September 21st, 2002 CE

I dreamed that I was standing at the bottom of a series of graduated cliffs which seemed perfectly squared-off and uniform in the manner of terrain from an old video game. These cliffs terminated in a body of placid water, and only had narrow walkways sepparating them, each of which was completely level and solid, without vegetation, and at right angles to everything. As my memories of this dream begin, I was jumping from level to level; I would stand at the base of a cliff and leap upwards, coming to rest on the walkway of the cliff above me, which I would then explore for routes to higher points on this cliff-face. Each leap seemed to take me another 100 meters or so upwards. I could just jump that high, and no higher.

I did this for a while, encountering people standing, stationary and video-game-character-like for a while, receiving cryptic comments and cluies, unsolicited, from them, before realizing this whole thing was stupid and that I was taking entirely the wrong attitude towards it. At that moment, I noticed a house at the top of the cliffs, and decided I was far more interested in going inside and abusing some of these clearly-artificial and patently unconvincing people than I was in jumping around like a video game character.

I leapt up onto the roof of this house, which was tall and steeply sloped, with red shingles and many windows and awnings sticking out of it. Upon landing on one of these awnings, I opened the window in front of me and stepped inside, therupon to see a japanese-looking woman doing her laundry. She looked to be in her mid-twenties, with long black hair tied into a ponytail and a white apron on over her blue pants and shirt. I advanced upon her and demanded sexual favors from her, knowing herand her entire world to be fictional and thus being unconcerned with her rights and certain she had no grounds upon which to object. As it turned out, I was correct, and she willingly obliged me. When her teenaged son entered the room, I stepped off and told him to go down on his mother, which he did, doing no more than envice a bit of discomfort.

This went on for a while, and soon the imagery began to lose credibility; I began to demand acts of them which are patently impossible but which they gladly and willingly took part in. There really are no words to describe how bizarre it got, so rather than try to descrribe it, I'll move on the point just after which I realized that this was all becoming a bit more distastefull than arousing. I went off and explored their house a bit, finding a room full of comic book boxes. I opened one at random, and began flipping through. One of them I recognised; Uncanny X-Men #242, which I got as a gift from my mother as a kid (and which I sawa reprinting of in a comic book store the day before in reality). Continuing to flip through, I saw a lot of other covers done in precisely the same style which I knew had never seen print. They all seemed to be a part of the same storyline as that first one, or further explorations of it, or alternate versions of it. It struck me as bizarre that someone would devote so many issues to exploring and re-exploring this one story, no matter how good it might be. I opened one up and flipped through it, and it seemed to be a re-telling of the story through the eyes (and sniper scope) of a police officer who wasn't even involved with the events of the story, but who was apparantly watching it from a distance. I put it back in the stack and continued to flip through. Another one showed six of the same charracter, the demon Nastir'h, on the cover. It was too wierd. I put it down and lost interest.

I went back down to the water at the base of the cliffs, and began to swim about in it. Somehow I had the idea that this was "my ocean"; it was a separate body of water from the rest of the world's oceans, which was suspended a few hundred meters above the rest of the world, and which had islands, structres and such upon it's surface. In due course, I came to a huge red suspension bridge which reached out from an island on my ocean to a body of land on the planet's surface. There was a procession of people walking accross the bridge onto the island in my ocean. It was thin and sparse; only one person every twenty meters or so, walking single-file, but the line went on as far as the eye could see.

I was joined by someone at that point who reminded me of talk show host Conan O'Brien, who wanted to talk to me for his show about my ocean. For all that there was no camera crew around, this was apparantly part of his show, and I agreed to give him his interview. We began to swim around as we spoke, and I was telling him about some of the features of my ocean when, abruptly, we came to the edge.

I was terribly taken aback, as my ocean was supposed to be far larger. Even worse, the water seemed to be spilling uniformily off the edge and into the water below, which looked to be the shore of the river which runs through Seattle (which, now that I think of it, must have meant we were directly above the far shore of that river, and thus above a large portion of Seattle). My ocean was clearly shrinking at a rapid rate, and all of it's water was joining the world below. We swam like mad for the nearest island, hoping it would stay in place irregardless of the motion of the water. As it turned out, the nearest island was a tiny stone pillar, perhaps five feet by five feet, perfectly squared-off at the top, video-game style, and extending down from the surface of the water to whatever solid mass existed at the bottom. There we huddled, watching the water recede, forlornly.

Suddenly, I found myself and the pillar I was on inside of a cavernous structure which seemed to go on forever, which was dimly lit by rows of blue lightsalong the ceiling. The ceiling itself was not very high up above me, and the walls were slanted at perhaps a 20 degree angle before joining the roof up above, but I could see no end to this tunnel-like structure in either direction. I did, however, see the set of a talk show in front of me, and there sat Conan O'Brien, who was chuckling at the demise of my ocean, as I sat there, wailing about how this pillar was all I had left.

And then I woke up.