Dream Log: May 29, 2001

One of the most annoying dreams is when you are still at work. I'm a manager at a restaurant. when I got home i laid down to rest after working 46 hours in one weekend. In my dream I was filling orders as as fast i could but slower than they were being thrown at me. The phone rang and woke me up, it was my best friend calling to tell me she was pregnant. For a second I thought I had fallen asleep instead of woken up and I kept trying to tell myself I had to wake up and finish filling the orders. Then I realized that my best friend really was pregnant and whether those people got there food or not, it was only a dream.

I dreamt a nightmare of a crippled automaton. A humanoid robot that limped and had a vinyl tube in its heart that wrapped around its chest. Blood flowed through. It wore a dark trench coat over its big square shoulders. It chased me around and I shut it behind a door, but the door had a hole in it. The automaton's tube had come loose and blood was squirting around as it paced back and forth begind the door in a craze screaming 'Treason! Treason! Treason!' It was slowly dying and I had my hand over the hole in the door to keep out the blood.

I woke in fear and her was back to me in our last night of an older life, an older loove. That automaton, I think is our love ... or my love. Insane, screaming, angry and dying. Crippled already, betrayed, yet somehow clueless in its simple way.

Parkins just stood there, ready to jump over the trench. He had this silly grin on his face, like the hell going on around us wasn't really important, like he was an actor in some movie. Bullets, pointed little darts hot with death and anger, whizzed by his head and suddenly one of the tiny bits of lead caught him. Right in the temple. One second he was as big as life, hell he was life, and the next that funny grin sorta faded in a fraction of a second and the smile turned into something like momentary thought, consideration. There was a war going on around us and he was taking a moment to decide if he was ready to die yet or not. Didn't matter, though. His body made the decision for him. He fell in a limp heap at our feet, more bullets piercing his fatigued body as it rolled through the air. I could hear the bite of the bullets as they tore into his flesh. Gone. Parkins was gone and I never even knew his first name. "T. PARKINS" was the name on his lapel, not even in my platoon, some stragler who'd stayed behind to lay down covering fire for the suppression teams.

A medic, LT. A. STIENZ, appeared out of nowhere, like a grim angel of death with far too much knowledge of his craft and yet not enough of it to make a difference all locked up in his helmet. Stienz knelt next to the fallen Parkins and made a series of movements faster than I could see; perhaps not that fast- I turned away a few times to fire back at our enemy. I decided then and there that I hated all medics. More than the fools who were shooting at us from across the field, medics were now my official public enemy. If I happened to see a medic headed in my direction, to work on me, it meant bad news. I didn't want to see any more medics. They were harbingers of doom. My hate for medics in general took firm hold in my heart when Stienz walked away from Parkins, the hero that never was, without even closing the fallen soldier's eyes. I was about to shout at the lieutenant when another volley of gunfire was sent over our trench and suddenly Stienz was lying right next to Parkins.

We were dropping like flies. Thousands of us. We didn't want to die. We wanted to live and go home and be celebrated for the heroes we were told we were going to be. We wanted to hug our moms and dads and sisters and brothers and just leave this chess board of murder. They fired at us, we fired back. Cause and effect. Simple, really. But, then again, dying is never simple- especially if you don't know when your ticket is about to get punched. I've had years to think about these things, to get angry and hot and furious over the insanity of it all because I survived. But then, in the heat of battle, all I could focus on, though, was the immediate stuff. As much as I hated medics, I didn't like seeing Stienz die like that.

I jumped back into reality and the world was a haze of chaos. Men shouting, boys crying, shells exploding, the whine of bullets and ricochets, screams of pain and confusion... to go from dead silence in my head back to that hell and turmoil jolted me. I flipped back, raised my gun and began shooting indiscriminately across to our enemy, someone else's enemy, someone's friend or something. I didn't care what I hit, I was pissed that some kraut had killed my medic, whom I hated. Maybe he's dead already, I thought to myself, but this can't go on anymore. Either they die or I do, but this can't keep happening. The sooner, the better. Kill.

And I suppose I killed. I don't really know. A bullet slammed into my helmet, a glancing shot, and I was knocked unconscious. I vaguely remember seeing another medic, I couldn't focus on his nametag, rush towards me and then I blacked out. I think I was afraid for myself when I saw him. Is that it? I asked myself and the closing blackness. Am I dead?

I woke up some four hours later in a medical unit, a bandage wrapped snugly around my head. I felt like someone had hit me with a sledge hammer right behind my eye. And when my vision stopped being blurry and I could hear groans of pain from my fellow wounded, I stopped for a second, not knowing if I should cry or scream in fury. For a minute I wished I had died. For a brief second in time I wished I was dead. I was in battle for all of ten minutes and all I had to show for it was a concussion and a deep scar on my scalp- and the memory of people I barely knew dying all around me. And I didn't know how many had lived and went on to carry the battle and save the day. I didn't know if the day had been saved. All I knew is that there were men out there on that field dead and I should have been one of them. Lucky? No. I felt cheated. Luck didn't sneak up on me for days.

I've dyed my hair blue. I'm walking to Dinkytown from my dad's house. Someone is with me, then I'm driving with a friend. I want to find a bike to take back to LA so I can bike to work, and I'm trying to think of ways I can hide my new hair color from my boss. Back in LA there are bugs in my room. I hear them moving in the three empty drink cans on my floor. I pick up the cans, thinking to throw them out, but first I shake them a little, hoping to force the bugs to the bottom where they won't crawl over my hands while I'm walking downstairs. One can has tiny flying beetles in it which emerge while I'm shaking it - good plan, huh? They're smaller than my smallest fingernail, black and green, and they fly in a flock like birds do. I'm irritated at them. I crush the can into an empty glass so no more can escape. I wonder why the spiders didn't get them. There are two huge spiderwebs in my room, one by the bed and one in front of the closet. The one by the bed has about 3 spiders on it. They're black and while some are large, they're all fairly normal looking. The web is normal as well. The web by the closet looks vaguely like a basket, about a foot across at the opening and kind of conical, with the bottom about a foot deep. The strands connecting it to the wall are strong; I have trouble breaking them. The spiders here look like they're made of glass. Some of them have bodies the size of my fingertips. The larger ones are almost perfectly transparent, the smaller ones are whitish and gleaming. There are about five. When I come back to my room after throwing out the insect-filled cans, the room is empty except for the bed. One window has been replaced by a door, and the other wall has an extra window in it. Everything is closed and curtained; it's high summer and hot outside.

It was strange I was with my best friends and cousins to go watch Pearl Harbour. My mom was there too and I had to sit with my mom while everyone else sat like two rows behind me. I haven't seen the movie, so basically the only big scenes I saw were from the trailer and anything made up in my head with the new actors re-enacting From Here to Eternity. Well the theater was really large but it was wierd because it was the theater in school I think.

Well after that everyone kind of disappeared except for one of my friends and we were heading to Star Bucks. So we got there and my uncle and aunt were there. My aunt was working, she owned the place and there was another teenager there who was making drinks as fast as she can. I order my Iced Chai Tea Latte that I get everyday and my friend gets her Mocha. My uncle comes up to me and tells us that we got there in time for the party (because we skipped the Church ceremony part). There were presents piled up in a corner and people started entering the store with more presents and putting them in the corner. I recognized one of the people who use to go to the same highschool with me, now we go to the same University but she's in my sister's grade. It was odd because I completely ignored her, I didn't like her that much in real life anyway.

When we walked out of the Star Bucks we turned out to be in Chinatown and we were completely lost. It was getting dark and people started setting up these stalls. There were people performing Kung fu and flying around, and others doing intense illusion tricks and healing magic. We were walking slowly and cautiously around the place but couldn't find a way out. So instead of trying to leave we decided to try some of the tricks that they show how you do, of course we fail miserably at first but we start getting the hang of it. It was really cool because soon we were twirling things and making things move without touching them.

When daylight came we finally got home and tried showing people what we learned but all we could do was mediocre, compared to what we could do the night before. We felt pretty stupid and kept saying that we could, it just didn't seem to be working right now. We got so angry!

I suddenly woke up when I banged my hand on the table.

Life was normal, I and my friends walked by the city and told each other opinions about the cars there. There was some sort of construction work going on at a parking lot, so we went there to see what it was. I dont remember exactly the details, but someone who I definately didnt like came to mess with me. He was asking for a fight, and soon got it. He was slightly taller than I, but about equally skilled so it was a long fight. Slowly, I got the upper position and managed to beat a long series of punches to his face. He staggered back and fell on the ground, but I didnt have time to enjoy my victory because a large powerarmored guard was coming around the construction area. I pulled my friend to a large pipe that was hanging downwards from the construction and asked him to help me up into it. I managed to catch some sort of powerup from inside the pipe, but after that we had to run, and I dont remember anything for a while..

I had obtained an exoskeleton, but it seemed that there was more going on in the city than I had expected. Heavily armored and armed soldiers moved everywhere, few tanks blocked some of the city streets, fires here and there, and everyone was talking about a Mecha attack. I got to the bus station, and since the army seemed to have something against me too, I decided to stay hidden as well as I could. I saw a blue Mecha with green shoulders at the construction area, but there were several tanks those had shot harpoons to capture it. I noticed that one of my friends was in it, so I'd might need to help him. My blue exoskeleton had artifical muscle structures, and in addition of making me stronger, they also allowed faster movement than my own muscles, so I made a plan of attacking the leftmost tank first and tearing its hatch open. Before I could do anything, the Mecha managed to take a grip of all the wires holding it, and threw the tanks into one pile before pulling the wires off itself. I walked to it, and said "Good work, I could have beaten the tanks too." He had to go somewhere, so I decided to hide into one of the structures. As I stepped in, someone with a powerarmor flailed his hand around me to strangle me. The servos of his armor would have easily chrushed me, but I managed to get away from his grip, and saw that he had a minigun in his other hand. I jumped at him and tried to hit him, but he quickly moved his hand in front of him and grabbed my fist. He lowered his minigun to lay against the wall and I heard his voice crackle through the armors speaker. "So, you want to sort it out fair? Fine, like the real men should fight their wars." He released my fist, so I tried to quickly hit him with my other hand, but he managed to block it efficiently. He tried to hit me with the large fist of his armor, but though it was almost as quick as my exoskeleton, I managed to narrowly dodge it. I tried to hit him twice, but he was very skilled so he managed to dodge one of them and got only a mild prod agaisnt his stomach. He swung his right arm, but I managed to block it with mine, and then quickly hit him twice into his headpiece before he recovered and started blocking my hits again. I tried to beat him as quickly as I could, but he started hitting back at me so both blocked each others hits by hitting at each others fists. While blocking my hits, he said "I remember.. that puch. It was you at the construction work, you're using the same desperate strategy.". I speeded up and shouted back "I was NEVER worse than you!", and managed to hit him once again. He pulled his hand back and managed to hit me hard, but because of the exoskeleton the impact only hurled me in the air against a staircase, which breaked from the hit. I got up, took a few steps at him, and quickly jumped up against the roof and threw me down against his head with my arms, delivering a hard kick against his headpiece. He staggered, but soon rushed at me angrily while I jumped a volt over him. It took him longer to turn than from me, so I spun around and hit him into neck with both hands, striking a weak point in his armor and making him scream in pain. He backed against me and tried to chrush me against the wall, but fortunately my exoskeleton was strong enough so I only hurt myself slightly while the wall behind me shattered. His armor was quick but clumsy, so he couldnt reach his back, and I managed to get a good grip of his headpiece without him reaching me. I couldnt strangle him, so I just held him from the neck with my left hand while beating him in the back of his neck with my right, slowly twisting the metal supports inside while he tried to shake me off. At the final hit, his voice turned into a gurgle and the armor fell with my enemy dead inside it.

I got out from the house, but a blue Mech was waiting for me. It had a tall torso like a Mecha, but its knees turned backwards, it had two huge machineguns bolted to its arms, and two missile racks on its shoulders. Its head shape was from a T-Rex, complete with strong fangs and large jaw servos. A voice from a loudspeaker said "So, the fool lost the fight, huh? But now, you're going to bow for your superior!". I ran back to the house to get the minigun, and just got out before the Mech sweeped the whole upper floor of the house away with its left arm. It started turning its torso, so I decided to run for cover and shoot it later, which was the right choise since its two autocannons soon teared plate-sized holes into the asphalt. I knew I wasnt safe behind the house either, so I ran around it while the Mech turned while firing a long series of fist-sized bullets through the house. I managed to get to its side so I opened fire, but the bullets didnt even scratch its surface as it turned to face me again. This time, it fired a burst of missiles, but I started running down the road so they hit the ground behind me, still close enough so the pressure threw me forward and on my stomach. I quickly got up and ran to an unusually large ditch. The Mech walked after me, but another large thing approached my position. It was my friend in his Mecha, and it got the attention of the Mech, making it turn its torso toward it. I tried to shout to my friend "Use the flamethrower! Mech gets overheated easily!" He heard me, but wasnt yet close enough so he fired the Mech with some projectile weapon, hitting it hard enough to make a notable dent on its upper jaw. The Mecha got to the range of flamer, but suprisingly the Mech had a freezethrower on its bottom! It fired a cold beam against the Mecha, which apparently snuffed out the flamer. The Mecha was slowing down, so I lifted a fallen billboard to block the beam, and though it was freezing my arms, I thought it was only way to give the Mecha time to get warmed up and use the flamer. I tried to shout to my friend, but the pilot of the Mech answered me "No use, your friend will be out from the battle for a long while!". The Mecha didnt seem to move, and the Mech turned to face me again, so I jumped down to the ditch while the Mech fired its missiles again. I hit the ground in the middle of the opposite wall of the ditch, but quickly jumped backwards against the wall opposite to that so the missiles didnt have time to change their course. The missiles threw dirt into the air, but before the dust settled, the Mech tried to jump on me. I ran a few steps ahead of it to avoid being chrushed, but it turned its torso down to aim at me. It wasnt flexible enough to fire down in that sharp angle, so its autocannons only hit the dirt. The Mecha started turning around, but I managed to run between its legs and climb up from the ditch. On this side of the ditch, there were several automatic turrets those had a few meters long metal hull and a rotating head at the end of it. I jumped behind the hull of one turret, and as the Mech somehow got up from the ditch, it noticed that I had hidden somewhere in the turret field. The head of the turret was at the end of the hull, so it only turned 180 degrees and couldnt shoot at the Mech, while it shouted "How pathetic! Dont you know that stationary guns are made to protect rocks and flowers, while mobile weapons are made for real mass destruction?". The Mech circled around the turrets rear, while I crawled under its head on the opposite side of it to avoid being seen by the Mech. It didnt notice me so it continued walking deeper into the field, while I tried to call my friend about where he was. The Mech occasionally fired its autocannons against the turrets in attempt to drive me out from my hidingplace, and my friend said on the phone that he was at the repairbay, and that I'd just have to handle the Mech myself. I wondered if he had ANY idea how hopeless this was, but I woke up..