that Robbie was engaged.
• I was solicited to donate to a project to repave a local community airport.
• A vlogger I follow became the superintendent of the condo/apartment building I lived in. And only did her job naked, which nobody else thought was unprofessional.

So, I'm fairly sure I was dreaming that I was taking part of a live reenactment of The Secret of Monkey Island. It was... fucking awesome.

So I was at home, and a goddamn eagle drops down my chimney. It appears to be knocked out, or asleep, but it seems to be stirring. Also, it has a bright, dayglo orange number spraypainted on its back (what I assume to be a tracking "tag").

I spend the dream panicking, trying to figure out what to do with a massive, dangerous bird about to wake up in my living room.

So I was on the crew of "The Deadliest Catch." And instead of crabs, we were hunting for monstrous, bowling-ball sized pitch black clams.

And then the whales showed up. And they were super, super pissed.

Random Person: "Yeah! Let's watch an episode of Hercules!"
Josh: "No, no, I can't really deal with Kevin Sorbo right now..."

Aaaand that's all I remember.

I only remember this one part of my dream last night, and I thought it was share-worthy only because it scared me so badly:

I somehow got under a train (maybe it was because I slipped on a berm of snow?) and it started to move. I rolled with the train to keep myself from being sliced in half, but then there was something on the tracks I had to maneuver my body over. I did this with success, and ended up getting out from under the train, but I woke up very stressed out.

So we're at an aquarium, on some type of field trip.

The guide is telling us something about how the whale shark lives in a sort of symbiosis with the giant squid. And that the temperature and acidity of their environments is kept in balance by some biological feedback loop.

The guide demonstrates that by increasing the temperature of the tank (a tank large enough to house both a whale shark and giant squid, mind you). At the same time, she dials up a robotic vehicle with a camera on it, and starts piloting it around the tank. She follows around the whale shark for a while, and eventually pilots the robot around to the whale shark's mouth, which has some non-obvious indicator of the immediate affects of the temperature change.

"Alright, so that's on a screen, but who wants to see it for themselves? Let's get changed, and meet me in the tank."

My stomach sinks, as my fears of water, suffocation, and large, benthic creatures kick into gear.

I wake up, just as I dive underwater and start to feel short of breath.

I think I need to stop playing Lego Harry Potter.

I was dreaming that I was in a circus/freak show (I think because of the blood blisters from the frisbee) and I didn't have a real freak thing. So then this guy shows up with two drum sticks that he taps together and could controll a swarm of flys by pointing them at things (like a wand, hence Harry Potter). To control the flys he wrote the number One, Two, Three and so on to the number of flys. So I accept them from him but then he violently turns into a bird of some sort and dies. Then hurricane Katrina is about to hit the building and a cat starts helping me clean up, it then turns into a lady and she says she has blisters on her butt. At that point I realize she's my familiar.

Then I wake up late to work.

So Colin Farrell is describing something to me. He hands me a pair of what look like sunglasses. I put them on, and notice something strange about what I see through the lenses. When I move my hand, it appears there is some delay between when I start to move and when I see the movement in the glasses, the delay becoming greater the more complicated of an action I perform with my hands (touching two fingers versus signing the alphabet).

"It's a time delay device," Farrell explains. "You put on the glasses, and you set your mind to a certain task. The glasses then fracture the universe, and you keep doing the task, and you're also freed of the task."

"The universe?"

"Well, maybe that's overly dramatic. More like it draws a line between you and now, and holds on to that line while you do something else," being no less opaque. "I'll show you."

He puts on the glasses, and starts on a chore, cleaning the toilet, I think. After about a minute, he puts on the glasses, which immediately vanish, but he keeps on working. I try to talk to him, but he doesn't respond until he's finished with the task, at which point the glasses reappear, and he starts talking to me again.

"See? I'm free to do other things, while I'm doing menial or unimportant stuff here."

"What other things can you be doing? You're not in your body, it seems."

"I have an entirely different life on the other side."

"Other side?"

He explains how the glasses create an entirely different universe, which he can live in without need or consequence.

A few minutes later, I'm talking with his daughter. She tells me how she hates the glasses and what they do to her father.

"How would you like it if half of the time you wanted to talk to your parent, they didn't respond because they chose to be somewhere else? Away from you?"

---

4:14am.

So I'm in trouble. I've either stolen or crashed an expensive car, that then ran out of gas (either by leaving the gas cap off, or someone having already siphoned the fuel out), allowing for my commanding officer to track me down and apprehend me. I got the sense that I was AWOL, and wanted to remain that way.

"We've got you now," the captain growled as he threw me into a prison cell.

However, military prison isn't how I would have imagined it. As punishment, prisoners are forced to participate in theatrical musical numbers. Which is about the worst punishment I can imagine. As either part of their community service, or possibly hired professionals, actual civilian performers perform alongside prisoners.

We're being forced to learn some new number, and it's particularly difficult, and the chorus line keeps getting it wrong. Stuck in some awkward end-of-scene flourish, a particularly nervous looking chorus girl looks at me and sings the last line of her part:

"What I mean to say... Is all shall perish."

Unsettling dream.