I walked through a strange multi-denominational church, and into what appeared to be 'my' room. I was handed my mail by the churches' minister daughter. It was an envelope bearing no return address.

Inside were photographs. A picture of my Moped outside on a sunny day, another of just it's wheel in the frame. A picture of the traffic lines on pavement blurred by motion, the next photo of the same lines, but they are now twisted into circular spirals on the road.
The final pictures are blue-tinted photographs from my photo album. Familiar images of friends and myself are mixed with photos of events I don't recognize – and perhaps haven't happened yet. They all exist side by side in these images; all tinted the same shade of cyan.

Underneath all of the photos is a small business card. Where the individuals name would usually be, only the word 'Travel' exists. A street corner address, and a time are printed below.

In the dream I turn and ask my brother if he knows who did this, but neither he nor his friend Cody know. I then seek out the little girl who gave me the package. She states simply that it came in the mail.

I sit wondering what it all means on the floor of my dream, and awake.

___

I almost wish this had occurred in the real world so I could discover who sent this strange message, and what it meant. The most puzzling fact about all this is that - in a way - I sent this message to myself. Of all the people we believe to know so well, we know our inner selves least of all.

I ran through a dark, shadowed city rendered in shades of blue and gray. Small red eyes peered out from crevices, tracking me.

A thick layer of soot carpeted this town, yet I left no footprints in the ash. As I ran along the waterfront, I passed an old school building with a fenced in field. A small girl appeared at the entrance as I passed, and grabbed me around the waist. A ripple of light arched across our forms, and we were both gone.

I now stood in the same place, but the gray and blue shading of the world seemed peeled away. That area sat like a malevolent rift at the edge of this school.

The girl explained this was a sanctuary against the darkness beyond. This school seemed like an unfamiliar hybrid of cathedral holy site, and a girls grade school. The world was now in vibrant colour.

I was shown the recreation area, which was as large as a soccer field and filled with children. Beside this field was a river, separated from the school by a fence. Leading up the school was a floating staircase, assembled from blessed wooden planks, and gold. Inside, the building, the hallways were all brightly lit, and a calming shade of beige. Down a series of winding, blind-corner hallways, was a sleeping area. I rested here until I heard screams echo in from outside. I rushed toward the water front area, to see a series of the red eyed creatures breaching the sanctuary. It was the emotional willpower of the children that held the dark creatures at bay, but I could sense them failing. Colour was beginning to drain from the sky. Patches of grass, and the children themselves began to desaturate before my eyes. Another, older child grabbed my arm, and pointed toward the building. I understood without words that that sanctuary was lost - and I needed to escape.

Running out of the fallen sanctuary, back into the gray world. Down a highway overpass, on to a main road clogged with both ash and snow. Two people danced atop a car, a man and a woman. Both wore a flickering assortment of gask and filter masks. They pointed toward the highway below. A writhing mass of the red eyed creatures rode a rusted, hulking vehicle of some kind down the road. Mounted on the vehicles front was a snow plow, and it caused a tidal-arch of snow, grit, and soot to swirl and quake in it's wake.

I ran to the vehicle, and climbed on top as it passed. I pushed the deamons aside, and they payed me no mind. I reached the front of the deamon-plow, and rode like a flowing wave the arch of snow on my stomach. Soon, the highway blended into a dark train system. The screech of rails filled the packed cabin. The world outside was still soot grey, but we were no longer in a city. The rickety subway-style train passed swampland that was once suburbs - flooded skeletons of houses, with only their rooftops and sidebeams intact.

The people on the train seemed intent on getting to the front, so I followed. We seemed to descend downward through four levels of cars, stacked upon one another. Once I reached the furthest car, I saw the driver. They sat looking out at non-existent tracks, rocketing their vehicle and passengers toward the colourless horizon.

I walked down a dry gravel road on a warm fall afternoon. Birch trees lined each side, their white bark peeling and waving in the non-existent wind.

To my right, another path opens, and leads up a hill whose steep incline was over 45 degrees. Climbing up this hill, I grasp ruddy weeds and old gnarled tree roots that protrude from the tan coloured dirt path.

As I reached the hills' top, the ground sloped downward until it reached a winding stream littered with stepping stone rocks. On my right side, the birch tree forest, to my left, the stream. Beyond this was a swath of grass covered land which divided this world from the featureless ocean and gray-blue horizon.

The bank of the steam was populated by Komodo dragons who sluggishly meandered about. However, I was approached by a komodo dragon whose body was covered with neon-orange spines, not unlike a porcupine. Down the stream, and across various stones and shallows I ran from this creature. One of my boots became stuck in the mud, but I left it behind.

It was here I realized this place was exceedingly familiar.

Behind me existed a distorted version of Champlain College, and beyond it, what was once a swamp in another dream.

I now stood on the swath of land which divided the stream from the ocean. On this grassy area existed a rectangular gazebo. From the ceiling of this structure hung doll parts - arms, legs, torsos, and the occasional unblinking plastic head.

A series of wind chimes, each with their own pull-string, hung at the entrance. Behind them, a little
black girl whose hair was gathered into two fuzzy pigtails. The wooden flooring of this ghezbeoh was covered in long dried blood, instilling me with a sense of dread.

"Why does this place disassemble people?" the little girl asked. I climbed atop a fallen tree, and looked at the wind chimes. I knew that pulling them in the wrong order would mean dismemberment. A blue fog seemed to be rolling in from the forest, drifting across the river toward the gazebo.

"Because," I replied "Sometimes people need to be taken apart know who they truly are." The girl looked at me an nodded, then turned toward the horizon. The blue fog was thick now, reaching past the stream and over the gazebo. I sat down on the fallen birch tree and let it envelop me.

A disconnected, half remembered dream.

I was eating dinner in a trailer-style, 1950's diner when a storm front moved in. There was lightening outside, and a girl appeared at the doorway.

She was pretty, with brown hair, and without preconception, I believed her when she told me I was special, and how I should be with other people like me. Her evidence is that earlier that day, I did something to save a person, and that I'm deserving of being with 'them'.

I leave my things at the diner, and notice she's gone in the blink of an eye - and so are half the other patrons.

I walked outside, and under a grey sky, notice a column of people all smiling, walking down the street. I see a boy I knew as a child (who knocked his teeth out on his bikes handlebars) - he tells me a similar story about an attractive girl. However, in his version she said he was the only person found deserving. I look at the column of people, and feel they've all been told the same thing. I also worry about my belongings that are stashed under my seat in the diner.

I follow the mass of wandering, smiling people to a house without doors, and there's a longtable, with elegant plates for everyone. Their eyes and smiles alarm me, but a sense of acceptance pervades the room.

While disconnected, and without the structure most of my vivid dreams have - this one stayed with me for a few days. When the pretty girl told me I was special, it reminded me of the pure belief I had as a child. There was no doubt, and her words filled me with complete trust. However fleeting, it was a wonderful feeling to recapture.

I walked in the ocean waters for the first time this day, while visiting Australia in July, 2008.

___

I ran down a horizontal path made of roughly hewn stone and jumped over the foot wide gaps. A swirling, malevolent sensation of dread followed me. There was a man ahead of me, also running but he disappeared into the murky water that filled void between the gaps. Tentacled horrors with thin and tendrils like reached down toward me from behind and to my left.

* * *

I stand on a stone plateau, with stone steps reaching upward in front of me. I run toward the shadowed, swirling tentacled horror awaiting at the top of this Aztech shaped structure. Thick ferns and leaves surround the left and right side of the stars, blocking any escape. As the beast ensconces me in writhing darkness, I'm shown a vertically rotating series of video screens, each with terrible things upon them.
Fear, sadness and horror mix as the beast tightens it's grip. I remember the shoreline, the beach - and something terrible arises from the salty waters.

___

I awoke with a twitching, spastic start, heart beating and covered in a cold sweat. I immediately asked the four Korean kids if they'd had nightmares, as I'd noticed them moaning or shouting earlier in Korean while they slept. They all had, although they refused to discuss what it was that frightened them so much. I asked if they'd been in the ocean yesterday - they all had, either walking or swimming in it's waters.

I asked Stephen who had the bunk below me if he'd had any nightmares, and if he'd touched the ocean. He's done neither.

I walked down an long hallway with its ceiling open to a twilight sky. It turned left at the end, and the wall was covered in band stands. Danielle C. sat in one set, looking outward, unaware of my presence. She got up, walked down and away.

I , or perhaps we stood in a darkened theater, oddly shaped. The floors induced a sense of vertigo, slanting subtly downward toward the screen, which was high and toward the ceiling. As the lights came on, the floor in front of the screen was revealed as rising toward a three sided triangle before the screen, further inducing a sense of confusion. The angles were all wrong to my eye. A film began on the screen, but all I saw was white light emanating from it.

I exited from the theater, possibly through the screen into the desert. I rode a horse slowly down deserted paved, cracked highways. There were no cars nor other traffic. Beside the path stretched a light colored sand, and dry, sandstone cliff faces. The sky was a midnight gray with wispy, dry clouds smeared across the horizon. There was no sun and no moon - only an eerie, omnidirectional dream-lighting that showed the path ahead.

Throughout this dream, it felt like I was accompanied by other people, and I reacted as if I was among friends. However, when I looked back, there was no one there.

Riding atop the horse, I once removed both hands and proclaimed "Look how I can ride. Now I can shoot Nazi's with BOTH hands!"

I passed into an intersection heavy with abandoned cars. The area was still desert, but had sparse patches of grass near the road. I dismounted my horse, and looked around. Beside the road was a ditch which sloped forward. Inside it, I found my pair of black and white shoes and my Canadian Backpack with the zippers all undone. The journal was missing. I packed the shoes inside the pack, put it on and looked for my horse.

It had crossed the road, and a man approached it. He was shoving his hands toward it's face, spooking the animal. I told him to go away. The horse was still across the road, but further away on the sandy space between lanes. A series of cars began driving down the highway, and did not stop. The horse stood, watching me try to cross the road.

I never got back to it again.

Somehow I slept through an epic rainstorm. This generated a dream about a television series that doesn't exist.

The conceit of this series was this - the first season was explicitly written as the dream of a writer - one where the spaces, moods and behaviors of the characters reflected the ever changing dreamscape.

The events of the first season operated in a very Lynchian way: Actors purposefully became other characters while maintaining the same appearance, but the 'threat' of the initial season was revealed as the end of the dream - a conclusion to a fictional dreamworld.

The second 'season', as described to me by my father in-dream was equally fantastic:
The events of the first exist in the second as a detached outline. In this second series, the writers dream is made into a series that loosely takes events from the prior season, and fills in the gaps with new fictions. Character relationships shift and meld, often overwritten in a way that the characters themselves are constantly remembering events of their previous lives.

In this shifting narrative, the only hints that the entire series is a multi-layered metafiction are strange objects or writing that appears in the series set design: News paper clippings pinned to a wall, paintings of a man at a typewriter, etc. The whole concept reminds me now of John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness" - a film where the protagonist gradually realizes he's a scripted character in his own movie, controlled by a horror writer with Cthulhuian ambitions.

In the end, the small black/white television in my dream revealed to me that the writer dreaming the TV series was in actuality a product of my own dreams - I dreamt the writer. Circles within circles, layers within layers.

I feel like my entire dream-fiction television show was actually a distorted, meta-fictional version of Twin Peaks - but there was no backward speaking, dancing midgets. There was however, a character who looked like Tom Cruise who hid in air vents shooting people with barbed arrows.