March 11th, 2001 CE

I dreamed that I was in a very old-seeming school which has appeared in many of my dreams, but which I don't believe actually exists in real life. It was three or four storeys tall, with a stairwell at each end and a single hallway running the entire length of the building, with classrooms on either side of the hallway along the entire length. It seemed that the school was still being used for educational purposes in some areas, as there were large classes being taught here and there, but in that my real-life friends, Jason and Karin were in the process of moving in together to one of the former classrooms, this wasn't uniformly the case. The former classroom they were moving in to was strewn with old electronics and televisions parts, many of them hanging from the ceiling via crude wire assemblies. It reminded me heavily of the classroom of Mr. Coulson, a teacher who taught at my old High School, John F. Ross, before I ever went there. We marvelled at the dozens of functional and semi-functional TVs which seemed to come with their "apartment", and the squalor of the rest of the place; the wires and bolts and circuit boards everywhere didn't seem to bother us.

At some point, I left the apartment and wandered the school. It was dank and dim and crowded, with students of all ages teeming in the halls. I would occasionally glance into a classroom to see what was going on in there. Many of the classrooms reflected classes from my real life - my grade 6 class with Mrs. Jarvis, the auditorium of Burnaby Mountain Secondary school, at which I worked as a security guard while it was being built. The latter seemed to be used as a dance class. Somehow, I got lost on my way to and from one of the school's washrooms, and was forced to ask for directions from a number of students to find my way back to the electronics class cum apartment. They said they didn't know, and I had to consult a giant, colourful map painted on one of the exterior walls. There, it became clear that I was simply on the wrong floor, and I chided myself for my idiocy.

On my way back to the apartment, I came upon a discontinuity in my dream, as the dank and run-down structure found it's self suddenly host to hideous chitinous creatures which resembled a cross between Xenomorphs from the Aliens films, and Zerg from the Starcraft series of computer games. All of them were beetle-black, intelligent, and fluent in English, and varied very greatly in terms of size and design. I encountered a number of people I knew, some of them from my real life, such as my fellow vampire gamer, Adam Zwolinski, and some of them figments of my dream. They were on the run from some of these creatures, scurrying furtively to some point of theoretical safety within the school. I got separated from them at some point and found myself hiding out in a filthy public washroom, with mounds of waste caking every inch of floor and only dim light. I seemed to have been sitting on the sink counter with my back to the mirror when two of the creatures I was hiding from entered the room.

One was nearly man-sized, with a face like a beetle, a humped back, and two large, multi-segmented arms which ended in what almost looked like human fists, though the "fingers" were fused together into a solid mass. It stood bipedally. The other was shorter and smaller, more spindly and less squat, with a decentralised body mass and many centipede-like leg-type things extending off from it's body all along it's length and two large limbs of indeterminate purpose extending off of it's shoulders, their mass exceeding that of the torso. They were arguing about some preferred human victim, I think, when they came to blows. The larger one, with his huge, fist-like extremities, flailed and jabbed at the smaller one until it fell to the ground, dead. More creatures then entered the room, each of their bodies equally unique, though all of them were black and chitinous. They discussed the death of their fellow creature in dispassionate tones, and specifically, how mystified they were at how they kept coming back to life after things like this happened to them.

It was then that they turned their attention to me. They discussed me in terms of my being some kind of human clone which they had produced for their own sinister purposes; that my existence served only to further their goals. One of them, which looked very much like a long, flat insect, roughly two thirds the length of my leg, with many, many long legs and a shape which as oblong, thicker in the middle, and nearly flat, top to bottom, scurried up to me and climbed up my leg, wrapping its innumerable legs around my one leg, latching on to me and began to suckle upon my member in a most non-erotic manner. The discussion among the creatures had turned to the production of human clones for the purposes of having more substances (all of which were referred to in pseudo-scientific terms which I can't recall now, which probably don't have actual meanings anyways, and which I'm fairly certain simply referred to sperm anyways) readily available for them to consume. As I was being fed upon by the first monstrosity, I shuddered in revulsion, and when it became clear that the rest of them were going to do so in turn, I could take no more.

I reached down and ripped the creature on my leg free, it's many sets of legs scrabbling for purchase upon my leg as I did so, and I then dove over the mass of other creatures on my way to the door, whereupon I bolted, as the creatures, seemingly too surprised to act, failed to kill me. I fled through the suddenly labyrinthine structure until I came upon some friends of mine, some of which seemed to be characters from the movie Clerks, which I had watched two days earlier. Specifically, Jay and Randal.

They were in a giant room, which seemed to go on for hundreds of meters, with an irregular shape, no obvious source of light (though it was quite light enough to see the entire room), a ceiling which seemed to be at least ten meters up, and a huge red metal cage which closed off the majority of the room, inside of which a small Tyrannosaurus Rex stalked around angrily, in a state of constant movement and agitation. The interior of this caged-off area was strewn with masses of rotting meat and bone, blood, viscera, and gore splattered all about. Large masses of organs seemed to be piled together in odd locations. The group of fugitive friends were sitting around a table, discussing what they were going to do next. It was obvious now that we were stuck inside this enormous and complicated building with hundreds of these creatures, and that the outside world wasn't much more hospitable. The actual threat they posed was somewhat vague. It seemed as though the world was simply going to hell, and that this room was one of only a few safe havens left to us, but that we needed food and things soon.

As we spoke, I turned my attention to a giant ergonomic plastic and metal mechanical-looking ... thing which was up against the wall beside me. I cannot fathom what purpose it could possibly have served. It was all grey, black, and white (though not in the manner of old black and white films), with many disconnecting part, panels which folded aside, and other transformer-ish elements. As I explored it's many compartments, I came upon what I thought to be a picture camera, though it didn't much look like one. I suggested that I try to take a picture of the group, which entailed a great deal of effort to get the tranformers-ish camera into the proper shape. As everyone posed, I hit a button, and it made a sound like that of a camera going off, though there was no flash, and I assumed there was simply no film in it. I began to talk about going and getting film along with food whenever a party was to g out and forage for food, as per the current discussion. Then I noticed that Jay, a noted moron, had wandered away from the group and towards the tyrannosaurus cage, and was opening up some kind of closet in the wall which contained some sort of HazMat suit. I became worried he would do something to antagonise the dinosaur in it trying - and possibly succeeding - to break loose. I warned him away from this, and for some reason, he agreed. I remember having been afraid of him being obstinate and refusing to stay away from the cage simply because I had asked him to do so.

Two others and myself were chosen to go out and get supplies for the group, then, and we agreed to split up and meet at some exit many floors below us in a short while. I went off and found myself in an area of the building immediately outside of that room, which seemed to be open to the sky, though surrounded by walls. The sky was red, and there were dead trees planted in pots all around. As I looked around for a way to get downstairs, I came upon another opening into the room I had just been in, this one with bent metal bars like those which had kept the Tyrannosaurus in check, and I realised with some horror that they were all that held the monster in from the outside world. As I peered inside, the T-Rex spotted me and charged in my direction, bending the bars. I fled, but the dinosaur continued to bash it's self against the bars until they gave way, and, thanks to me, the creature was loose.

I ran and tried to hide behind a short brick wall, but I felt I was surely doomed, when I caught sight of another horrible monster, this one in no way related to anything that has ever actually lived, flying in the direction of the Tyrannosaurus. It was huge; nearly the same size as the T-Rex, with huge, fleshy wings and six leg-like appendages which each ended in a single talon-like spike. The creature was red and blue, and it's overall shape was not unlike that of a manta ray, with the appendages sticking out of it's ventral side. As I watched, it swooped down upon the T-Rex and latched onto it's back, shrieking as it did so. A brief struggle ensued, and I seemed sure that the T-Rex would be defeated, until somehow, impossibly, it tossed it's attacker off it's back and killed it. Oddly, I remember at this point wondering why the T-Rex's coloration had changed, though I can't remember what colour it had changed from or to.

I slipped off into a quiet corner and skulked there for a while, sulking over how it was my fault that this creature was loose, and how it would kill so many people due to my idiocy. This seemed to go on for a long while before I realised that I was supposed to have met my friends downstairs some time ago. I looked around for a stairwell, quickly finding one with a small, white-painted wooden door on it. I went through it and found the stairwell was of similar design; wooden planks all painted crudely in white. I descended many floors very quickly before coming to the ground floor.

Here, there is another point of discontinuity. I'm not certain if I've just forgotten the next part of my dream or if it didn't actually take place, but the next thing I remember had Randal and I taking to some vaguely Nick Fury-ish figure who was trying to convince us that we needed to play some part in stopping what was going on in that building, citing all the happy, content people living their lives in the unspoiled city around us as being the people who would be hurt if we didn't do anything. We agreed to go back and try to put things right, logic be damned.

Here there is another point of discontinuity. The next thing I remember, I'm a vampire, travelling in a car with a group of other vampires, and dawn is approaching. We pull up to this squat little house by the side of the road with a lawn covered in dead grass and an ugly screen door. It reminds me of some relic of the nineteen fifties. We head inside, and find the place inhabited by a rival group of vampires, who seem passively antagonistic towards us. The leader of our group swings a deal with the leader of theirs to let us sleep there during the day. While this was happening, a number of empty cans of coca-cola were being hidden surreptitiously throughout the house, kept from view of the house's inhabitants, who, it was understood, would destroy them if they found them. This would be a bad thing, because these cans were actually friends of ours, transformed into these innocuous forms. Knowing that they knew that we would have these sorts of things with us, and that they would try to locate and destroy them at their first opportunity, I lay several actual coca cola cans in several intentionally poorly chosen spots, in the hopes that the local vampires would find and destroy them, thinking that those were all that we had with us. Sure enough, very soon, one of the them, who looked very much like Mike Stapleford, a vampire player I know, found one of the fakes and tore it open with his fangs.

We then settled in to sleep. I found an armchair to recline in, and a woman who looked and sounded like a woman I know named Andrea, aside from the fact that her face looked like a skull with wispy hair with white yarn woven into it, sat down in my lap, whereupon we put our arms around each other and we slept.

When we woke up, we got up and looked around for our fellows, and I found one of them who reminded me of Karin, a friend of mine, who was flouncing about flirtatiously with the leader of the enemy vampires. This I remember irritating me, but this was about the last thing I remember before waking up.