A shadowy escape

 Dec 31 2021

Sophia writing.

Dreamed I was at some sort of suburban house living there temporarily.  There was a lot of stuff of mine lying around in a basement apartment, unfinished.

Lalein was with me, his dark cloak brushing the cement floor as he watched me put things away in plastic baskets.  We were having some sort of conversation between us, not the sort with words spoken out loud.  I was very on-edge, hearing footsteps upstairs.  Something about my landlord was wrong, something predatory that elicited a traumatic reaction from me.

At some point this landlord came downstairs, a huge pot-bellied man with strange chestnut-orange facial hair and a giant balding head framed by the same colour hair left around his nape.  He laughed and came towards me.  I dodged him, making jokes, placating him as he lumbered around the room watching my every move.  I went into a closet of sorts and my mind raced as I put toiletries in my baskets.  I felt Lalein's heavy gaze on me, like a reassuring seatbelt.

Then the man lumbered, bored, into the boiler room. That was when I leapt into action.

I went out of my closet to something in the corner of the room - a cement mixer that was placed there by whoever had been doing construction in this basement.  Faster than it could be real, I turned on the machine and began to cube the cement into bricks that formed almost magically under my fingers.  "Help me," I told Lalein, who wordlessly slammed the boiler room door shut.  There was a moment when the landlord panicked, fighting Lalein against the door, but we both leaned against it and Lalein rapidly began to brick up the door and slather wet cement in fistfuls.  As he busied himself slathering, I finished up packing my things - it was an awkward, adrenaline-fueled haze.  I had too many things, and kept discovering more.  Distinctly in the dream I thought, I need to get rid of my attachment to objects.  

Once the landlord was fully boarded up, his shouts and cries for help were so muffled they sounded like they came from the neighbour.  Lalein was shedding cement off his hands with cement tendrils.  I gathered the baskets in my arms, overflowing and awkard, and decided it didn't matter what else I left behind.  Lalein gathered me into one arm and as the landlady was coming down to check on me - a skinny woman with an 80s reddish perm, dressed in a bizarre subdued fuschia pencil skirt suit - we leapt.

My head would have crashed into the ceiling of wood and exposed wire if not for the fact a glob of black shadow swallowed us, passing us through to the floor above like a portal.  Once upstairs in that house proper - a stark white kitchen with white furniture - I panicked realizing my work laptop was still anchored into the desk.  Lalein patiently shielded me as I unplugged it from all of its surroundings, stuffing it into my backpack.  Then we fled outside into the sun.

There was a little more in this dream but this is the gist before we woke around 10AM - far past my 8:30AM alarm which failed to wake us.  

disturbing doll

Dec 22 2021

There was a prolonged nightmare for Colleen this morning when we fell back asleep.

I was a maid for a rich family that was mistreating me... The master of the house was an abusive tyrant even though the people around him were kind. He was a potbellied brunette with a bulbous nose and red face. I was invited by his daughter, a pretty slender brunette girl, to play (we were all teenagers). We sat in my small bedroom with her friends, two pretty women who crammed themselves on my single bed. Since it was Christmas, they insisted on helping me change clothes out of rags and into something more presentable. They were kind, laughing and joking and including me on things. 

Going downstairs to the main hall, it was decorated beautifully. A high ceiling stone Lodge with a magnificent Christmas tree behind railing.  I tidied and decorated dutifully, shifting a fireplace with what felt like the abilities of someone in a furniture decorating game. I hung stockings and moved a rocking chair and positioned a smaller Christmas tree to the side with cushions and presents. As I busied myself, the master suddenly appeared and seized me by the arm. He shouted so loudly in my face that I felt his breath hit me in waves, demanding why I thought I had any right parading around in his daughter's clothes. I looked to her in a panic to explain, but she avoided my gaze. The master slapped me across the face and told me I was fired, to gather my things and leave immediately. Some of his guests gasped in horror watching him strike me, shrinking away. They parted for me to stumble back to the stairs. 

I wandered upstairs and in a daze began to gather my things. The women were still there laughing. I began to pack and they barely noticed me. As I rifled through my things I found a cardboard box which housed two of our ball jointed dolls inside... The blank Valor and one that was featureless.

The featureless doll morphed into Girly, or at least, a doll version of her. We switched. 

Girly seized her own doll by the throat and began to strangle it. She hissed, "If you're me, then I hate you, because I hate me."

She began to squeeze the doll which struggled and failed mutedly. Sophia immediately tried to seize front and they wrestled. Meanwhile the doll began to bleed. When the doll stopped struggling, Girly collapsed too. Sophia then took front and the doll transformed to the Lalein doll we own. She looked at the two women on the bed who didn't notice any of this, asked them to help her pack the dolls. They did, and she began to pack a rolling suitcase of everything else. We don't remember taking the things with us as we left. 

There was a segment of a dream where we wandered the downstairs of the lodge which had game rooms for pool and televisions. We wandered into the daughter again and she cheerfully called out, then froze seeing the blood splattered on our chest. 

We journeyed in a haze further downstairs into a garden with a waterfall that served as the entrance of the lodge. As we were crossing a wooden bridge, walking againt the traffic of guests moving into the house, the master suddenly appeared in our minds and we turned around. He was on the bridge laughing and charming his guests. Something came over us and we strode up to him and pushed him off the bridge. He shouted as he fell into the moat below, not enough to die but enough to have people panic to help him as we stood and watched.

There was a bit more to the dream but we woke up late and the rest is swept away. 

The systems dinner!

July 19 2021

Dreamed several people on the server came to have dinner!

First up we picked up Cash, Sarah, and a girl named Natasha from my old job. For some reason I thought Natasha would make excellent friends with them (even though I'm not particularly close with her). When I brought them home to my house - which looked like a hybrid between my condo and like a school portable, with a wooden porch and steel exterior - they busied themselves in my kitchen, cooking and talking and laughing. Opal and Andromeda were already in my condo chatting, not entirely sure who was fronting for either (may have been Ellie and Seijah?) 

Then Beans came over on a bike - me and Andromeda went outside trying to help them lock their bike up, but it must've been Honey who switched in because she LEAPT off the bike. She was running around wildly excited and barking, in their body but with like a clear blurry wagging tail and ears. As I wrestled with the bike lock, Honey got lots of pets from Andromeda who was just as excited lmao

We didn't end up locking the bike up, there was something weird with the mechanism and it wouldn't click together. The code was 65-43-25, I remember distinctly. 

Then when the dinner was about to begin, my mom came over with a tonne of her friends, my old highschool friends, some random people... Which for some reason included Lady Gaga. I distinctly heard Adrian and Carli's voices with hers as they went to my living room and started to karaoke Shallow?? I heard Adrian briefly, then I heard Carli talking excitedly about this being a live exclusive lady Gaga show. Meanwhile my mom was singing along in an accent. 

There were too many guests at the table, we were crammed to the edges of the room and the table was FULL of food. I was trying not to knock the guests with my ass and tiddies, to no avail LMAO. At some point I made my way back to the kitchen and I heard Simon say, "Hey, you wanna go with me?" for some errands or something... After which at that exact moment, my alarm went off!

Ps. the whole dream I was puzzling over the damn bike lock, never got it to work and lock up beans's bike

fugitives

August 2021

China first - Went to Korea became a fugitive for something. 

Met friend with lots of pets like Cash but more... Rats, Guinea, rabbits, all little animals. We went on heist with guns in bank mafia standoff and decided against escaping through the window. 

Three companions with me, a blonde woman, a white man looking ex military, a buff Korean man. Gun fight we survived when breaking out with all the money. Me and blonde ran to a mall to try escaping but bricks broke under her feet and we slid through a tube to an underground place. 

Found one root of the World Tree wriggling and screaming that broke when we fell. Chills, deep primal fear. 

Kepr climbing dilapidated stairs til we got to the top again, went to mall. Laoye was waiting for me there all smiley. Took him shoe shopping briefly then met up with my mom who was going to spirit me out of Korea to China again. She strapped me and Alston into her car on a stormy night and drove, minding the lane directions. 

As we drove past erosion barriers and curves of a cliff, storm worsened. Blue and violet lightning descended in the cliff, landing in a valley right next to us. My mom remarked on its beauty before it bounced up like a dragon and into the road. We swerved with a bunch of cars and got hit. 

I felt the sizzle of electricity all down my right side, rang in my head. 

Mom shrieked and laughed and said we need to call 911 but rhe numbers came out jumbled from her mouth. 999, 111, 110, 911, 199, she kept saying more but she couldn't remember Korea's. I asked Alston to google but he was sluggish. 

Mom kept driving recklessly fast around the mountain highway and I tried to dial my phone. 

Then I heard another phone ring. In despair I thought I dialed wrong. It was my alarm. I woke up. 

Yeye

Dream POV - Sophia 

Had this dream about a week ago on July 17, 2021, shortly following the blowup between myself and my biological father. I dreamed about my Yeye. All week I'd been fretting about what this new estrangement between me and bio dad will mean for my relationship with Yeye.

First, the dream started off in some twisted rendition of 72 Barrington, where I grew up with my father's family.  Some sort of conflict had brewed between me, my dad, aunt Jenny.  Everyone was there, from stepmom to stepbrother to Alston, all the aunts and uncles of my dad's side of the family, and even Chen Po, who I haven't seen in decades now.

Our fight felt like a tribunal for me. I ended up weeping hysterically and at some point, I even fainted, but my eyes were open the whole time as I fell to the floor between the hair, dust, and dirt.  I watched my father's family walk away one by one, out the front door - they were going out to dinner, and they left me.

When I came to, I wandered the house in a daze.  I went to the front door, but found the wall to my left to be made out of thin newspaper. I poked through it, and found Yeye in his room.

Yeye looks like what he looks like lately - snowy hair, older.  He's his 100-year-old-self, where in most of my dreams, he's still 80-something. 

He had no idea what was going on.  He didn't hear the commotion and he'd been napping in his bed, which looked kind of like a hospital bed in the middle of the room.  He wasn't in bad shape, though - he hopped right out of bed, looked at me with a worried face, and in Mandarin, he asked, "发生什么事，丫丫？"

And I burst into tears.

I ran into his arms and slung my arms around him. I said I was sorry for not connecting with him more.  I cried so hard that I actually started to weep hysterically in real life.  Simon actually burst into the bedroom to shake me out of my dream because I was sobbing so loudly he could hear me from the kitchen.

This same week I set up a phone call with Alston to talk to Yeye. I want to right some wrongs and to make a relationship with him at least before the end of his time.

The Singer

Nightmare, colour, epic, sensation, 25



First part of the dream, I was a young girl known as a Singer.  The second part of the dream I wrote on discord to Milly & co, and I will put it on a separate post

Much like the story Simon and I were trying to write, the Singers were, from my knowledge in the dream, a race of fairy that could affect all sorts of things in reality with their voices.  In this dream I was probably somewhere from twelve to fourteen years of age, a silvery-blue haired girl who had sung in quiet to change my appearance slightly with the magic I was given.  I was warned by my mother that I had incredible powers and had to keep them ethically shut.

I was wandering around on Clifton Hill near Niagara falls.  I had been separated from my family.

(Update July 2021 - this was left in my drafts unfinished, unfortunately.  Publishing what we have.)

The Mole Rat

Sophia had a nightmare last night that had horrible details. This is now Soph writing. 

Simon and I moved to a suburb where there was a garage sale regularly in one of the alleys before the main street, and a stretch of undeveloped dirt fenced off nearby.

Later, we joined the neighbourhood for what they called their gourmet mystery dinner. We were excited. We ate what they served us on the plates, one particular "dish" being the tiniest morsel of meat.

The organizers then revealed what it was. A shivering naked mole rat, flayed alive and barely still standing, was shivering on a plate on its paws which were nothing left but bone.

In the dream I felt meltdown hysteria. A scream bubbled up my throat. I started to say, "Oh. Oh God. Oh fuck. No, no, no, NO, NO, NO!"

And the screaming went on forever. I screamed Simon's name and sobbed and vomited all over the table. He took me outside frantically but I couldn't stop vomiting.

Woke up just now. All the rest of the dreams details are gone. Just my own screaming and the feeling of the world spinning. 

dreaming of escape

Mall in Canada. 

Meeting Cašmir, who I excitedly hugged and dream started to roulette switch. We were having a mall date together and I was her host for the trip so I was enthused. 

The racist vendor with the middle of the mall stall selling hats and scarves etc who wouldn't serve her. Cašmir remarking, "Yeah, that woman wouldn't even look me in the eyes even as I called for her." I felt shock and anger even as Cash shrugged. 

Objects like a sun hat and a poncho turning into violins on the shelf as we examined them and put them away. I took Cash by the hand but we switched, me to Leen, her to Ava. There was a long soft look shared as Leen palmed Ava's cheek sympathetically, and Ava muttered something about prejudice happening every so often. Heart squeezed. 

We made a loop around the mall, separated by crowd somehow. I tried to call her but our phones had low reception. Anxiously wandered into a store. Switched to Cerise because POV froze in the store corner fretting, and I heard her whimper, "Mami..." remembering the rule of being a kid needing to stay put if lost so parents can come find her. 

The store had a mosaic in blues and teals and grays, like old ICON colours, in a box backlit with light. Suddenly some of the squares shattered spontaneously and we got a tutorial from a guy fixing it about how each mosaic tile is actually tubes stacked together like piles of firewood bundled by their metal square frames, not melted panes. POV flew to back of mosaic where these tense fibre-optic-looking sticks were shifting out of shape from heat and pressure, then popping out and causing shatter. 

Went on a roller coaster ride inside this store for some reason, some sort of factory inside manufacturing swirling pools of colourful melted stuff? It may have been the mosaic materials, I realized. Might have been plastic and not glass, hence the stacking for crackle effect. Mind rationalized as the roller coaster (not an extreme one, just a track that took us through) dropped me back down to the store where the mosaic had been cleaned up and disappeared. 

Still couldn't find Cash. Anxiety spiking, called her. She was equally anxious not knowing where she was so I told her to stay put and went diligently looking for her. 

Exited to a suburban home somehow. Asian man and his little girl outside playing in the grassy back yard. I walked through the house which was decadent with marble floors. Somehow ended outside. I was looking for the duo but kept missing them. Disappointed I went back into the house and then headed back to the mall side. 

I was looking for Cašmir while ignoring a sense of dread about losing her in the crowd. Got a text message from Eden that they got their bearings, asking if we could meet at x store nearby. Feeling relieved. 

I arrived at with Rob and Sol from Grace and Frankie. They morphed into two men I don't know from real life, but one was my husband (not Simon, just a role) and the other was his friend. I was having some sort of argument with my husband and feeling depressed. The store we were in was under construction, like a dentists waiting room where it was bare bones. Broken chairs and tables on concrete in a small narrow space. I dragged the chairs and tables trying to make something comfortable for us to sit on as I waited for Cash. As I turned around I caught the two men kissing.

I blankly remarked to my husband, likely referring to the Fight we had, "Are we even now?"

They looked at each other guiltily and told me no. Today they were going to tell me he's leaving me for his friend. I feel a hollow devastation.

Cašmir arrives to me weeping and the men standing guiltily. She asks what's wrong, confused and alarmed.

I told her, "I'll come with you."

I think briefly of my family and connections here and realize it doesn't matter. All I wanted to do was fly and live with Cash in Virginia. She froze. I could hear her thoughts briefly about her siblings and mother and her sharp worry that she couldn't take care of me because she had to take care of everyone else. I start off touching her arm saying, "don't worry, you know I'm capable of taking care of myself and of others."

But there's a pause as we switch again. Not sure who. Just felt like me but very, very depressed. I uttered, "No. I don't want to be there," but at her confused look I struggled to articulate, "I don't want to be here. I don't want to be anywhere. I want to disappear. I want to die."

Cash flinched and hugged me.

The dream ended. 

the world elevator

Sometime in November 2020

World elevator

Floors jumbled on keypad. We lived on 8 and there was a clause specifically to protect sectors 1-10. I remember up to floor 22 in the dream on the keypad. 

Svengali the leo sign too powerful but in love with a maiden who knew his true shape. Layleen played the roles. He wanted to travel with her and break her free of this contained world. 

One part of dream had giants awakening from their slumber in the earth to walk. One woman's step could eradicate portions of cities. Barefoot pretty woman looks like Naga from fire emblem. Crushed cities beneath her feet and stared at starry space above. I think this was some sort of prequel to why the world became contained in an elevator connected tower. Had to get away from the giants. 

Floor 1 was a shipping dock, far as eye could see it was ocean and dirty garbage dump and food harvests. As we went down here the rail car didn't even stop, just reversed. People below shouted and threw rotted food at us, lettuce and bags of garbage etc. 

Floor 7 was crowded shopping mall. Roller coaster elevator ride made me dizzy. Went to bathroom and Lalein wove to the other side and became a young Philippino boy. We pretended to pass him off as a girl as he joined me in the girls bathroom shrinking all the while. We had to leave this mall space after and the glass doors opened too half and bottom half. Very illogical. People ducked to get out and also the doors for exit swung inwards, entrance swung outwards, etc. 

Floor 6 exclusive for robots. Dark dingy cement storage units. I found garbage dumps here too but in proper dumpsters. Found my grandpa here hoarding stuff like old chipped vases etc. 

Floor 8 was a chill market sector with trees and lights. Home. String lights in trees. Futurama black guy calculating medical repair costs for every medical problem and prices were exorbitant. 

We were trying to get to floor 10. The "freedom floor". Opened it to a dark office space with lots of people peering down from the floors of the open inner space around. Could see actual roads and traffic and rain outside. Didn't leave however, woke up 

Back to highschool

Jan 2 2021

Wandering through what was supposed to be Bethune or AY Jackson but it felt mixed with Trudeau. Steven Universe was there with the gems and Connie narrating. They danced through the Halls and accidentally dented lockers which then pearl put handwritten sticky notes near each dent saying Oops!

My mom drove me to school and at some point we couldn't figure out which entrance to go into. I laughed about remembering my first day of grade 12 being similarly eventful but felt whiplash because that was nine years ago. When I went in it became a vets office. I went into a waiting room that had lots of cats and found Mochi but he was a pale cream colour instead of his usual browns. There was also a pink pot belly piglet and I carried it around a bit because it was so cute. When I set it down Sushi came up to it to cuddle. Soon my family showed up but there was a flurry of action as I tried to translate and sort through a lot of problems. Then they left and I went searching for my first class with Steven. 

I kept getting glimpses of gothic Lolita crystal gems and eventually Steven and I settled into a class called The Dark Ravens filled with goth teens lol. At some point I started scrolling my phone for apps and found some micro visual novel stories to download. In one, drawn in an interesting art style, was a long blueish silver haired tan man looking forlornly to the left. He wore a police uniform and the description of the app had words that I'm now forgetting but here's the gist:

This is the most heartbreaking one in the series

For most prosecutors, catching criminals is honorable life work, but after 3627 years, Vitrina found himself slowly and slowly clinging to what little he had left as a hothagàs

Rapidly waning 

Around here I suddenly was in Stephanie's car and she stopped me to correct me on the pronunciation of waning. She said it like wah while I said way... We kept trying to google the correct pronunciation til I woke up just now to google it and I was right!!! Lmao!!