June 7th, 2002 CE

So many dreams today.

My first dream began with me in the basement of a house which reminded me of my friend Rene's, with a girl who seemed to be my girlfriend. She was nearly as tall as myself, withg long, curly dirty blonde hair. With us was a male friend of ours, who was tall, gangly, with deep brown hair. The house was hers.

As we were on our way down to her bedroom, we heard noises coming from her mother's bedroom. The door was wide open. We looked in, and saw her mother, on her knees on her bed, dressed in a grey silk neglige and nightgown. This upset my girlfriend terribly, since her mother had died recently, she explained. This was clearly a ghost. The restless spirit of my girlfriend's mother was moaning and writhing about on the bed in some cruel mockery of pleasure, and it was really quite hideous to behold.

We retreated into my girlfriend's bedroom to talk about this; she was talking about getting someone to come and cast this spirit out; an exorcism or something. I objected, pointing out this was her mother she was talking about, even if she was dead. Perhapss she was back from the dead for a reason. At the very least, I said, we oiught to ask the ghost if she wanted to be sent away. Just then, we heard a terrible moan from the next room. That shut me right up.

Soon therafter, a hulking brute of a man came into the room. This was my girlfriend's step-father who, now that her mother was dead, was now her legal guardian. He took extreme objection to my presence there. He was a lout and a bully, and took great pleasure in belittling and threatening me, as he steeped about her bedroom, mocking me for the idea that I'd be having any fun with his step-daughter. He went so far as to pull a condom out of it's hiding place in a vase in her room, and saying something like "Oh, what's this, then? Looks like I'm going to have to put the beats on you". I had no doubt that he could do just that. He said that he would be waiting out in front of the house so he could beat the crap out of me in public.

I began to panic, and wondered why my girlffriend wasn't sticking up for me or resisting him as she followed him out of the room. I reached for the nearest phone and dialed 911, hoping the police would save me from a savage beating. After dialing the number and having the operator ask me "Fire, police, or ambulance?", I realized that I didn't know the address, and couldn't tell me where to come to save me. I hung up, dejected.

I went upstairs, where the brute was standing in front of the open door, gesturing outside in an "after you" sort of gesture. In a desperate move, I got up onto the stairs behind him, and gave him my hardest shove towards the door, hoping to knock him outside and then lock the door behind him to buy mmyself some time. It was like throwing myself against a brickk wall; he didn't budge. He didn't seem too impressed by this, either, and began to turn towards me. I began to jabber, "Now, see? There's really no point in you beating me up. I just proved that I'm incapable of shoving you out the door even when leverage is on my side. How much more proof of your physical superiority do you need?" At about this point in time, I realized this dream was going nowhere good and woke myself up.

My next dream of the day began with me inside the front hall of a tall, narrow building, perhaps 7 storeys tall. I had difficulty getting a sense of the dimensions of the place throughout the dream, so perhaps it didn't have a specific number of floors; it was just tall.It was similar to my friend BJ's formmer appartment building on 7th aveenue in layout and style; one long corridor with doors on either side, extending perhaps 100 meters from it's main entrance at the street, with a deep-colored wood motif. The main differences were that everything was much taller; perhaps 20 foot tall ceilings and main entrance glass door, and everything looked - or at least felt - much classier and more expensive.

The place seemed to be an academy of some sort, I was a new student there. I was being shown around by Emma Frost, one of the teachers from X-Men (which gives us our daily comic-book-dream-quotient). We walked down the hallway, and there was some sort of means of getting upstairs there. It seemed to have traits in common with both a set of stairrs and an elevator. I don't think my mind was very clear on what it was supposed to be, so what it was was a big, blurry, confusing mess. We went up several floors, and each seemed basically identical to the last; a wide, open space with tables, comfortable seating arrangements, such as couchees and armchairs around them, and a large, open shaft in the middle of the floor with a waist-high guard rail around it which led downstairs.

When we got to the top floor, I made myself comfortable in one of the armchairs, and began to write something..Emma left me there, and not long afterwards, I was somehow made aware that there was trouble in the basement. I don't knoww how. Instantlly, I was up and out of my seat in a gaudy brown and red pulp hero-esque costume, reminding me sort of of the Rocketeer, and bounding for the sheaft in the midddlee of the room. I overheard other people in the seats around me talking about how stupid I was as I made my way downstairs.

The trip downstairs was very confusing; the layyout of the building was very different on the way down than it had been on the way up, and in nothing like an orderly manner. I quickly became frustrated with my lack of progress. There came a point when I reached the bottom of a stairwell and came upon a dead end. I searched around and found a red button inset into the wall. I pushed it, and the entire stairwell began to descend into the earth, like a giant elevator. When it reached the bottom, it opened out into a wide, open field at the bottom of a wide hill. A battle raged all around, with bullets flying overhead, eviscerated bodies laying in tangled masses all over the place in the blood-soaked mud, and smoke and red light suffussing everything.

From out of nowhere, I summoned up a horde of red-fleshed, scythe-wielding demons atop black horses to join the battle, and sent them forth. Sadly, this act seemed to draw some negative attention, and we were all gunned down and killed instantly and messily.

The dream began with me as a disconnected point of view, and I saw a large man with a red handlebar oustache sift through our bullet-riddled corpses, until he came upon a helmet with a long-barrelled cannon mounted on the front of it. It seemed slightly damaged, but he plunked it onto his head anyways, and began firing shells out of it at some tanks at the top of the hill. If anything else happened in this dream, I don't remember it.

My third dream of the day is pretty vague in my memory. George W. Bush, the mad emperor of america was in it, and he was a drooling moron; mentally handicapped. His head was severely malformed, with a pointed chin and a flat-topped head, like a cross between a slice of pizza and a 'grey' alien. He had a job as a paper boy, and his elderly mother had to drive him around late at night to make his deliveries. At some point, she met with another woman who was also driving around HER mentally retarded son on a similar errand. I really can't remember anything else, sadly.

My final dream of the day that I can remember had me in a building very similar to the Open Learning Agency, as is the case with so many of my dreams lately. I was buying a bunch of comic books, including the latest issue of The Incrediblle Hulk. The cover was this great bloody fold-out deal, with about five folding sections. It was huge and quite impressive. I kept thinking it was drawn by somee legendary Hulk artist; Sal Buscema or Jim Steranko or someone. I wandered around the upper floor of the building for a bit, and saw plans for a new Secret Wars series, which would involve characters from a half-dozen different companies, but not Marvel, oddly enough. One of the images I saw in regards to this plan looked like a picture of Batman and The Question drawn by Frank Quietly. As I roamed a bit more, I realized that one of the comics I bought was a trade paperback called Wolverine: Primal Rage, which I realized, to my dismay, was just a big black-and-white reprint of issues I already had in color, packaged in a shiny black, red and white foil cover with a $30 price tag. I was most put off, and begant to wonder about getting my money back.

Then I woke up.