Dream - The descent: Witches, flying reptiles and the tall tree-like man

Starting around February 12, 2008, and very bad for a week, less bad thereafter, I was very, very sick, with a bowel obstruction, kidney stones, and a bad case of the flu. I didn't get much sleep for a week, because the pain in my side was too much when I lay down. I didn't spend much time laying down, though I did catch a few minutes of sleep that way. Sometimes I caught a few minutes of sleep sitting down and sometimes even over an hour, sometimes even a few hours. Some days, though, the total sleep was measured in minutes rather than hours. I spent long periods of time standing, sometimes assuming different positions, sometimes even bent over double, trying to relieve the pain in my side somehow.

The day before this started I had worked for about five hours on my sister's yard, starting late in the afternoon, stopping long after dark when I was too cold and sick to continue. I wasn't even wearing a coat.

For a few days before this started I had been feeling bad, and had noticed that my lips were sometimes very pale.

I had a few dreams during the time I was sick, some of them with very disturbing elements. One of the most disturbing ones happened around February 20, 2008.

In the dream, I seemed to be at a house we had lived in in the early to mid 1960s, though sometimes it seemed to be my grandmother's house instead, the one she lived in a little later on after she moved to Arizona. The houses were on the same street, but not close to each other. A lot happened earlier in the dream that I don't remember.

At some point I went out back and toward the side yard to the east. It was dark. A large number of people were there, even out in the alley and other yards. I also felt they were all over the place, even down at the end of the street. I wanted to fly, and went toward the side yard. The people, who it seems had already been witches of some kind, started to become witches in appearance, and some of them turned into flying reptiles, with some of the people riding the flying reptiles.

I was someone with magic powers, like the others, and part of the group of people. I started to change into something else and flew for a while, though I'm not sure if I changed into a flying reptile or into a more traditional witch appearance and rode a reptile (or rode something else). I flew around for a while, east toward the end of the street and back.

The dream turned darker, and it seems the witches were now out to get me, and were apparently also vampires of some type. They were also changing into various monsters, often or usually some variation on the flying reptiles theme, with huge claws even on their elbows and other places. They wanted to get me with the claws, to cut and stab me.

The houses were gone now, the scene changing to uneven ground with different places at different levels, kind of an outdoor scene except it seemed to take place inside an enormous cave. At some point I seemed to have returned to my normal appearance. I kept trying to avoid the creatures, who seemed to be in almost a continual process of slow change. They seemed only marginally aware of me, occasionally turning toward me with an evil look, especially if I got too close.

There was a tall tree-like man with fingers like long branches or roots and legs turning into trunks and roots. At first he was on an area of higher ground in the cave, a place to the side where it narrowed somewhat and then went on. The winged creatures seemed not to be concerned about him and did not pay a lot of attention to him, though there were frequently a few in his area. I went toward him, but as I got closer he raised his arms and started to try to move his legs, to try to come toward me, and I backed away.

Sometime later I noticed that he had managed to move thirty or forty feet, and was now on a lower area but still a ways out from the middle of the cave. I kept feeling that he wasn't really my enemy. I went toward him again and got pretty close, but then he raised his arms with the long root-like fingers that could stretch all the way to the ground and tried to get me again.

A winged creature was passing by behind the tree man, stopping every few feet, seemingly unaware of what was happening or that we were even there. It was bent over in almost a crouch, with extremely long arms and legs and torso. It was slim but muscular, and had big shoulders. Its head was raised up and pointing forward, and was large and bald and somewhat thin, with a greatly exaggerated nose and chin. Its eyes were large and had somewhat wavy slits for pupils, pupils that were a pale yellow in color. The eyes themselves were an odd color, slightly dark and almost clear, and tilted a little with a curved under part and an almost straight top part. The mouth was pulled up in a huge grin. The skin of the creature was a kind of pale greenish-brown, and even bent over like it was it was still about the height of a man. As it paused behind the tree man, its left elbow went through his back and out his chest, splitting it open, the elbow with its huge thick gray claw sticking out the front. There seemed to be no blood, just a big split in the chest.

The tree man stared at me in pain and sorrow, and seemed to somehow be blaming me for what happened. He was not stopped by the injury, and still reached out for me, partially changing into something else, one of the clawed creatures. I pulled back and away. The original winged creature moved on, pulling its elbow out of the tree man's chest, never once looking at us.

There were other creatures everywhere but they seemed to not be paying attention to me, just milling around. Raised areas in the ground went around the middle section of the cave in a kind of square path, or paths. Sometimes the creatures followed the paths and sometimes they didn't.

I could also see a path that led up and down along the far wall, with a creature slowly coming down it. Others had gone up and down it earlier. I felt the creature had come back from someplace higher up, out of the cave or at least a different section of it. I wondered if it had gotten orders of some kind, and was on a mission. I made my way toward it, coming from the side. As with the others, though, it seemed to have no real purpose or awareness unless I got too close, and then its head turned toward me and its eyes got slightly bigger, and long clawed fingers reached out, and when I pulled back the awareness faded, I could see it fade from its eyes, and it turned back to what it had been doing, walking slowly along the path.

In retrospect, the situation in the dream seems to have turned into some kind of a representation of Hell.

Dream - The vault

On Thursday, October 30, 2008, I fell asleep around 12:30 PM for about ten minutes, and dreamed I was in a large dimly lit vault. In the dream I felt it was something like a bank vault, but in retrospect it seems more like a mausoleum. Along the left wall were large polished black granite panels, perhaps 16 inches high and 30 inches wide. They were in rows along the wall, which was the same color, and extended perhaps an inch from the wall. They had a little space, perhaps an inch or two, between them. I was probably six or seven feet from the back wall, facing the left wall and examining the panels, brushing them a little with the fingers of my left hand, barely touching them.

Behind me, shadowy people in dark suits occasionally came and went, one or two at a time, presumably on business of some kind. Sometimes they were not much more than just faint blurred figures, with occasional flashes of a white shirt and the suggestion of a face, looking like pictures taken with a camera that was unable to properly freeze the motion, with the ends of the arms and legs almost fading out. Sometimes they barely felt physical at all.

They never tried to talk to me or interact with me, always going past me toward the back, sometimes then turning toward the right and going somewhere away from me and out of my awareness. I felt that money was stored somewhere behind me and perhaps a little along the back wall, presumably in something like safe-deposit boxes and maybe safes, though I didn't see anything and didn't try to look for it. I was mostly concerned with the panels.

Feeling the panels with my fingers, I had found that some of them were a little rough or uneven, some much more so than others. Some of it seemed to be in the rock itself but some of it, particularly on some panels, was mostly accumulated grime, like it had been a long time since maintenance on them had been performed. I curled the fingers of my left hand and started rapidly scratching at the surface of the panels, starting at an upper one, sending tiny thin pieces of the surface off, so tiny or thin they were hard to see properly, like ashes or the memory of ashes, like the ghosts of ashes and the ghosts of powdery dust.

As the surface of a panel got smoother I moved to a lower one, and then a lower one. The third one down from where I started, the second one up from the floor, was a lot rougher, feeling like slightly smoothed-over dried soap scum. This one was going to take a lot longer.

I continued to work while the shadowy presences came and went behind me. It looked like it would take a long time to do all the panels. I wondered what would happen if everyone left and went home for the day and I got locked in. I thought that surely they would have some janitorial service that would come during the night and clean the vault, at least sometimes, so I would get out eventually, and might not have to spend a whole night or weekend there.

Scratching near a lower corner of the panel, trying to smooth out the final irregularities in that area, I noticed that I was making a shallow depressed area diagonally across the stone. I decided to leave that area as it was rather than try any more there, as it seemed like the irregularities at that point were caused by the inclusions in the rock being of different hardness from the surrounding matrix, and it didn't look like I would be able to smooth it there any further with just my fingernails. Someone would have to use real equipment to get that area any smoother, if they cared enough to go that far.

I considered whether to work on another area of that panel, which was still mostly unsmoothed, or to move to a different panel, perhaps one to the right. I was starting to wonder, also, if this project, a task I had undertaken on my own, without any prompting from anyone, was something I should continue to do. Nobody appeared to notice the condition of the panels, and they would probably not notice even if they were smooth and clean. There was also the question of whether they would mind me doing what I was doing, as I had no authority to be doing anything. It was just something that I found, something that I felt needed correcting.

Snakes! - the poem

I first wrote this poem as a post to a thread about humorous invented words and definitions, as a reply to someone who had written a much shorter poem about snakes. Her poem was a general response to posts about snakes, and had a line that could be taken as referencing an earlier post of mine involving Medusa, the mythical figure who had snakes on her head instead of hair. The general point of her poem, given in a humorous way, was that she did not like snakes, though she did not say the word anywhere, always saying "them" instead. At the time the thread was sometimes being used by people to post humorous take-offs on the "Snakes on a Plane" movie, so quite a few posts had snakes in them, though some had versions not involving snakes.

I later changed my poem slightly, in a version not part of that thread, making it have less of a specific response, making it a more general poem about someone not liking snakes. It fits in rather well in my family this way, as my father was chased by a snake long ago and my mother, when she was young, sometimes had the experience of a particular worker on the family farm showing her snakes he had killed while mowing the yard.

In the poem below, the line "Many other places where" originally said "Places have been listed where" in the version in the humor thread, and the line "Places I have not yet given" originally said "But other places were not given".

This final version of the poem is dated 12:11 PM, December 10, 2007. The version in the humor thread was dated 8:55 AM, May 24, 2007, and the Medusa post was dated 7:40 AM, May 23, 2007. All times are Arizona Mountain Standard Time (MST).


The Medusa post:

Snakes on a Brain

What happened when Medusa's "hair" became ingrown.


The final version of the poem:

SNAKES!

Should a snake always be inside its lair,
And not catch a person unaware?

Are there other places they can be,
Where you cannot, will not, see?

Many other places where,
You would not like to find them there?

Places I have not yet given,
Places where they could be livin'?

If one crawled swiftly up the lane,
Would it drive you quite insane?

If they came from out your pockets,
Would your eyes bulge from their sockets?

If one fell from trees into your hair,
Would it give you such a scare?

Would one in the sunshade in your car,
Really give you such a jar?

Would one found upon a pillow,
Make you let out quite a bellow?

So many places snakes might lurk,
Would they all drive you berserk?

Is there a place that I could say,
That would not make you run away?

Or would a snake found anywhere,
Be one more snake than you could bear?

Where's my shoe?

This probably happened back in the mid to late 1980s, when I would have been in my early to mid thirties.

I was putting on my shoes in my bedroom and I couldn't find one. I looked under the bed and in the closet and everywhere else in the room, and then looked everywhere again, and then a third and probably a fourth time. I couldn't figure it out. It had to be somewhere but it didn't seem to be anywhere at all.

I finally gave up on it being in my bedroom, at least for the moment, and started walking down to the living room, thinking that maybe my mother had taken the shoes to polish them, something she had on rare occasions done. It seemed only a faint possibility, but I just couldn't find it and I was running out of places to look.

I was walking down the hallway when I realized that I had both shoes on instead of one. I had been wearing the missing shoe the whole time.

Dream - Young self one and two, dreams of different lives

In January of 2008, I had what were really two dreams, one after the other, perhaps one leading into the other, which showed younger versions of myself, when I was a kid, but different from what I was like back then. They were other lives lived in which things had turned out differently, including a different version of my grandmother's death.


The first dream took place in a very large house. My mother was there, and at some point she encouraged me to go out to a patio or porch on the side and back of the house. Lots of little tables were there with food and things. Two little kids had been left with us who were kids or grandkids of my brother or one of my sisters. My mother and I had to watch them. They ran around among the tables, playing and being a nuisance.

The boy later wanted some orange juice, and I went back inside the house, toward the front of a long room filled with rows of tables to get it. I was pointed by someone toward an odd device made of ornate tubes that looked something like a harp frame. It contained orange juice and poured different kinds - high-pulp, no-pulp, normal, spicy - depending on which opening it was poured from. I was surprised at the elaborateness of it, but I was assured that the kid was used to it. A much smaller contraption held lemonade.

It was dark and late at night when my brother came back. He seemed happy. Someone was with him, and I believe some other people also came, including my father. The scene kept replaying itself, changing a little each time.

A younger version of myself showed up, I think maybe actually brought by my brother in one of the replays of the scene (in real life my brother is younger than I am). My younger self was perhaps 12 years old, with short hair perhaps an inch long, maybe slightly longer toward the front. He had a big smile like my brother did, but didn't look quite like I actually looked back then. I'm not sure my younger self knew who I was.


In the second dream, some people were going to make a movie about my life. Danny DeVito was chosen to play my younger self. I thought it was a strange choice, partly because he wasn't tall enough and partly because he didn't look anything like me or have the right personality. His hair was dark and he looked much younger than he does now, but for an instant when I contemplated his age he looked much older with wrinkles and gray hair and then he was young again.

He went to go through a door and looked back at me and laughed, and then continued through the door. I thought, well maybe he was the right choice after all.

I then saw various scenes of my life, my life as it had been in the dream. Apparently my life was being reviewed in an effort to get material for the movie script.

In the dream version of my life, my father was much different. He was tall with dark hair perhaps one and a half inches long on top, a long rectangular face, and a long muscular torso. In real life, my father was tall and strong, but started going bald fairly early, and tended to be overweight. My mother, who was shown in a separate scene, looked about the same as she had in real life, except she was thinner with more of a medium weight. They were both in their mid-thirties at the time shown, and seemed happy.

In the dream, I was put with foster parents for the 7th and 8th grades, but I'm not sure why. I looked back at the 8th grade time and I seemed to be happy. My younger self didn't quite look like I did, looking more like a combination of my brother and myself. In real life, I have a brother and two sisters, but in the dream I didn't have any sisters, though I think I did still have a brother. My younger self also seemed to interact more with the other kids than I did in real life, though he still seemed a little bit shy.

I watched my 8th grade class, at a time when the class was not in session. Kids were in the classroom, standing in various groups, talking to each other. Watching the scene, I saw some girls and remarked to someone with me that I liked a particular girl back then, she was hot. I gave her first name and a couple of different possibilities for her last name, and was a little bothered that I was unable to quite remember it. I don't believe the name in the dream quite matched a real name, but in real life there was a girl something like that - slim with a reasonably good figure, light brown hair and perhaps a little taller and somewhat different looking than the one in the dream. In real life I thought she looked somewhat attractive - especially her figure - but I didn't talk to her and thought someone else looked better (I didn't talk to her either).

My impression is that my younger self, in this new version of my life, did have some interaction with the girls, even if in a relatively minor way. I'm not sure which girls, though, and it may or may not have included the girls mentioned above. And while this version of myself was less shy than I had in reality been, he still tended to let the people around him, whether boys or girls, do most of the talking.

Toward the end there was a scene at a restaurant where I was with my mother and grandmother and perhaps someone else. I was now older than before, an adult, though younger than I am in real life. The tables were widely spaced, and we were sitting down at one in the middle and toward one wall.

Then the scene moved forward in time a little and my grandmother was on the floor on her side, partly curled up from where she fell off the chair. Everyone in the room was staring at her. My mother was leaning to the side and forward, looking at her, an expression of alarm on her face. I was farther down the table, in the process of standing up.

Some time passed, while various people went over to my grandmother and looked briefly at her, perhaps touching her lightly but apparently not doing much else. I could hear them talking among themselves about her, in low, mumbling tones. I didn't catch much of what was being said. I went over there, too, in the form of my younger self, after the others had finished and had indicated that I should come. I bent down and looked at her and I think touched her shoulder, but there didn't seem to be anything I could do.

A little while later the ambulance arrived. Bright light poured in through the suddenly open door and across the floor past where my grandmother lay. A paramedic was in the doorway in silhouette, his shadow stretching across the floor toward us. He went to her and looked at her briefly, then looked up and shook his head and said, "She's gone."

I was watching the scene from the side and above like a ghost. I nodded and acknowledged to someone with me that, yes, this was always sad when things like this happen, though I seemed somehow far removed in time from the scene and even reality itself and could only manage a wistful sort of sadness, like sadness at the passing of an era, and retained a small, understanding smile.

The Pomeranian and the Crawfish

This is another story that I did for a message board for a thread that was normally concerned with comically constructing new words and definitions. At that time people were taking turns writing short stories containing a short list of words given by another user. The list of words for this story: pomeranian, headress, sled, crawfish, creep

This story was part of a group I did for post number 989. I did another group for post number 1000, catching up on ones I missed. And as with post 1000, post 989 was the second time that number was reached, due to the board crash that cut several hundred from my post count but left the posts themselves unaffected.

This story is dated 5:04 AM, November 29, 2006, Arizona time (MST).


THE POMERANIAN AND THE CRAWFISH

The pomeranian rode his sled across the ice, his head held high. He wore a headdress of nobility and power, denoting his status.

As he turned a corner, a crawfish stuck out a claw and knocked him off the sled. He lay stunned, and the crawfish came toward him, creeping silently across the ice.

The crawfish looked down at the pomeranian's crumpled form, then reached down and took the headdress from him. Placing the headdress on its own head, it went away muttering, "I wondered where that went."

The Dance

Many of the things mentioned in this poem actually happened to me. I haven't seen any sea serpents yet, though. I haven't seen any angels either, at least as far as I know. I do think I have a guardian angel, probably several. Perhaps some day they'll appear more openly and we can have a talk, even if I don't see them dance.

This poem is dated 6:38 AM, August 25, 2007, Arizona time (MST).


THE DANCE

How many angels can dance
On the head of a pin?
Was an argument
No one could win.

How many sea serpents
In the sea?
First depends
On whether sea serpents be.

How many flying saucers
In the skies?
How to tell
The truth from lies?

Would something that goes bump
Within the night,
Still go bump
In the broad daylight?

I have seen something
In the sky,
I have not seen since,
Though the days go by.

My name was called
By no one there,
Though I came when called
And looked everywhere.

Things that might have gone wrong,
Somehow went right.
In darkness trapped,
I saw with more than sight.

Helped somehow
by things unseen,
Who knew just when
To intervene.

So much out there
we do not see,
How can we say
it cannot be.

Could angels dance upon a pin,
Singing merrily all night long?
Would we all be welcomed there,
If we weren't a stranger to their song?

Or do we need to see
What can't be seen,
To join the dance
Where the angels sing?

Where's my sock? or Sock on, sock off

Back when I was in high school, a long time ago, a more restrictive dress code was instituted, requiring, among other things, that socks be worn.

Not long after this, I was sitting in class one day when I felt coldness on one of my legs, near the ankle. I looked down and discovered, to my horror, that I had only one sock on. To make matters worse, I was sitting at the very front of the class, approximately in the middle.

The teacher, a man, was on the far right side of the room, standing up, talking to the class. After a while, he turned and walked to the left, I guess to talk to somebody over there. As he passed me, he frowned at me but didn't say anything.

Dream - The superimposed cat

A long time ago, probably around 1980, give or take a few years, I had a strange dream.

I dreamed I saw my mother (who is still alive) in the dining room near the counter that divides the dining room from the kitchen. She was in the dark but was partially lit, probably from a light over the kitchen sink. She had a sad and somewhat hurt look on her face, and seemed to be waiting for something. Perhaps she was just waiting for the time to pass. It was disturbing to see her there like that, looking hurt, there in the dark in the middle of the night. I don't recall why I came into the dining room, but it must have been for a different reason, as I didn't expect to see her there.

She saw me as soon as I came in, and as we looked at each other, I dimly saw the outline of the form of a cat appear around her. The image of the cat wavered in intensity, fading in and out a bit. The dream eventually ended.

Later, we found out that in my grandmother's house, a few streets over from us, a sick kitten had hidden behind a bed and slowly died, perhaps on that very night. The kitten wasn't found immediately, so the actual time of death is uncertain, but it would need to be near that time.

The Centipede with the Parasol

This is a story that I did for a message board, on a thread normally concerned with comically constructing new words and definitions. They were at that time doing exercises where a user gave a short list of words and other users then wrote a story containing those words. The list of words for this story: gum, prozac, parasol, centipede, tipee (spelled here as tepee).

This was my post number 1000 for that message board, but it was the second time I hit that number. The board software experienced problems a few times over the years and reduced some of the post counts of a lot of the users along with dropping some of the user data. The first time I only lost about 5 or so from my post count, but I didn't have very many posts at the time. Much later, another glitch removed a few hundred. The actual posts weren't affected.

This story is dated 9:23 PM, December 1, 2006, Arizona time (MST).


THE CENTIPEDE WITH THE PARASOL

The centipede came out of the tepee holding a parasol. It put a stick of gum in its mouth and chewed carefully, blew an enormous bubble, and then released it and let it sail into space. Putting another stick of gum in its mouth, it peered closely at me and said, "The Prozac didn't work, huh?"

Below the Stars

I originally published this poem on a message board, as is the case with many, though not all, of my poems. The poem seems to indicate that I might have needed to think of happier memories at the time. Perhaps the message board also needed to. It did seem to be a time of troubles on it.

This poem is dated 9:14 AM, April 19, 2007, Arizona time (MST).


BELOW THE STARS

Below the stars
Beneath the sky
The Earth still turns
The days go by

Time moves along
Upon its way
Though we cry out
It does not stay

Memories we have
Of things that were
Of times long past
That are no more

Some memories stay
And some may go
Some are happy
And some bring woe

Happy memories
Are generally best
The ones that are bad
Can cause regret

So even if just
For a little while
Let's make memories
That make us smile

Posts from the abandoned Story

These are the posts that I made to the guestbook version of write101.com's The Never-Ending Story. As I stated earlier in my post on September 11, 2007, the story was begun on two pages on the website and then continued on the guestbook. The guestbook version was finally discontinued and the story was partially restarted as a blog, with people continuing the story by means of comments.

The guestbook version had many interesting characters and situatins. Sometimes a person would make an entry that killed off a main character, more than once even killing off the main character, Dr. Morgenes. The characters were almost always revived later on by other people. One of my posts, in fact, revived Dr. Morgenes.

Some of the other characters that appeared were Morgenes' wife Maria, his mother-in-law Lucinda Carlotta Borgia de Corlione, the adventuress and actress Viburnia Hedgerow, Father Wetherly, a talking giant Gerbil, a talking Yak, a talking Yeti (abominable snowman), a talking dog, a talking Anvil (practically everything talked), Elvis, and a man named Phillis Diller.

The Never-Ending Story was restarted as a blog on January 18, 2005, though I did not find out until much later. My last entry to the guestbook version occurred on August 28, 2005. The story on the guestbook was not getting many new entries at that time. Most of the potential writers may have been aware of the blog version. The text copy I have of the guestbook version ends with my last entry. The guestbook version may have in fact ended with my last entry, but I don't know for sure. I only accessed the story occasionally, and probably the next time I tried to access it was the time it failed to load, even after a long wait.

Toward the end, the format of the guestbook version changed. One of the changes was the removal of carriage returns from the posts and the merging of all paragraphs into one. This change apparently occurred late in 2004, perhaps in October of that year. It was in effect for my last post, and so it appeared there as one long paragraph. It appears here, though, as I originally intended.


Name: Stephen
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/stephen_m99/
Hometown: Arizona
Sent: 2.54 PM - 3/28 [2004]

The door in the gumboot opened and a tall figure emerged, dressed in a dark cloak, a dark helmet, and a dark mask. His breath hissed noisely. He turned to Morgenes and said, "Join me! Come to the dark side."

Morgenes, taken aback by this apparition, found it hard to make a reply, but finally stammered out "What if I don't?"

The dark figure raised a flaming sword and said, "Then I must use this."

Smithy, the ancient sailor, who had somehow returned unnoticed in all the confusion, squinted at the dark figure and said, "Is that you, Luke?"

The figure paused, raised the mask, pulled a corncob pipe out of his mouth, and squinted back at the sailor.

"Is that you, Pappy?" he said. "It is, it's me Pappy, after all these years! You don't happen to have any... spinach with you, do you?"

Morgenes stared in shock from one to the other. What did this mean? And did the strange dark figure still want Morgenes to join him, or was the dark figure now joining them?

Meanwhile, no one noticed a hand emerge from a hole in the air and reach for the flaming sword...



Name: Stephen
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/stephen_m99/
Hometown: Arizona
Sent: 1.07 PM - 7/29 [2004]

Morgenes suddenly sat up, trembling. "What's happening, man, a bad dream?" said Richard. Morgenes said, "A dream? No, I fear it was a vision, a omen of disaster. And don't eat the eggs."



Name: Stephen
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/stephen_m99/
Hometown: Arizona
Sent: 10.31 AM - 9/17 [2004]

"Wait here, " the beautiful woman said, "and I will get us some drinks."

Morgenes watched, a dreamy expression on his face. Had he been somehow transported to Heaven? Surely, Heaven held no angels prettier than what he was seeing now.

From a distance, a yak and a shaggy, man-like figure watched, as the woman took a strange bottle that she had somehow concealed upon her person (but where?) and poured something into one of the drinks.

"Should we intervene?" the Yeti asked, stratching his shaggy head.

"Nah," the Yak said, "it's just getting interesting."



Name: Stephen
Homepage: http://stephen-has-spoken.blogspot.com/
City: Arizona
Sent: 08/28 03:28 AM [2005]

Morgenes stared at the apple core. He couldn't believe that he'd actually eaten that apple. It had tasted horrid. He had been so hungry, though... He had a vague memory of having died (again), and come back to life (again). And what had been that bit about the boy and the giant talking dog? Morgenes stared at his drink suspicously. Had he been poisened again? He suddenly felt very warm.

He took off his long, grey beach coat and went over to the closet to hang it up. He opened the closet door and paused. A strange man, wearing long sideburns and a sparkly white jumpsuit, stood there. The man took the coat from him and hung it up. Morgenes stared, then abrubtly slammed the closet door and stood with his back to it, his face pale.

The beautiful dark-haired woman paused, frowning. Had Morgenes seen what she had hidden there?

Phillis Diller had turned back from the ocean and was watching, drink in hand, a strange expression on his face. He opened his mouth to speak...

The Post Unlaced

This is another poem that was originally posted to a message board, to a thread about poems. While it was posted to keep the thread going, it is one of the better poems I have written for such a purpose.

This poem is dated 4:49 PM, December 17, 2006, Arizona time (MST).


THE POST UNLACED

At this time
With some haste
I leave this post
All unlaced

With lines askew
And reason frayed
It fell from
The bed it made

Perhaps another day
Will come
With other posts
That are more fun

This day I leave
This post for you
All unlaced
but spirit true

Dream - Leaving Earth

Back in November of 2007, a few days into the month, I had a dream about the remaining population of Earth being rescued by extraterrestrial aliens.

Most of the population of Earth had been destroyed or had somehow died off, but how this happened is unclear. There seemed to be a lot of fog or smoke, and people tended to live in pockets that might be separated from each other by vast stretches of bare dirt. Some cities, or portions of cities, still stood, but the population in them was frequently sparse, sometimes thinly spread out and sometimes in groups near the edges.

I was with a group of people that was some distance away from a city and that was somewhat distrustful of the city, and of outsiders in general. Battles had taken place with the groups of people in and near the city and with other groups farther away, battles in an earlier and largely forgotten part of the dream.

Terrible weapons and futuristic technology had been used against us, sometimes from a great distance away, but we had somehow managed to prevent our destruction. This was in part because of an invisible barrier we had placed around our area, some kind of force field, that prevented some of the weapons from reaching us. We had not been sure that it could hold, and it was weakening as the battle progressed. In the end it was still standing, somewhat to our surprise. We had agents outside working against our various enemies, but the battle ended in part simply because the enemies' major weapons were used up.

That was in the past. Now the old animosity was ending and people were coming together in a kind of peace. It was something that happened rapidly. Word reached us, and we cautiously reached out, some of us heading toward the city. Aliens had come, aliens from outer space.

The aliens knew of the disaster, and had arrived to rescue most of the remaining people. The aliens were disguised to look like humans, but under the disguise could be very much different.

More than one alien race was involved. One type looked like reptiles with protruding heads and approximately humanlike, but overly thick, bodies. Although appearing, like the others, to be human, this type was too bulky to fit in a human disguise. Some kind of illusion accounted for at least part of its appearance. Perhaps illusion was most of the disguise for all the types.

The aliens were leaving with the people in eight days. Humans were being rapidly trained in various things, apparently mostly related to the journey, rather than what might be needed after arrival. There was no time for the people to gather much to take with them. Almost everything needed or wanted would have to be recreated after they arrived on the new world. The aliens were leaving on time, and would not wait for anyone. Some other disaster (or continuation of the current one) was going to happen soon after they left that would likely wipe out the remaining people.

There was a huge, warehouse-size room with lots of desks and people who looked human (but probably weren't) sitting behind the desks and helping the people who wanted to leave fill out various forms. The people/aliens behind the desks were very quick and businesslike. Once, in that room, I saw a guard briefly change to a reptilian entity and back to human again while having an animated discussion with someone else, probably another disguised alien. There seemed to be a big rush to get everything done, at times almost a desperate rush. People who completed the forms were hurrying through turnstiles to another area, apparently to where the spaceships were. The whole left side of the long room was filled with turnstiles. There seemed to be very little time left.

I watched what was happening, still not sure whether I wanted to go or not.

The Idea of a Circle

Long, long ago, back in grade school, the teacher wanted each of us to come up with an idea and to make something, in a box, that represented that idea.

I thought for a long time about what idea I should use, and finally decided on the idea of a circle. I used an old cigar box for the box, and put lots of circles in it, with some of them being partial circles coming from the inner sides of the box. Some of the circles or partial circles were painted and some were cut out of colored paper. At least once I made a circle out of white glue and then sprinkled sand on it, and then painted it after it dried. I also made a big arc of colored paper coming out of one of the inner sides, a little distance from the bottom, supported on tiny pillars of rolled paper. It was on this arc of colored paper that I wrote, "THE IDEA OF A CIRCLE".

Dream - The figure with the hat and coat

Back on June 12, 2007, I wrote a post called "The figure in the doorway." This was about a dream I had in early January 2005, in which a short, thin figure wearing a hat and trenchcoat stood in the doorway watching me. This is some additional information about that figure.

The feeling I got about the figure with the hat and coat was of interested watching with a potential for action. I guess I felt kind of like it was checking in on me. And, as I said, like it was "aware" of me on some deeper level. I didn't know what action it might take, should it decide to take action, and so there was a possibility of something being done that might be dangerous or scary, but I don't recall a feeling of evil about the entity. There was also a bit of a feeling that a kind of judgment was being passed by the entity, a judgment on me and my situation, and that the entity had great power, power enough to even alter reality if it chose, but that it would not necessarily choose to do anything.

This is This

This poem is something that came to me, for the most part, fairly quickly. I did take some extra time on the last half of it, enlarging it to four verses instead of three and making the third verse follow the pattern of the second verse. I posted it to a message board shortly after writing it. Though the poem might be taken to have a bit of an edge to it, it was mostly done in humor. I think.

This poem is dated 1:33 AM, June 10, 2008, Arizona time (MST).


THIS IS THIS

This is this
And that is that
Where I am
Is where I'm at

Where I go
Is where I'll be
If you're there
Then me you'll see

Where I went
Is where I was
If I'm still there
I haven't budged

What I do
Is what I does
And I wrote this
Just because

Dream - The watchers in the walls

In 2007, sometime in the first few months of the year, I had a strange dream.

At some point in the dream, a small figure, perhaps one and a half feet tall, was by me. I was on the second or third floor of a big building, standing by a bench and some equipment of some kind. The small figure is vague, and I don't remember clearly seeing its face, but its body was white and very ragdoll-like. I picked it up and it complained in a sad, strange, high monotone voice, wanting to be put back down. I walked over to the window and held it out the window, holding it with one hand around its waist, or where a waist would normally be. After holding it out the window for a while, I finally set it on the small, sloping metal hood of some tall equipment that was outside by the window. I didn't let go, because it would slide off and fall if I did. The yard outside seemed to be an empty lot with various pieces of equipment stored in it. The creature continued to complain the whole time, only this time it was begging me not to let it go.

I finally brought it back inside and set it down, after which it stopped complaining and seemed to lose interest in me. I then went to another part of that floor, which was more house-like.

A few other people were there, shorter and much younger than I am (I am tall, though). They may have been in their early twenties, and they all seemed to be around the same age. I didn't recognize them, though I seemed to have some kind of connection to them in some way.

They let me stay in a bedroom in a space between two beds. I was wearing an old, gray, heavy coat. The floor between the beds was raised up some, almost like a shallow transmission tunnel in a car. The floor was also covered with thin carpeting, worn through in places.

I lay down between the beds, on the raised, irregular floor, and tried to sleep. I couldn't sleep, though, and saw in my mind beings embedded in the walls all around me. They were pale, and perhaps four or five feet tall. They were raised off the floor, but I sensed that they were actually standing on a surface in a different dimension, a surface that I couldn't see. They were back a little ways behind the surface of the walls, and stood silently in a row going around at least three of the walls. Except for their dark eyes, silently watching me, their faces were relatively blank and almost mask-like.

I got back up and went back toward the other part of the room. I found the tiny figure from the earlier part of the dream standing there, apparently waiting for me. I was tired of this and I thought that since this was a dream, I could get it to tell me what it was.

I reached down to pick it up, apparently mentally communicating my demand, and abruptly the creature changed. It expanded out of my grasp, leaning back and floating on the air as it did so. It became perhaps five feet tall, with very wide shoulders and chest. Its clothes were tight-fitting, and seemed secured at the wrists and ankles. Its arms and legs swelled out between the joints, almost like they were inflated. The whole thing was fairly balloon-like, like a figure wearing inflated clothes, though I felt that it was the figure's body stretching against the clothes, and not air. Oddly, the hands and feet were relatively normal size, even being a little small.

The body, enlarged it was, was now slightly transparent, and was tilted back so much that it was nearly horizontal. Its head was tilted forward, looking at me with big, demonic eyes and a mouth open in a wide demonic grin, as it slowly drifted backward and faded out.

Dream - The underlying structure of reality

Two or three years ago I had a strange dream. I don't remember the first part, but toward the end of the dream I was flying high in the air, trying to escape some people. The feeling was of exhilaration.

I looked down toward the ground and decided to zoom in with my vision and get a closer look. I felt that I had the power, in this situation, to do this. Probably because I realized that it was a dream, and so under my control, and I could do things I normally couldn't.

So I zoomed in with my eyes and the ground rapidly expanded and became closer. I did it again and again, until I was looking at the ground from an apparent distance of inches. I decided to keep on doing it, to look closer and closer, down to the subatomic level and even smaller, if I could. I wanted to see what the ultimate structure of reality was, what was under everything.

So I kept on zooming in, over and over, getting closer and closer until finally I tried again and nothing else happened.

I was looking at white lines on a dark background. The lines were in the form of short, even lengths attached to a longer line that acted as a central axis, with a line at the end of the axis joining it to other, similar structures. The arrangement did not extend indefinitely, but was limited to a couple of collections of the patterns, one larger than the other. I think that they may have been connected to each other.

There may have been more of them at a greater distance (and I felt that there were), but if so I was concentrating on what was in front of me and did not see them.

There also seemed to be something else, boundaries of some kind, gray on gray and black on black. And some vague, dark structures. The boundaries and the structures seemed slightly more three-dimensional than the lines, which were very flat. The boundaries were also sometimes curved instead of straight, and seemed more random, though they smoothly enclosed the groups of white lines.

I looked closely at the white lines, following some of them. If I concentrated, I could look a little closer, though nothing like the zooming in that I had been doing.

The lines were very straight and they had a uniform thickness, but on close viewing I saw that the edges of the lines were slightly irregular. They had a certain roughness to them.

The overall visual impression was of something like a parking lot or a circuit board, though I didn't know the lines' purpose or what they were.

I felt, though, that I was looking at what the underlying structure of reality really was, and that I couldn't zoom in any more because I was already at maximum magnification.

If there was anything more, it was beyond my ability to see it.

In 2012

The 2012 in the poem refers to the date that the Mayan calendar ends, generally said to be December 21, 2012. That marks the end of the calendar and the end of the age, after which the calendar restarts and a new age begins. Some say that the end of the old age and the beginning of the new one will be a time of trouble, with many changes happening. Predictions of the future are frequently in error, though. We'll know in a few more years, one way or the other.

This poem is dated 3:02 AM, February 6, 2007, Arizona time (MST).


IN 2012

In 2012
The world will end
In 2012
The world began

And the world begins
With each new day
And sets us all
Upon our way

Will the world ever end
And not begin?
We will know
When we get there then

What lay around the bend

About 10 to 12 years ago, something odd happened as I was driving late one night.

I was in Arizona on a road going into an increasingly mountainous area. The road was fairly empty, but there were occasional cars and trucks, sometimes coming in clumps. I went up a long slope, and then the road turned abruptly right, went a short distance, and turned abruptly left. Because of the mountains, I couldn't see around the curves. It was a way I had been many times before.

For some reason, I was very cautious and suspicious as I went around the second curve. As I came into a view of the road beyond, I saw a forklift carrying what appeared to be a telephone pole across the road. There was a long flatbed truck parked a ways off to the left of the road, with some poles on the bed and some on the ground. I think some may have been at least partly on the road, also.

I immediately stopped, since I was prepared for something being there, and sat in my car and watched the forklift slowly carry the telephone pole across the road to the right. It was going away from the truck, so it was evidently not concerned with putting it back on the truck. It all took place in darkness. There may have been a flashlight or two in use somewhere, but not much more. The road did not have any barriers set up, either.

Although it seemed to take a long time for the forklift to cross the road and get out of my way, it probably actually wasn't too long. I began to get concerned, though, that someone might come up behind me, maybe even some big truck, and run into me. Nothing like that happened, though, and eventually the forklift was out of the way and I drove on past it.

Good thing I had that suspicious feeling, though.

Dream - The doomsday machine

Saturday morning, October 13, 2007, I had a dream about another world in a parallel universe, a world in some ways much like ours.

In the dream, in this other universe, I had just had a birthday (in real life, my birthday was months ago), and I was taking a paper plate of brownies, wrapped in plastic, with me to eat on my trip. I was traveling by car, driving to another state to visit various military installations out in the desert. The installations were small, with small groups of people, where doomsday weapons, generally missiles of various types, were being worked on. We had been in a low-level war for a long time, against a large country on the other side of the world.

At one of the installations, people from another universe visited, appearing in a dimly lit and uneven hole in our universe. The people were dark-skinned, and looked like normal black people. They said that they, too, had been visited by aliens. They said that the aliens didn't talk much, but that the aliens did say they were from another universe or dimension and were not like us. As the visitors from another universe said that, I could see in my mind the aliens beside them.

The aliens looked like vague, three-dimensional shadows with wide, flat heads with points on the side, almost like flattened cat ears. The aliens' eyes were wide from side to side and somewhat narrowed, and glowed yellow-white with orange around the edges.

The people from another universe said that they didn't, themselves, possess the technology to come here and were just piggy-backing on the alien technology and couldn't stay long, and they soon disappeared.


At some point, I ended up in a restaurant in a small town. I was sitting at a table attached to a wall. Some other people were at the table with me. I had brought two large cloth bags with me. The bags had wide canvas straps for carrying and long zippers holding them closed. They held various things I brought with me on my trip, mainly notebooks and books and pens and pencils and various other things.

I opened the bags and began taking things out, laying them on the table and the floor. One of the things I took out was a computer, which was not something I had originally brought with me, but was something I had been given at one of the installations. It was about the size of a closed laptop computer, but it didn't have a hinged screen; the screen was built into it.

The screen display was dark, with a lit outline of an image. I was trying to adjust the display, to increase it to maximum size but not so large that the edges would be lost. The image also tried to tilt, and I had to adjust it to straighten it. It was difficult, because the controls at the bottom were very sensitive and just a touch made the screen move, and because the display was dark and the image on it didn't have straight lines or extend to the edges of the screen, which made it hard to see where the edges of the screen were.

The image on the screen was a colored outline of the United States. The image disturbed me, though, because there seemed to be something wrong with it. The outline seemed to show how the United States might look if the ocean had risen significantly and covered part of the coastline.

I finally decided it was time to leave the restaurant. I had been there a long time and it was getting late. I tried to put the things back in the cloth bags, but most of it seemed to be missing. As I looked around for it, more of it seemed to disappear. I finally left one mostly-empty bag there by the table, hoping that if someone found the missing stuff they would send it to me. I picked up the other, not very full bag, put it over my shoulder and left. Outside the restaurant it was dark. I put down the bag and fiddled with the computer display again for a while, before giving it up for later and moving on.


Sometime later, I was with a girl in a small car heading back to a town. We had evidently been out in the desert looking at some installations. I was in the passenger seat and she was driving. She was not very tall and was probably somewhere in her thirties, but it was hard to tell. She was wearing a short-sleeved lightweight dress that fell below her knees. The dress was wide, but extended out only moderately and seemed to want to hang in large folds. The dress was dirty with dust and what looked like soot, and so was she. This seemed to be normal; at least I didn't think it was anything unusual.

Outside it was daytime, though the sun wasn't very bright. The sky seemed to have a smoky haze with thin, smoky clouds. This also seemed normal. The car we were in was small and seemed to have very short fenders. From inside, I could see the tops of the front wheels. The tires were very wide and the tops were almost straight, with only a trace of tread. They seemed to be old, but I felt that new ones would not be much different.

The road we were on was dirt, and was wide and had a slight upward slope. The dirt of the road was the same color as the dirt of the desert, a pale brown, almost cream color, and seemed roughly bulldozed, with an occasional large chunk of sharp quartz rock on it. The tires didn't seem to care, though.


After we got back to town, we went in a small building with several rooms. I decided to take a nap. While I slept, the aliens communicated with the girl, with voices in her head. They told her how the conflict could be ended, how the war could finally be over. They told her how to build a doomsday machine, not a missile but something that would shoot poison gas high into the atmosphere and cover the Earth. It would take about half an hour to cover the Earth and settle down to where the people were, and another half hour to kill them. There was no cure and no antidote. Everyone would die.

She listened to the voices in her head and built the machine, while I slept on unaware. It looked somewhat like a large, very wide artillery shell, and was close to three feet tall. When it was finished, she stared at it for a while with eyes that were a little wide. Then she activated it.

An extremely dense column of air shot up, so dense that it was opaque, with ripples in the air at the edges. It continued for a while, as she watched, and then, its job done, either stopped automatically or was shut off by her.


A little while later I woke up. I had done pretty much everything I needed to do on this trip, and it was time to go home. I gathered up my bags, now fairly full again, and noticed that I still had two brownies left on the paper plate. This disturbed me somewhat, as I had intended to have them all eaten by now.

I went with the girl, then, to a local mall to have a last look around before I left. I had my bags hung over my shoulders by their straps and was still holding the paper plate with the two brownies, wondering if I should start eating them now or leave them for the trip. The mall was large and crowded with people. The ceiling was unusually low for a mall, perhaps only ten or twelve feet high, and a large grate was in it not far from us.

As I looked at the grate, blue air, clear and see-through, started flowing out of it, looking almost like flowing blue water. The girl beside me looked up at it and her eyes grew wide in panic. She began to run, crossing in front of me and going to the right, and ran rapidly off down the mall. She was soon lost in the crowd.

I didn't understand what was happening, but I knew something was wrong and ran after her. I couldn't see where she was, but I went in the direction that she had been going and where I hoped she might have gone. As I ran, I changed direction to go at a long angle across the wide aisle of the mall, and I found a door at the other side. I went through the door, though I wasn't sure whether she had gone that way or continued down the mall.


The door led to the outside, where a large, narrow triangle of landscaped ground was. It had lots of green bushes and some strange green trees that looked almost like giant broccoli sprigs six or eight feet high. Between the plants, pale ground was visible, the same ground that was everywhere else. To the left, a wide, paved road came out from under an overpass, an overpass that seemed to be an extension of the mall. The road went past me at a slight angle toward the mall, and was filled with vehicles moving very fast.

I started running to the right at an angle toward the road. I was running very fast, the figures 60 and 66 miles per hour came into my mind. I saw the bushes and trees rush past me as I ran. I felt that I could have merged with the traffic on the road, but I decided to run in the dirt beside it. Early on, I had dropped to all fours, reaching out with both hands and grabbing the earth with my fingers, pulling on it and sending a spray of it backwards as I went forward, bounding along.

As we left the landscaped area, the plants thinned out and became sparse and changed in character, becoming more like clumps of grass and occasional small bushes. The road gradually turned toward the town, or what I thought was the town. I could see it in the distance, but it was much bigger than I remembered; it was a small city. The buildings were close-spaced, with occasional tall buildings sticking up. All the buildings were a light tan color, the same color as the dirt.

I was losing energy now, though I didn't really feel tired. The vehicles had all gone ahead and the road was empty now. While they were still there, the road had become progressively less maintained, and had turned briefly into a dark gravel before becoming dirt. Now I continued alone, still by the side of the road, on hands and knees now, still reaching out both hands at once and pulling myself along.

A raised area had appeared by the road, perhaps six or eight inches high on the side by the road and perhaps half that on the other side. The somewhat-flat top was about eight inches wide, and the sides dropped off sharply from it. The raised area had a line of holes in it, a line that extended into the distance, and had uneven, eroded cracks between some of the holes. The holes appeared to have originally been a few inches across, but were now mostly filled in. Some of the dirt in the holes appeared to be relatively fresh. As I pulled myself along the raised area, I wondered if some animals might be living in the holes, and might jump out and try to get me. None did, though.

Eventually, I came to realize that the raised area with the line of holes was all that was left of an ancient wall of dried clay blocks. The clay blocks were built somewhat like concrete blocks, in that they were about the same size and had hollow areas, but the hollow areas in the clay blocks were smaller and the clay blocks didn't seem to be as tall.


I continued toward the closer-but-still-distant city, crawling on my stomach now, still pulling myself forward with both hands, fingers clawing at the hard, eroded surface of the dried clay blocks, sending more dirt into the holes. The raised area that had been a wall of blocks was down to the level of the rest of the desert now, and the only things that distinguished the dirt of the still-wide road from the dirt of the desert were the flatness of the road, the lack of vegetation on it, the occasional tire track, and the line of holes near the edge of it.

The part of me that knew what was going on wondered if somewhere, someone would realize what was happening and set off the missiles, in an attempt for revenge against an apparent attack. Wouldn't it be funny, I thought, if the atomic explosions when the missiles hit turned out to destroy the poison and allow a few people to live on. Wouldn't it be funny, I thought, if the missiles that had been intended to be doomsday weapons actually ended up saving a few people.

The part of me on the ground knew nothing about that, and didn't understand what was happening. I knew something was wrong, and that I was very weak and getting weaker. I had hoped that I could at least reach the city before I died, but I was afraid now that I might not make it. I looked at the city, still so far away, and continued to slowly crawl toward it.

Message Madness, or The Post That Wailed

The post in the poem is, of course, a message board post. I originally wrote this poem for a message board I frequently visit, for a thread for users' poems. The message board had recently, at the time, been going through some troubles, but this poem does not refer to any specific post by me or anyone else. Like most of my other poems, it did not originally have a title, but has since been given one. This poem is dated 12:59 AM, 7/20/2007, Arizona time (MST).


I shot a post into the air,
It fell to Earth and quivered there,
And gave a wild uncertain shout,
And madly madly ran about.

And hid within the debris field,
And cowardly refused to yield,
And let no others have their say,
And even kept the dogs at bay.

I let out one of many sighs,
As it watched back through narrowed eyes.
With its eyes so burning hot,
Watching me though I watched not.

I finally went upon my way,
Letting it decide to go or stay.
Left it lonely sitting there,
I could not say without a care.

I've heard it's still occasionally seen,
Among the debris it hides within.
I saw it there again today,
I guess some posts are just that way.

A nail, or something like it

Around 12 years or so ago, on a visit to Reno, Nevada, I pulled into the parking lot of a shopping center. As I chose a parking space, off by myself with few other cars around, I said to myself, "There's going to be a nail RIGHT HERE!"

When I got out of the car and looked, a few feet from a front wheel and somewhat off to the side I found a small nail-like rivet.

I suppose I must have been especially tuned to these things, as I had relatively recently been having tire trouble, though with bits of glass and not nails.

Dream - The figure that came out of the wall

I had a strange dream, or possibly something else, around 1997 or 1998.

In the dream, I was laying in bed (where I actually physically was) and a strange figure started coming through the wall beside me, but a few feet higher in the wall.

The figure was initially somewhat cloudy, but became clearer as time went on. It was also totally black and statue-like. Even the hair, which was curly, looked like something that was carved.

It was also not a complete figure, just the head and shoulders and part of the torso. The figure was not vertical, but was on its side, with the body and head pointing the same direction mine was. (I think, though, that it may have initially been more vertically oriented, but slowly twisted to the other orientation.)

It was also not initially facing me, but slowly, slowly turned in my direction. It's eyes were closed. It moved so slowly that it seemed to be partially replaying itself, like a movie extending a scene by showing almost the same shot over and over.

As it turned toward me more and more, and slowly emerged further from the wall, it very, very slowly smiled. Its eyes remained closed.

It had the face of my brother.

A feeling of absolute horror surrounded this, and a feeling of terrible danger. It also had a strange, almost hypnotic pull, like something in it was reaching out toward me, trying to draw me in.


I finally managed to wake up. I don't know why it looked like my brother, who is still alive. If anything odd was happening to him at that time, he never mentioned it, but I never asked, either. I should mention also, for clarity, that although the figure was black, we are white, so black is not a normal color for my brother. I suppose the blackness of the figure could have been related to the feeling of danger surrounding it, that the blackness was because it was evil. That still doesn't explain why it looked like my brother, who is not evil. (He has been involved with art in the past, though, which might explain the statue-like appearance.)

Dream - The long white hallway

I had a dream, probably sometime in the fall of 2006, that was relatively normal for the most part (normal for me, that is), but turned very strange toward the end.

Toward the end of the dream, I found that someone had come into my room and taken some things from me. I went searching for them, and came to a store and started looking through it. The store got much bigger as I searched, becoming similar to Wal-Mart. At some point, I came to approximately the middle of the store and a little toward the back. When I went to the left to look down another aisle, one of the aisles that led toward the back, abruptly things changed.

The aisle became hallway-like, and people rose up into the air, tilted until they were more or less horizontal, and floated. I rose up in the air also, but tilted only partly forward. The air itself seemed like a slightly thickened water, like a gelatin that has not yet set. I watched as the other people changed, becoming darker, with their limbs shrinking and becoming just lumpy extensions, their bodies lengthening and even having something of a short, thick tail. In some cases their heads, or the large lumpy things that passed for heads, turned down toward their chests.

The floor was white, as before, but the aisle/hallway had white walls now, instead of just shelves of merchandise. It also now had no ceiling, and gradually, over a long span of time, the people were drifting upward and outward into a blank whiteness. I kept trying to hurry forward, trying to run, but it seemed difficult to do so, and I seemed to mostly hang there in the air. The aisle-turned-hallway lengthened into an indefinite distance, ending in a vague whiteness. I seemed to hang in a timeless space, trying to move forward.

Some time later, it's hard to say how long, but it felt like a great deal of time had passed, I became aware that I was noticeably closer to the end. I could see far away at the end three figures looking like ink drawings. I interpreted the figures to be gods. The central one was turned toward me, but his head was turned to the side and he was looking partly upward. The other two were partly turned out to either side, and were also with heads tilted partly upward. The three had their arms partly raised in different degrees, with their hands in some cases reaching shoulder or chest height. They were massive figures, like something drawn by a Renaissance artist. Their heads and shoulders rose above the walls and they were visible only from the waist up, fading below into the indefinite whiteness of the end of the hallway.

More timeless time passed, and I was closer. The figures were larger, but still looked like ink drawings, and were unchanged in appearance.

Again more time passed, and I was now much closer to the end of the hallway. At some point, all the other people had drifted away into the whiteness, and I was alone. The massive figures, still looking like ink drawings, were unchanged except for the large increase in size brought about by the closeness of them. They began to slowly rise and separate from each other, the drawings still fading away at the waist. As they slowly drifted upward and outward, below them, not far away now, the indefinite whiteness of the end of the tunnel was revealed, unobstructed. It looked large now, in front of me.

I stared at it, my eyes open wide. I was still filled with a sense of timeless peace, but also with a sense of that fading and something else beginning, of something else on the other side, a place where things happened, a place less timeless.

The indefinite whiteness of the end of the hallway was not far away now. I slowly drifted, with a quiet anticipation, toward it.

More posts about posts

Last summer I posted a collection of posts I made to a message board I visit frequently. This is another collection of those posts.

On that message board, new threads crowd out old ones, old in this case meaning oldest last update. Threads can persist for a long time, however, if they are posted to frequently enough so that they stay comfortably away from the bottom of the list.

I help to keep some of the threads going, by posting to them when it seems that a new post might be needed. On threads about writing or poems, I have sometimes posted poems. Most of these poems refer to posts or posting in some manner, and most of them are short, sometimes very short, though a few are fairly long.

This is another collection of some of the poems. They did not originally have titles, but I have given them titles here. The times shown are in Arizona time (MST), not the time on the message board, which uses Eastern time.


I LEAVE THIS POST
5:04 PM 6/10/2006

Around the world,
Across the way,
The sun has made,
Another day.

Within this time,
Within this place,
Within this now,
That we have made.

I leave this post,
For all to see,
Containing these...
My words for thee.



TOO LATE THE POST
12:54 PM 6/28/2006

Too late the post,
And like most,
This thread will disappear.

So do your part,
Straight from the heart,
And place your post right here.



I POSTED A POST
2:04 AM 10/6/2006

I posted a post
Worse than most
Better than some
Much better than none

The post revives
And brings new highs
And for a while
Might bring a smile

If this post won't do
Perhaps one from you
Would be the one
To get it done

And in this way
The thread might stay
And not be a ghost
For want of a post



IN THE RACE
6:55 PM 12/7/2006

I put this post
Upon this place
So that this thread
Stays in the race

So that it lives
Another day
And so more posts
Might find their way

Perhaps a post
From you will come
Posts are needed
As a race is run

Some threads win
And some must go
Let this thread stay
Let the words flow

As time moves on
Let this thread rise
And be a delight
To everyone's eyes

Let posters post
And viewers watch
And be inspired
And ideas hatch

So that this thread
Should never die
And in old age
Be forever spry

I put this post
Upon this place
Let your post come
Come join the race



TIME FOR MORE
12:19 PM 2/26/2007

Time for more
That's for sure
For thoughts in rhyme
Now's the time

Put them here
Have no fear
Do not stall
We welcome all



TIME TO WRITE
11:49 PM 3/22/2007

Heavy or light
Time to write



PUT DOWN A WORD
1:40 AM 8/3/2007

Put down a word
Put down a line
Make a story
Or make a rhyme

Something you know
Or something you feel
Or somewhere you've been
Whether dream or real

Write it here
Don't wait too long
Without new posts
This thread is gone

Write a word
A line, a song
Do your part
Keep this thread young



JUST STOPPING BY
12:38 PM 8/14/2007

Just stopping by
To bring this thread high
To say hello
And make it grow

And as everyone knows
Up it goes
From down below
To the top of the row

I bumped this thread
To keep it fed
And make it high
While stopping by

Visions of other realities

Back in mid-February 2006, I was pretty exhausted and I lay down to sleep for a while. As soon as I closed my eyes, I could see an array of tiny bright shards, all about the same size but in different orientations. They all seemed to be about the same distance from me, and formed a wall that extended an indefinite distance up and to the sides. The bottom had a definite boundary, though. On the lower part of the wall of shards, a blurred line ran across, and below the line was blankness, apparently at a somewhat greater distance. If I remember correctly, I opened my eyes and then closed them again, perhaps more than once, and each time I closed them the vision of the shards came back.


Some hours later, or perhaps the next day, I woke up from a dream (I think that this had been a separate sleep period from the one just mentioned). I closed my eyes again and could immediately see a scene, but it was not from the dream that I had just been having.

In this scene, this vision, another reality seemed to be overlaid onto this one. Everything was dim and half-seen.

Close by, a strange plant, perhaps a couple of feet high, had a very large, multicolored, clothlike leaf that had a slight outward curvature. Large waves, caused by the breeze, slowly moved across it.

In the distance, I could see tall, thin, strange-looking buildings, like part of a city. Not far away were lower buildings with wide paved areas and large planters with vegetation, like some kind of plaza. This apparently extended to, and past, where I was.

In the middle distance, some people were standing apart and talking. Their voices were somewhat distant and distorted, and sounded like they were slightly speeded up. I couldn't understand what was being said.

As before, I think I opened my eyes and closed them a few times, and each time the scene came back. It seemed to be very realistic, although only partly there, like looking at a badly faded picture.

Dream - A warning from a future self

I had a dream in late 2005 in which I was overlayed by a future version of myself, along with some other entities who were along for the ride. The future self may have been me in this life, or me in a future life, or perhaps something else. I don't think it was actually from later in this life, though, because the reason I was given for his coming was that he was there to experience a significant and negative event that was going to occur in my life and that he and the others were there to witness it. That's the long version. What actually happened was that the knowledge and timing of the event were given to me, along with knowledge of who he was and what his and the other's purpose was, just as a knowing, a feeling. I could also feel it as his spirit came down over me, and I could feel the others watching.

In the dream, I was working on the front yard late at night, in the dark. The negative event mentioned above would occur when I went to a vary dark area of the side yard on the left (east) side of the house, near where the back fence begins, and work on a tall bush (or short tree) with lots of skinny narrow branches (in real life, no such plant is there). I believe the event was supposed to occur at 1:45 AM, or something like that (it's been a long time since the dream). The nature of the negative event was given to me, but I'd rather not state it here. You can use your imagination.

The event in question never occurred, at least not yet. Forewarned is forearmed. I hope.

The palms of my hands

I have very few lines on my hands, and none form an M. The lines on my left hand extend greater distances than those on my right, but the pattern on both is similar. Basically, I have a line that runs across and then a shorter line under that. From near the beginning of the shorter line another line branches off and curves downward. At the end of the shorter line, near the upper center of the palm, another line or two curves downward, but these are very faint.

I have a small white scar on the palm of my right hand that I got from pushing on the broken end of a shovel handle decades ago. The dull point of the wood damaged the flesh of my hand, even through the heavy rubber of the glove. On the left hand, on the edge near where the thumb would rest if it was laid against the edge of the hand, I have two small scars, nearly invisible now, from a time even longer ago, from a cactus needle that became embedded under the skin and then infected (for months).

I am right handed, but when I was very young this was less certain. The teacher told my mother that I seemed to use either hand, and recommended that I be trained to use the right hand to avoid problems later on.

Dream - The mall under the ground

Around the end of April 2005, I had a dream in which I was in New York City, on the edge of it, but it wasn't like the real New York at all.

In the dream, the city was very small and constructed mainly of metal, though the metal was mostly painted or otherwise coated, and various other materials, perhaps cardboard or plasterboard, were also used.

In the dream, my mother had wanted to go shopping there, complaining that she seldom got out. I left her in a large store that looked like part of a mall (actually, the whole city seemed to be one big mall), and wandered around the outside of the city. Someone was with me initially, but I don't know who.

Outside, it was uneven ground, with various businesses here and there. They seemed to be laid out in lines, though there really wasn't a road. It was as though they followed along the wall of a cliff, or even the wall of a cavern or a tunnel.

I went into a large store and was looking around. The front of the store was entirely open. At the back, there was a notice, something printed on the wall, about something on the other side of the wall. Someone who was there, someone who was just looking around like me, wanted to try to get to it.

Getting to it meant going through the wall, and I was a little suspicious of this. He went ahead, though, and I watched him fade through the wall.

I decided, then, to try it myself.

On the other side of the wall was a corridor, like a wide hallway, but of varying widths. The floor was not level, but was straight in sections, like sections of flooring laid over uneven and somewhat tilted ground. The edges of the floor, while also straight in short sections, moved in and out like it was following an irregular and somewhat curving tunnel. The floor had an industrial look, being constructed out of what looked like long strips of tire rubber, set into panels. Along the sides of the hall were various small businesses, constructed mostly of metal.

There were a few people walking around, but it wasn't crowded. I walked along the hall, which had a mild downward trend. Eventually, I got to a big open area. It had a large sunken arena off to one side. There were a few people in it, but it seemed to be a time when it wasn't being used for an event.

There were some nearby tables, where people ate food that they bought from the nearby businesses. At one of the tables I found my father and at least part of his family (he divorced and remarried a couple of decades ago), though some of the people with him I didn't know. He looked much thinner than when I saw him last, and he had not shaved for what looked to be a couple of weeks. I talked with him a while and then moved on.

As I walked, the hall became much wider and took on a more conventional look. It also became very crowded. Eventually, I came to the end of it. Two broad escalators were there, one taking people to the surface, where presumably the shopping continued, and the other bringing people down. The hall ended a little ways past the escalators, in kind of a rough, rounded look, but offshoots went to either side.

I went to the right, into a much smaller hallway. and eventually into a short offshoot of that. I went into a business or two and they seemed to be fairly conventional, like convenience stores or drug stores, with heavy concentrations of touristy stuff.

I went back, then, and went into one of the offshoots on the other side of the escalators. There was a small eating place there, along the hallway, with a small counter and stools. A few people were there, and at the far end a small man wearing a brown striped suit and hat sat, slouched over.

One of the people standing by me remarked about the man wearing the suit, that it was out of place because the man was a maintenance worker for the complex. I looked again, but he wasn't wearing the suit anymore, and had gained some weight. He now had on a t-shirt and probably gray workpants. He was sitting down but he was turned sideways to the counter and was leaning over backwards, with his upper body embedded in the wall.

He seemed to be doing some type of maintenance, but I also felt that he was showing me how to get behind the wall. I felt that there was something behind the wall, some other rooms. Small rooms that led off in a series, gradually but swiftly climbing. I could see them dimly in my mind.

The metal wall into which he was embedded had some kind of structure visible, like the panels were stressed and slightly out of place, although I felt that he was somehow faded into the wall as well as going through some secret opening in it.

He somehow emerged from the wall, then, and was sitting up. A small device started to slowly fade in attached to the wall on the left side of him, a short section of wall before the counter started.

I watched the device slowly fade into view, and then I woke up.

My first cars

My first car was a 1955 Cadillac 4-door sedan with a light tan body and a reddish brown roof. It had a forward pointing hood ornament that was a streamlined person, and its front bumper had two huge protrusions on either side of the grill, like rocket nose cones, pointing straight out. On the back, it had stubby fins with wraparound tail lights. This was probably back in 1970 or 1971, and it was a car my father had been using for business. It was kind of an informal gift, and he still ended up using it for business sometimes.

The car was very tall and had a musty smell inside. When driving down the road, sometimes it seemed to bob on all four corners, and it felt very isolated. It felt very stable on dirt roads, though, even when driven fast. It had a bad quirk, in that it sometimes died when idling when the engine was only partially warmed up. The engine ran so quietly, though, that it was difficult to tell when it died, and I sometimes ended up trying to pull into traffic with the engine dead.

An interesting feature was the gas cap hidden under the driver's side tail light. To access the gas cap, you had to push in the small round reflector under the tail light. The tail light would then pop up on a hinge, revealing the gas cap. I remember one young man at a gas station who was going to put gas in the car (this was before self-serve was common) who looked up and down both sides of the car, along the back, behind the license plate, and everywhere he could think of before finally giving up and asking where it was. I got out and demonstrated for him.

I only had that car for a year or two, though it stayed in the family for a long time. It finally ended up sitting for a long time in the carport of my grandmother's house. She didn't mind, because it looked more like someone was home if a car was there. The mailman got in the habit, though, of scraping his bicycle against the car when he delivered the mail, and over time he left a huge scraped area along the side of the car. When my father found out he was really mad, and got the post office to pay for fixing it, though I don't remember now if the money was ever used for that purpose.

I got my next car, and the first one that was really mine, in 1972 or thereabouts. My father knew someone who was trying to sell a 1964 Cadillac Coupe DeVille with a light blue body and white top, and I ended up buying it. It had an internal combustion leak, and had to have water added to the radiator every week or so, sometimes sooner. We eventually put new head gaskets on it, but not for several months, maybe longer.

I really liked the design of the '69 and '70 models, though. They were still fairly new at the time, and I figured it would be quite a while before I could afford one. Then, late in the summer of 1973, my father took me to the local Cadillac dealer to look over what they had. I didn't intend to buy anything, just look.

The used car section had a lot of bright, shiny cars of various colors and ages (though all were fairly new). None of them seemed to be quite right, though, being either the wrong color or wrong model or wrong year. They were all kind of expensive, too, probably being somewhere around $4500 to $5000 even for a 1970 model (new Cadillacs at the time probably went for $8000 or $9000 or so).

My eye kept being drawn back to one car parked at the back, a 1970 Sedan DeVille with gold paint and a white vinyl roof. Unlike the other cars, its paint was already a little faded in some areas, and it didn't seem to have any information posted on it. I wasn't sure if they were trying to sell it or if someone had parked there.

My father went and checked, and they told him that they had just taken the car in and hadn't checked it out yet. They were wanting a little less than $4000 for it, but my father managed to get them down to $3350 or something like that. Thinking back on it, besides them having not checked the car out, the already fading paint and the relatively high mileage (almost 40,000) may also have factored into them lowering the price that much.

I bought the car that night. It was a car I ended up keeping for a long time.

Dream - Getting lost

Somewhere around April 2006, I had a strange dream. The first part of the dream seems to have been some kind of nighttime adventure involving dimly-lit warehouses, and is largely forgotten. The second part of the dream dealt with the afterlife, and remains clear.


At some point in the dream, it was dark, and I was outside, with some buildings behind me and slightly to the left, but not far away. Someone was standing near me, also behind me and slightly to the left. Someone who was unseen and perhaps invisible, and not actually human.

The entity was telling me a secret about what happens after people die. He said that people get caught up in doing a series of tasks. There are always more tasks, and they are drawn in deeper and deeper, until they get lost in them. And I had a picture in my mind of going through a series a small, brightly lit rooms, filled with various things, and doing something there and then being drawn somehow (or told) to go through a door into the next room, and on deeper and deeper into the building. I felt that this was what hell actually was, to get lost in the endless series of tasks.

The unseen entity standing by me said that all a person needed to do to get out of this or to avoid it was to call on Jesus Christ and the person would instantly be removed from it.


Previously, I had been dimly aware of a long building in the distance in front of me. I had now moved somehow, and was standing perhaps 10 or 12 feet in front of it. The building was low and white, and almost endlessly wide. Double doors, like elevator doors, were evenly spaced across the front of the building. There was also a sidewalk that ran in front of the building, and I was standing on or near it, and there was a broad walk that ran from the sidewalk to each of the doors.

A young girl came up beside me, a few feet away to the right. She was thin and perhaps in her late teens. She was wearing what looked like old, inexpensive clothes, some jeans and a jacket or a sweater. I think she also had on a knit cap. She paid no attention to me. She stood looking at the double doors in front of us for a moment, her hands in the pockets of the jacket or sweater.

At some point the doors in front of us slid open, perhaps even before she arrived, and featureless white light poured out. She walked forward into the light and disappeared, evidently feeling that this was expected of her, her face looking a little strained and uncertain. Her eyes were always pointed straight ahead, though, and she never looked at me.


I felt that the building and the light were the traps I had been warned about. I felt certain that the building was not real. I went up to it. The doors were closed now, but there was a big button on the recessed area surrounding the doors that could open the doors again.

I poked at the building sharply a few times with my finger. The building gave slightly and bounced back, and finally seemed to separate slightly at the seams. It appeared to be made of a stiff, paper-thin plastic.

I went back away from the building, slightly past the sidewalk to where a small, gravel path was. Some other people arrived, not all at once. They were of various ages, and were all much shorter than I was. Like the girl, they tended to look thin and poor. Unlike the girl, they seemed to be looking to me for guidance, their faces worried and uncertain.


I led them to the left, along the gravel path, walking with the building at my right. We walked along in the darkness for a long time. Eventually, the path deteriorated, becoming more dirt than gravel, and going through a series of small rises and dips. The path finally ended, fading into the land, just before the building itself ended.

Moving past the corner of the building, we could see it stretch away from us until it was lost in the distance, continuing on indefinitely. Ahead of us, beyond the end of the building, the land sloped down for a ways, and leveled off and then rose again, like the banks of a dry riverbed. Beyond this was a vast barren plain, at a lower level than where we were.


On the edge of the downward slope in front of us was another structure. It was low and at a right angle to the path, and appeared to be partially buried in the dirt. It was also very dark in color, and at least part of it looked like cast iron. The end of it was enclosed, like it contained machinery, and was lower than the rest and more rounded.

I pounded on the enclosed portion for a while, trying to loosen up some seams like I did with the white building. I did manage to make a seam visible, though it remained tightly closed. Some broad, shallow rivet heads, perhaps three inches across, also became more noticeable, and took on a cloudy, waxy look.

The dark structure had a series of rooms that led away to the right, paralleling the end of the white building but a little ways from it. The rooms had the roofs mostly cut away, leaving a smooth overhang along the inside of the walls, an overhang with rounded corners. I also felt that doors existed that could be used to go from room to room.


I led the people through the cut-away roof down into the first room. The room had a sink and various devices and objects hung or attached to the walls. There was also a table. The devices and objects seemed to be simple in nature. Some had mechanisms to operate, and some didn't. There seemed to be nothing, aside from perhaps the lights, that required electricity, though I'm not sure about this. Some of the devices were actually the controls for some very advanced equipment, advanced even beyond what we have today. Even so, the room in general had the feeling of an earlier time about it, and seemed almost like a kitchen, though some items had more of a business nature.

I seemed to know in my mind something of what would be required of us. I could see, in my mind, that a horde of people would be coming, from the direction of the riverbed but at an angle. We had to fight them off as best we could, using the various objects and devices in the room. I saw also, though, that they would overrun us and continue on, but we had to continue to fight them as they went past and over us, at least partly simply to protect ourselves. I knew, too, that this was but one of a series of endless waves of such people. We were to handle just this one wave, though, leaving the others for groups that came after us.

I went to the far wall, then, where a tablet of paper was mounted high near the door. I looked at the pages briefly. Someone then took the tablet down to examine it, but I held it soon after and looked through a lot of the pages. They held instructions for us, printed in large letters, a few lines per page. The paper felt old and soft, and tore easily. I think a page or two may actually have been torn off by me or someone with me.

I became very concerned, then, that we not damage anything, at least as much as was possible. I felt that neatness counted and it was very important to put things back the way they were for the next group, that we had to do this before moving on to the next room and the next task. I tried to emphasize that to the others.

While I was doing this, though, part of my mind was saying to me that I was being led off into the endless tasks, and that all I had to do was call on Jesus Christ and it would all be taken away. I was leading the others astray as well, and failing in my duty, having not told them of what the entity had said.

But still I hesitated, wanting to continue a little more...

The cactus came through

My family moved to New Mexico just before I started second grade, in 1960. We then moved to Arizona early the next year, probably in February or March. While in New Mexico, we sometimes took trips in the car to look at the scenary.

One time when we were driving through the desert, we saw a very small mountain that abruptly rose up out of the flat desert. The mountain, small enough to be called a hill, looked so odd and out of place, surrounded by flat desert, that we stopped to have a better look.

The mountain was covered with rocks and boulders and had lots of plants on it, including several types of cactus. One of the types of cactus was a prickly pear that grew close to the ground, its broad, flat lobes having clusters of long needles.

I walked up on the mountain, along with my father and younger brother. I think my mother stayed further behind, and didn't actually get up on the mountain. I moved by myself among the rocks, away from the others, and was careful not to step on or brush against any of the types of cactus that grew there among the other plants. As I moved forward in my irregular path, I noticed that one of the flat prickly pears was not too far ahead. I kept that in mind as I wandered along between and on the rocks, and I purposely steered to one side to avoid it.

All of a sudden, I looked down and saw cactus needles, long spines, sticking out of the top of one of my thin-soled canvas shoes. I had somehow stepped on the prickly pear, even though I had tried to avoid it. And it was that same prickly pear, for I looked around to try to see if I had somehow stepped on a different one, one that I had been for some reason unaware of. There were no other ones near me. It had to be the same one, though I could not understand how I had managed to do it.

I looked down at the spines coming out of the top of my shoe for what seemed like a long time. There were at least three or four of them, and they were all in the front section of my shoe, probably within two or three inches or so of the front. While I could accept that perhaps one or two of them could have been in front of or between my toes, at least one was so far back that it had to have been very close to and perhaps past the point where my toes joined my foot, and one was so far back that it had to have been through my foot.

I didn't feel any pain, or anything of the spines at all. There was no blood. I didn't know what would happen, though, if I tried to pull my foot off the cactus. Perhaps it would start to hurt, then. Perhaps everything would get very bad. I continued staring at it. I was hesitant to call out to my parents, because I felt kind of stupid for stepping on it, especially when I knew about it and was trying to avoid it.

Finally, because I knew I couldn't stay there forever, and having no other solution, I lifted up my foot and the needles came right out. I still didn't feel anything, and I didn't seem to be injured. The whole thing seems very strange, and I've never understood it.

Dream - Flying with the professor

In May 2005, around the middle of the month, I had another dream about flying.

I had been flying around in the desert by and at some military area, and the military got interested. I got away, but later came back with some people to get some big black SUV that had been left there.

One of the people was a professor type who had come up with the concept of flying, and he wanted to fly back instead of driving, so he went flying off.

I flew after him, even though I was worried about the attention it might bring. Sure enough, we were tracked down by military people, who captured us after we landed. They came into the building and got us.

We were holding little metal things that looked almost like hose clamps that were made of a couple of loops of metal with two bolts at one end. They were supposed to help us fly, but they weren't really necessary. The military wanted to use them to handcuff us to some pipes.

The professor willingly went along, maybe even fastening it on the pipe himself. He looked at me and said that normally he could pass through any metal, but not this metal, of course, because it was a special metal. I think that beyond what it was made of, that it was actually enchanted. I knew, though, that even if he couldn't pass through it, he could undo the bolts with his mind.

I pretended to fasten mine around my wrist and the pipe, but I just bent the loops so that it looked like it was fastened. I thought that it was easier to bend it back and get loose that way, rather than trying to undo the bolts with my mind. The captors didn't seem to notice and left us there, though we expected someone to come back later.

Our intention was to be gone, though, before that happened.

Suddenly, sleep paralysis

I've gone directly into a sleep paralysis state without falling asleep first at least once, but I was lying down at the time, and was extremely tired. It was the middle of the day, though, and I had not intended to actually fall asleep.

It was a strange feeling to have it happen. It seemed that all of a sudden my mind retreated. I could still think, but it was like I withdrew the physical connections and was locked into a small space inside my head. I was still somewhat aware of my body, more aware in some ways than before but less aware in others. I was unable to move at all, though. The only thing I had any control over was my breathing. I kept trying to make myself breath harder and deeper, and I seemed to be actually doing it, but it felt very odd. I seemed to have no direct connection to it. It was like my attempts were being conveyed through some intermediary, and I wasn't getting any feedback except for noting that my body did seem to be breathing deeper and faster. It was almost like giving commands to a sluggish robot that responded slowly, and not right away, but eventually did respond if you kept pushing the buttons.

I kept up the fight, refusing to give up, and finally, all of a sudden, my mind reconnected with my body and I could move. That was a little odd, too. It felt that my mind suddenly reached out and grasped the nerves that led through my body, and, while reaching out, simultaneously retreated. For before, my mind was alone, in a small place by itself, but now it was a small part of something bigger, my body.

Real or not

Perhaps we ourselves are not real, yet still exist.

A probability among other probabilities. A universe built upon an underlying unreality.

What of all the other possible worlds? Is our world more real than theirs?

Is our world more real than the afterlife? The afterlife will still be there when our world is gone.

Nevertheless, this is where we are, now. We have to go with what we have, real or not.

Write101 - The Never-Ending Story

There's something called "The Never-Ending Story" that a person named Jennifer runs. It's a story about the adventures of Dr. Morgenes. In the story, a brief introduction is given and then people are invited to add their own brief continuations to the story. Originally, it started out at her write101.com site, but a couple of years or so ago it was moved to a blog she started, and then given its own blog.

The blog version seems to be at least partially restarted, without carrying on the original story line at the point where it last left off, although she mentions briefly some of the earlier story in her explanations of it. Part of the earlier story is still available, though the blog seems to begin at the end of the first page and not the continuation page (both at write101.com), and ignores all the posts that were added at a different website (now seemingly abandoned; see below).

I've managed to put in a few contributions from time to time, part of them at the previous, now lost, location and part of them at the new location.


Write101.com

The write101 blog: All about writing

The current story location (the blog):
Never-Ending Story

The original story locations at write101.com (which still exist):
The Never-Ending Story
The Never-Ending Story continued


There was also another location, an outside website that was really a guestbook, that the continuation page originally linked to instead of the blog. This other location held 200 posts that continued the story. More posts actually existed, but they were lost because only 200 posts were allowed, and after that earlier ones disappeared.

This other location is apparently entirely gone, now. Trying to access it directly produced a long delay without much happening. (I have all but the earliest posts saved, though.)