First off, I need to remark on what I remember from my dream. It was one of those continuous ones, where there was sort of a main theme running through it, giving it something of an actual overall story thread, despite a lot of random elements. The basic gist of it was that I was helping people move into a house that had “bad things” happen before hand, and was reportedly haunted. You can all see where this is going, right? There was some sort of evil thing brewing just under the surface, but it was hard to tell if it was the previous occupant (a man who severely beat and killed his wife, then his child), or if the previous occupant had been corrupted by an evil that was already in place.

Whatever the case, the “presence” there, which seemed to be the ghost of the guy, was looking to build a reality within the house that matched what the 5-year kid saw; everything was large, looming, and unfriendly. At one point when the ghost briefly materialized, it was like 25 feet tall, looking down, and nothing but a dark silhouette. I realized things were getting bad when a simple small toy was developing a taser attachment that it could send around corners and under doors.

I wound up in another room where I had to destroy another haunted toy, but that really just destroyed the form housing the evil, and as it started form into a flat black shape of tentacles and horns, I decided that “I really didn’t feel like dealing with it right now,” so I left the room and closed the door behind me, knowing that for all of its otherwordly and unholy powers, the evil within still hadn’t figured out how to work a doorknob. I went the house across the street, used the Hookshot from the “Zelda: Ocarina of Time” game (gee, I wonder how that got in there?) to get up to the roof, and convinced the people below who were beginning to get corrupted to start singing Christmas carols, because it was Christmas time, after all. The family inside came out and started singing too, and it was a full Rockwell household of boy, girl, mom, dad, grandpa, grandma. It easily broke the evil, and we all went inside to discuss the evil across the street (people were still over there at this time, but we had no idea what was happening in the house).

As we chatted, an old manager from my past, KTW, stepped in, and he was filling the role of weasely little jerk in these types of tales, which makes sense, as he was a weasely little jerk when I knew him. He made the accusation that only I knew what happened in the bathroom when some other person had died, and then he ran off. I realized that everyone was looking at me, now, and that my character in the dream did actually know what had happened, but since I also realized it was a dream, I actually had no idea what had happened.

Then I got to thinking about what a jerk KTW was to break up the momentum that had been gathered, and I woke up.

Yeah, he’s still a jerk.

[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]

Yesterday was our last football game for the season. The other team only had 1 player show up, so we won by forfeit. Wanting to still play, however, it was (eventually) decided that we’d play the team that had played just before us. They were very good, and we wound up losing again. And failed to score a touchdown again, too. Ah well. Since it was just a scrimmage, nobody cared too much.

And as always, I judge the “success” of a game by how I felt that I played. I managed to snag a couple of interceptions this time around, and also got a few passes as a receiver, so I was fairly pleased with that. As always our biggest downfalls (besides the lack of people showing up — this time we had about 5 ringers show up, giving us a chance to play with subs for the first time since the first game of the season) were the lack of cohesion on defense — questions if we were in man or zone, and if in man, who was covering who — and the inability to make deep throws. Just never got the sense of chemistry for that stuff.

I did have one spooky moment. While going out for a pass, my feet got tangled up with another player and I tripped. What was worrisome was that it yanked my bad ankle pretty strongly, and it definitely hurt. I had my ankle brace on, though, and I think that definitely prevented it from getting worse. After about 5 minutes, the pain subsided, and now, over 24 hours later, it still feels fine.

And since I have basketball tomorrow night, that’s a good thing.

[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]

My birthday is coming up, and I’m trying to figure out what to do about it. I keep waiting for some awesome birthday party, and I am constantly disappointed. I’d like to do something nifty, at the very least, but I’m just drawing a blank on what might work. I can always try to invite some people out, but since my birthday is on a Monday night, it’d be better to hold it on a weekend. But you know, even then, it’s rare that I have a lot of people show up. usually maybe 3-4 people can stop by. So, I’ll have to kick some ideas around.

Just some quick notes on some recent dreams:

1) Playing basketball in some non-gym area; looked more like a set-up in a warehouse, poorly lit. Captain Picard was on my team for some reason – I think I was helping him out. I played a bit better than I normally do, but still missed more shots than I care to admit. The game was put on hold when there was an invasion of enemy alein troop robots, and we switched to a Mass Effect 2 approach, by popping in and out of cover to take our shots, I was using my trusty sniper rifle (a futuristic high-powered one, of course), and took out the four robots with 1 shot to their pre-designated weak points (a red optic on head section), and also took out the “boss” of the group which was a single-rider sized blimp; again, futuristically styled. I managed to get it right in the weak spot of the balloon part, so it deflated. And I was quite pleased that at least here, unlike basketball, I made all of my shots. Hmm… sensing a trend?

2) Last night/morning, I woke up around 7ish, and having another 20 minutes or so before needing to get up, went back to sleep. I then had a dream that, honest to God, I did not realize was a dream. Yeah, one of those. In this case, I found myself suddenly “waking up” at work, in front of my computer, as if I had been snapping out of a trance or daydream or something. Everything seemed normal, and it really felt like I had gotten up, went into work, and was there for a few hours, but then had completely blacked out that time. Sort of like the “lost time” thing that X-Files was always talking about. The rest of the people around me were acting completely normal, and acted surprised when I asked if I had been at work long. In this case, when I woke up, for real, I felt very, very disoriented, and actually called in sick to work. I think that the mix of low sleep, low blood-sugar, and scattered thoughts from the past week all converged and pretty much knocked my mind out for a bit. True, I was fine later that afternoon, but I decided to spent the rest of the day just resting.

A few nights ago, I had one of those dreams where you didn’t study for the test, but this was a little different.

Two “famous” teachers from my North Olmsted K-12 days (they were those rare breeds who were very tough, but all the same, were universally loved by the students), Mr. Forgosh and Ms. Cornell, were teaching the class that I was in, and asked me to be the first of class to give an off-the-cuff oral report on plants, which was going to count for 95% of our final grades. In this case, I actually knew all the info, but couldn’t decide the best way to start. Also, when giving this report, I was supposed to sit in “the chair,” which was an old electric chair (unplugged, mind you.) I remember being told to get on with it.

“Okay, okay, I’m in the chair…,” I said as I sat down. But then I leaned back a bit too far (maybe expecting it to be attached to the floor), and fell over backwards in it. At which point I said, “…which needs work.”

Laughter followed, even though I thought my comment wasn’t that funny….

Then I had one of those odd moments when, even though you are still in the dream, you are also aware of other things happening around you: I heard my father ask, “Where’s your uncle?” to my nephew, who replied that O was still in bed.

“Go tell your Uncle Matt to get his butt out of bed.”

So I wasn’t surprised by the sudden attack by my 7-year old nephew as he crashed on to my bed. Ah, holidays at the homestead….

This has got to be the earliest I’ve been up since the summer. You know, back in the old days when I still had a steady job (not counting the recent contract work). I admit I was concerned about my ability to get up in the morning these days, but I think that as usual, I just needed some actual motivation, and in this case, it was that I will be leaving for Wisconsin tomorrow; the day before a trip is usually pretty busy, so I might as well get up early to tackle most of it.

I had another dream last night, although this one wasn’t nearly as weird as the last one — just sort of a generic “weird.” You know, the usual things, like living with a random assortment of friends and heavy snow outside and the like. What was memorable about this one is that the Dragon Boat Girl was in it, and she and I actually started talking again; she was deeply amused by my inability to pronounce certain words, and so that melted any ice between us.

To be honest, I miss DBG; she’s been with her current boyfriend for over two years now, and by all accounts is likely going to marry him at some point — this is cool, as she deserves some happiness after the tough times she had earlier in her life. But I always regretted that I’ve never been able to really maintain communication with her — she’s mainly busy with her school and work, naturally, but there have been things that have taken place which have led me to believe that she has some type of residual anger towards me. Or something. And okay, yeah, a lot of this is based on what I perceived as some “snubbing” on Facebook, but still!

Whatever the case, I would like to still count DBG among my friends, but I just don’t get the sense that the feeling is mutual, so obviously the dream was a hope for a mended relationship.

Ah well. At least the dream was a nice one in that sense, even if it wasn’t as entertaining as hiding from a black dragon in a department store. Hard to top that.

I had a dream last night which, as per usual, I didn’t entirely remember upon waking up, but was odd enough that I decided to take a few seconds to jot down the things that stood out:

So, I was messing around in this attic for some reason, and was checking to see if there was a portal to another dimension behind a tarp (because, you know, I was pretty sure that’s where I saw it last). This was sort of like a combination of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” and “House of Leaves.” Anyway, sure enough, it was still there, but that turned out to be problematic as a black dragon from D&D came through. Me and some others wound up hiding in a store that was sort of like a Kmart or Target general department store, and the Dragon was looking around for us, naturally bringing in his human serfs. Half of them were dressed in all white suits with white make-up, and the other half had light grey suits with (you guessed it) light grey make-up. I remember thinking in the dream that they reminded of North Koreans paying tribute to Mickey Mouse — I have no clue why I thought that at the time.

Anyhoo, we managed to give the slip to the dragon out in the parking lot, and we drove off. I’m pretty sure there was more about the dragon getting tricked back through the portal and something about a weird traffic jam with trains, but obviously that wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember.