Here are half the interesting dreams I've had since the last entry. I hope to post the others in another entry soon. These dreams all follow common patterns, but with weird new twists.

I've also made lists of the worlds in all the Mario games with discrete worlds. Actually, only the Mario games I own. Actually, only the ones I own that I like. Note that the worlds in "Super Mario Bros. 3" are given different names in different copies of the game, and the worlds in "Super Mario Land 2" have no official numbers (because the first six can be visited in any order).


Image

A cat born with four ears due to a mutation.


List 1: The Worlds of Super Mario Bros. 2

1. Grass Land
2. First Desert Land
3. Mountain Land
4. Ice Land
5. Tropical Land
6. Second Desert Land
7. Wart's Domain

List 2: The Worlds of Super Mario Land

1. Birabuto, the Desert Kingdom
2. Muda, the Undersea Kingdom
3. Easton, the Island Kingdom
4. Chai, the Mountain Kingdom

List 3: The Worlds of Super Mario Bros. 3

1. Grass Land
2. Desert Land a.k.a. Desert Hill
3. Ocean Side a.k.a. Water Land
4. Giant Land a.k.a. Big Island
5. Sky Land a.k.a. the Sky
6. Ice Land a.k.a. Iced Land
7. The Pipe Maze a.k.a. Pipe Land
8. Dark Land a.k.a. the Castle of Koopa

List 4: The Worlds of Super Mario World

1. Yoshi's Island
2. The Donut Plains
3. The Vanilla Dome
4. Twin Bridges
5. The Forest of Illusion
6. Chocolate Island
7. The Valley of Bowser
8. Star Road (not numbered)
9. Special World (not numbered)

List 5: The Worlds of Super Mario Land 2

1. Tree Zone
2. Macro Zone
3. Mario Zone
4. Pumpkin Zone
5. Turtle Zone
6. Space Zone
7. Wario's Castle
    

This was a typical back in school dream. The only really noteworthy part was that I was supposed to read a piece of prose to the class from out textbook. But it wasn't in my book. I couldn't figure out how that was possible, since I had just taken it out of the plastic wrap so there couldn't be pages missing. The story was Norwegian in origin.

I don't remember how that was resolved, but when I did read the story I came to an impasse. There was a name with "Ö" in it. I didn't know whether it was pronounced like the "Ö" in "Ragnarök" or the "Ö" in "Schönberg," and I didn't want to embarrass myself by pronouncing it the wrong way. But my stopping abruptly was also embarrassing. I don't remember how that was resolved either.

Later, I was telling someone outside of class about some slugs that came in neon colors. The lime green slugs were acid slugs, the neon orange slugs were fire slugs, the electric purple slugs were frostbite slugs and so on. I don't remember if I was talking about reality or fiction.

I had another dream that night after I woke up and fell back asleep. I'll post it later.

I dreamt about the Daleks. Doctor Who was still a work of fiction in this dream, but the Daleks were based on a real civilization (apparently of diminutive mutants living in robotic shells, though perhaps descended from humans instead of aliens). I was reading or watching something about how the Daleks were written for, and about how care was taken not to offend the people who lived through the nightmare of the latest Dalek War.

The bulk of this dream wasn't very interesting. It was based heavily on real memories from various art classes, so it didn't depart from reality enough to be very remarkable. I was in a summer art class in building that housed the old art museum. The only part that had the usual weirdness of my dreams was when I went to use the bathroom, and it became one of my weird unisex bathroom dreams.

The building's restroom was large and had no stall dividers. The toilets were some new futuristic type, and were all connected to each other to form something like a giant silver and white bench. This was despite the fact that the room and everything else in it looked old and run-down. It took me a moment to figure out how to use a new toilet, but I managed.

Then a group of girls came in. I was afraid I'd gone into the wrong restroom until I remembered there were other boys in there too. Nobody seemed surprised that both sexes were in the restroom, so I didn't say anything and tried to act like this wasn't horribly awkward for me. None of the girls used the toilet. They all just talked amongst themselves, and a couple fixed their hair and makeup. I was frightened again when I thought I shouldn't be using this toilet because it was underwater, but then I realized I wasn't really up to my waist in water, there was just a thick mist in the room (like in the derelict spaceship in Alien). Then I woke up.

I was at a Sherman family reunion. The house and town didn't seem like anyplace in real life, but in the dream it was the home of some relatives. We'd brought Junebug along, and he got too rowdy, so I took him for a walk around the strange town. When I returned, I was asked to take my cousin Martin on a walk too, and was handed his leash.

A ways into the walk I thought to myself, "Why am I taking Marty for a walk? He's not a pet, he's a human being. And he's not even a small child, he's an adolescent." I don't remember where it went from there. Martin is in college in real life.
 

Top: Some drawings by Jonathan Wojcik. Middle: My drawings based on the above. Bottom: More of my drawings using the same design æsthetic.

I was in Iowa City, somewhere deep within a giant building filled with maze-like halls and rooms built over the course of decades. I ended up in a small store, like a corner drugstore, where I looked for something that wasn't there. The girl behind the counter was actress Sarah Chalke. Since she was a friend of a friend, I wanted to buy something from the store she worked at, so I was going to get a pack of Trident. But they didn't have any, and the only gum they did have was some shabby-looking off-brand gum I wasn't sure was even gum. So I bought Tic-tacs instead.

Right before I left, Chris Miller, a person I know in real life, came in to chat with Sarah Chalke. They were dating in this dream.

Then I went with my mother to a seafood restaurant/bookstore that was located in the same building. Like the little store, it was very familiar to me, but it seemed to have gotten worse lately. My first bad impression was a bunch of tiny parasitic arthropods, sort of like spiders, ticks, and fleas, but not any of those, that got on my hand from the wall, and I had to brush them off. Then they got my order wrong. Shortly after I started to eat, I went to the bathroom to wash my hands. My mother was away from the table too, browsing the books, and when I got back they had cleared our table, throwing away my barely-eaten meal. I was complaining when I woke up.

I was a green parrot courting a female goldfinch with a Cockney accent in 19th century London. But that reality was revealed to be a Disney movie I was watching at Grandma Sherman's. Then there was some scene in the dream involving Uncle Chris, but I don't remember how it played out. I recorded this dream right after it happened, but can't find where I wrote it now, so the details and exact date are lost.

That monster thing from the end of The Gate, because I happen to have it on my hard drive.

This dream revolved around a creature that was a member of an alternative intelligence, a sentient race that evolved on besides humans. That is the one unifying thread, although the plot and even the nature of the creature changed. It changed from the size of a weasel to the size of a bug, gained visible eyes that it lost later, became a parasite at one point, and seemed like an animal rather than an intelligent being in others. I never noticed these inconsistencies while I was in the dream.

The creature had the genus name Heptasaurs (spelled like that, not Heptasaurus), with a species name to go with it which I forgot. I don't remember what part of the Earth it came from, assuming my dream even gave away that information, but its people had built a thriving civilization without coming into contact with mankind until very recently. It evolved from one of the minor phyla (here is a nice introduction to the minor phyla that was put together by some class at Seattle University). It was an orange-tan color not far from that of human flesh and looked sort of like a centipede, millipede, or onychophoran, but also had features like some kind of mollusc or gastropod, which lessened its grossness. For most of the dream at least it didn't have eyes, antennae, visible mouthparts, or a face in the conventional sense.

It was an ambassador that was going to meet with representatives of human governments, which we all hoped would lead to a peaceful coexistence between human and alternative intelligences. My Grandma Lindberg was driving it to this conference in her van (the one her and Grandpa had before the Odyssey), and I was worried, because she tended to get lost (and isn't allowed to drive in real life). But I ended up going with her, and was able to navigate. The reason I was there was because I was the only person who could touch the creature without being grossed out or experiencing pain. The pain was apparently psychosomatic on the part of the human touching the creature. It had to be carried everywhere because it wasn't used to this environment.

But the plot changed so some of my Muir relatives were there too. I was having fun bouncing the creature's harmless eye lasers off the tinted windows. Here or elsewhere, a bridge was of some significance to the plot, but I can't remember what.

At one point it was a symbiont or parasite that needed a warm-blooded host to survive, and it had to be transported in a temporary host until it could join with a more suitable one at the peace conference. The host was June, who was a female dog in this dream and would supposedly recover once the creature left its body. However, June suffered during her time as the host, and her eyes were red from crying. The creature reengineered the dog's body, so its uterus became a marsupial pouch that it lived in. Later the dream changed so the creature didn't need a host, and I forgot that it had ever had one.

Once the dream's history had been rewritten, the now much smaller creature (the size of a grass snake, I think) was being transported by my other grandmother. It escaped in rural Iowa, and for some reason we had to convince a Catholic priest of the creature's existence. Then it changed so the creature was missing in the Pershing house. It was now the size of a large centipede (large by Midwestern standards; there are centipedes in the British Isles that grow longer than 9", centipedes in South America that grow longer than a foot, and centipede-like arthropods in prehistoric times that reached at least 9'9").

John and I had to go into the ventilation system of our house, which was antique and had never been properly explored. In the process of looking for the creature, we found exoskeletons of dead organisms resembling the creature, which must have been there for a long time. One had died coiled around a pipe and was about 5' long, while the other was 2-3' and was in a hiding position behind a wall. These raised questions, but we put off any investigation and speculation until we had caught the creature. We had to get it to the peace conference, even though it seemed more like an animal than a sentient being in this part of the dream. We did finally catch it, but I don't remember the plot's conclusion, assuming it had one.

In another dream from that night I was watching an episode of The Simpsons that parodied Love Hina, containing very blunt ridiculing of Japanese culture.

Somebody discovered that there were three universes before our own. And there was apparently some kind of reincarnation, since a young woman under hypnosis remembered her lives in all three previous universes. Except the only part she could remember were what the toilet facilities were like. What's more, I can barely remember anything from her stories.

The one I do remember is that in the first universe, the woman (remembering herself as a little girl), sat on the empty eggshells of giant bird-like reptiles to relieve herself. There was a maid who put the used eggs over fires. The water vapor from the liquid waste was collected for drinking water, and the rest was sterilized with heat to be used as fertilizer. In the second universe, the woman herself was a maid involved in the function and/or cleaning of toilets. One of the maids had interesting white gloves.

At another point in my dreaming that night I was seeing a subplot cut from Return of the Jedi where some of our heroes were riding in a big wheeled tank on Endor's Forest Moon. Very cool.
 

I lost most of my text files to a computer virus, including a nearly complete novella and two short stories I'd put a lot of work into. My nearly complete novel Truelove survived, as did my novelette "Atsuko the Cute Witch Battles the Mysterious Death Tentacles," which I've been slowly editing for months. It's very dispiriting. I probably won't be writing any fiction for a while, unless I work on Truelove.

A drawing I made based on one of the dreams below. On the left is what the actual pencil drawing looks like; on the right is the scan after I added color and detail using Photoshop.

I was playing a small part in a film. At first I believed the character I was going to play was based on Gêkí Yün, a character I created in high school. After I had signed up to play the part I found that the character had no connection, but I still played him like he had a similar personality. It was a superhero ensemble cast film based on existing comic books or some other medium.

The director was using unorthodox methods. Only the actors playing the villains knew the script. The villains and the fake news appearing on T.V. were the only things telling the people playing the heroes what they should be doing. We were supposed to react in the way we thought our characters would, and in the end all the raw footage would be cut together to form a coherent story. The extras were ordinary people who didn't know a movie was being made, and they included a class of young children on a tour. It was filmed in Iowa City. I think the elevator in the parking garage figured in.

My character was a greyish blue-skinned mutant. I was told that the C.G.I. character would be pasted over me in postproduction, but would copy my positions and facial expressions. He could glide on wing-like membranes growing from his arms and his oversized hands, as well as change his color and texture the way some octopi can, giving him camouflage.

A problem with our director's approach was that the extras reacting to me couldn't see me using my powers, and thought I was just silly. There was one point where I flattened myself against a big piece of concrete (a ramp?) and pretended to blend in, but a woman walking above me and the little girl with her could of course see me in real life, and looked right at me. The girl even giggled. I was afraid I would seem like a comic relief character in the final cut, especially if the effects guys made it so my powers didn't work as well as I was acting like they did. Lots of other scenes happened in the making of the movie, but this is all I remember now.

One of the people in this movie was an actress who I'd seen in several things and greatly admired. When I met her in person, my admiration got out of hand, and my praise for her sounded really fannish and gushy. I realized this probably seemed weird to her and others, partly because she was about ten years my junior. She had been in three different movies that involved sliding down a water slide that had coins on it (like something out of a Mario game). During my over-the-top conversation with her, I asked if this trend was some kind of inside joke, but she didn't know.

In this dream there was a computer-animated movie coming out based on "Super Mario Bros. 3," which had no apparent relation to me, the actress, the director, or anybody or anything else in the dream. I woke up right after talking to the actress.

In this dream, I woke up and went to use the bathroom only to find a banana slug the size of a golden retriever slithering out of my toilet. But when I took a second look at it I realized it was no giant slug, nor even a living creature. It was a many-jointed robotic vehicle that happened to superficially resemble a slug. What I had thought were the eyestalks were really the vehicle's pilot and copilot, a pair of striped caterpillars the size of Polish sausages.

I made a drawing based on what I remembered of the vehicle and its drivers, but took some liberties. The vehicle is old and beat-up in the drawing, but looked shiny and new in the dream.

I had another dream I felt like typing up, so I'm making another entry. I hope this keeps up, but I make no promises. I've also posted a list I made (which I really went overboard on).

Lately I've been listening to the Move (I now own all their albums and single A and B-sides), reading, working on personal projects, and feeling like I'm wasting my life.

The Move, circa 1968. Foreground: Trevor Burton. Background, left to right: Bev Bevan, Carl Wayne, and Roy Wood.
 

• I was half a year old when the first Martin Luther King Day was celebrated
• 1½ years old when The Terminator came out
• 1½ when the Crisis of Infinite Earths began in the D.C. Universe
• 2 when the Post-Crisis continuity was introduced to the D.C. Universe
• 2½ when the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in the U.S.
• 2½ when the Challenger Disaster happened
• 2½ when Georgia O'Keeffe died
• 3 when Labyrinth came out
• 3 when the Electric Light Orchestra broke up
• 3½ when the explosion of Sanduleak -69 202 was observed
• 4 when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered
• 4½ when Red Dwarf premiered
• 4½ when the Writers Guild of America went on strike for the second time
• 5 when Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark broke up
• 5½ when the Traveling Wilburys debuted
• 5½ when George H. W. Bush was elected president
• 5½ when Roy Orbison died
• 5½ when Salvador Dalí died
• 5½ when CompuServe launched the first Internet service provider for P.C. users
• 6 when Batman came out
• 6 when the Seinfeld pilot was aired
• 6 when the Game Boy was released in the U.S.
• 6 when Voyager 2 probed Neptune
• 6½ when Doctor Who went on hiatus
• 6½ when the 1990s began
• 6½ when the first Soviet satellite country declared independence
• 7 when the Hubble Telescope was launched
• 7 when Seinfeld began regular airing
• 7 when the Gulf War began
• 7 when Germany was officially reunified
• 7½ when the Traveling Wilburys broke up
• 7½ when the Gulf War ended
• 8 when Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out
• 8 when the World Wide Web came online
• 8 when the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was released in the U.S.
• 8½ when the U.S.S.R. was formally dissolved
• 8½ when Sailor Moon premiered in Japan
• 8½ when Isaac Asimov died
• 9 when the Endeavour was launched
• 9 when Batman Returns came out
• 9 when Hurricane Andrew struck the Florida coast
• 9½ when Bill Clinton was elected president
• 9½ when Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered
• 9½ when Babylon 5: The Gathering came out
• 9½ when the Waco Siege happened
• 10 when The X-Files premiered
• 10½ when Babylon 5 the series premiered
• 10½ when Cake debuted
• 10½ when the first global positioning satellite system came online
• 11 when the first extrasolar planet's discovery was confirmed
• 11 when Star Trek: The Next Generation ended
• 11 when Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered
• 11 when Netscape 0.9 was released
• 11½ when "The Far Side" ended
• 12 when the Oklahoma City Bombing happened
• 12 when Windows 95 was released
• 12 when Sailor Moon premiered in the U.S.
• 12 when the verdict was reached in the O.J. Simpson Criminal Trial
• 12½ when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated
• 12½ when Lexx 1.1: I Worship His Shadow came out
• 13 when Doctor Who the movie came out
• 13½ when Carl Sagan died
• 13½ when Sailor Moon ended in Japan
• 14 when the Mars Pathfinder landed
• 14½ when Lexx the series premiered in Canada, Germany, and the U.K.
• 15½ when Babylon 5 ended
• 15½ when Red Dwarf ended
• 16 when the Littleton Massacre happened
• 16 when Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came out
• 16 when Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ended
• 16½ when the 2000s began
• 16½ when Lexx the series premiered in the U.S.
• 17½ when George W. Bush was elected president
• 17½ when the last new episode of Sailor Moon aired in the U.S.
• 17½ when the Third Millennium began
• 17½ when Love Hina premiered
• 18 when the September Eleventh Attack happened
• 18½ when George Harrison died
• 19 when Lexx ended
• 19 when John Bloom died
• 19 when The X-Files ended
• 19½ when the Columbia Disaster happened
• 19½ when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested
• 19½ when the Iraq War began
• 20 when the Great Northeast Blackout happened
• 20 when the first manned Chinese spacecraft was launched
• 20½ when Saddam Hussein was arrested
• 21 when SpaceShipOne was launched
• 21½ when the Indian Ocean Earthquake happened
• 21½ when Doctor Who returned
• 22 when William Mark Felt revealed himself to be Deep Throat
• 22 when Hurricane Katrina struck the Louisiana coast
• 23½ when the Wii was released worldwide
• 23½ when Saddam Hussein was executed
• 23½ when the Postmarks debuted
• 24½ when the Writers Guild of America went on strike for the third time
• 24½ when Messenger flew by Mercury for the first time
• 25½ when Barack Obama was elected president
• 26 when the Digital Switchover happened in the U.S.
• 26½ when the 2010s began

I was in a reality show. Whereas some reality shows have people trading spouses, jobs etc., I had been talked into trading bodies. I was temporarily inhabiting the body of some athlete via a telepathic link, while he apparently inhabited mine. The part I mainly remember was the younger sister of the person whose body I was in. She was a very playful and open young woman, and she flirted with me. I liked her and wanted us to be a couple, but the fact that I was her brother made things awkward. I was afraid to encourage her, but didn't want to reject her.

In the last scene before I woke up, we were talking in secret in the bathroom of her house (which was partly like the Pershing house). After a while, I tried to hint to her that I'd like her to leave the bathroom for a minute so I could pee. When subtlety didn't work, I flat-out asked her to leave, and she said she didn't mind seeing me do that. She thought it was funny that I did mind, but finally left. Then, after I unzipped my fly, she poked her head in the door to tell me one last thing. After that I locked the door. For some reason I could see through the wall into the bedroom of my "sister," but I knew no one in there could see me. Maybe there was a camera in there, and a T.V. monitor in the bathroom. Anyway, the last thing I remember was watching the girl talk to my mother (that is, my real mother, not the mother of the person whose body I was inhabiting), but being unable to hear what they were saying. They were laughing.

When I was around 9 I had a nightmare about watching a disturbing movie. The movie, as far as I knew when I woke up, didn't exist. But in my dream it was vividly real, and I was very affected by its grotesque and depressing content.

It was about a scientist trying to do something. I don't even know what, but he was portrayed as bad/foolish to attempt this. It took place in a stereotypical big white laboratory, like what you see in films like Tron and The Manhattan Project. He enclosed himself in a machine, a big white tank, for some experiment. No one could turn the machine off after he started it. Inside the tank, he uncontrollably mutated into many different forms. Other people in white lab coats could only watch in horror. The only one I remember resembled a tapir. I forget how the dream ended, except that it wasn't a happy ending for the scientist. It probably doesn't sound very horrific in this brief, partly-forgotten summation, but it certainly frightened me.

The weird part is that I recently discovered that there was an actual movie with a plot uncannily similar to this, Altered States. I wouldn't have been allowed to watch it when I was that young, but I must have seen part of it, or heard someone talking about it, and my subconscious memory of its plot shaped my dream. Otherwise it would be a remarkable coincidence.