I had two dreams last night and they were both very stressful! I'm hoping that after a week with little sleep, it was just all the tension dissipating out of my system at once.

The first was about being at a hotel at a convention, except Whitney and her parents were there as well and I had to divide my time between the two groups. I kept losing where my room was - after going out of the main hotel part and into the convention centre rooms, I came back and I could never find where I was going among the identical corridors, as if the rooms were shifting around every time I left. Eventually I would find the reception desk and they would point me back in the right direction, but I kept forgetting things and having to go back... I was meant to deliver an album to someone in the Pictionary room and make it back in time for dinner at 7 with the family, but I think I ended up on a mountainside somewhere and then everything turned into Final Fantasy 6 after the end of the world and I don't even know any more.

The second - which might have led in from the first due to finding this in the game room or something - was a game that was something to do with Sonic and Zero Escape together, if you can believe it. In the context of the dream, this was the infamous ending puzzle to Sonic 06, even though nothing like this (or anything competently programmed at all) exists in the real game. After rushing through a space station with a countdown going, the last task was to decipher and input something called the Struggle Combo to prevent the space station exploding. The clue for it was this massive ring of symbols and colours that went through all the machinery in a big circular control room, and you could slide it around like a big horizontal wheel. Depending on the mode you had the game in, it had squares of colour that corresponded to the buttons on the Xbox controller, symbols that were meant to resemble the button letters but really didn't at all, and other things that I never worked out. After failing and restarting, you were given a time of five minutes to fly down from the vent you entered from and go back to the control room to start the process again.

The Struggle Combo was randomly generated for each player, and so there wasn't a solution available online, but people had written massive FAQs dedicated to how to work it out, including the types of symbols that could appear and how they related to each other. I never even came close.

I had a dream again last night! It's been a very long time. As usual, either I don't remember my dreams at all or they're absolutely immense.

Whitney and I were on a long car journey (perhaps the dream was inspired by the trip we recently took to Washington DC) and we were looking for somewhere to stay the night. I don't know what attracted us to this particular place, but we found a blocky building on a university campus surrounded by a chain-link fence, and parked the car in a secluded corner next to the only entrance we could find from the road. I remember the layout of the building very clearly, and I've drawn it out to make the rest of this description a bit easier to follow.


We walked into the building through a small glass door and went through to a dimly-lit place that I'll call the A/V room - it was a mess, with assorted pieces of dated technology scattered around the floor and the available surfaces on the room. At the back there was a white plastic piece of machinery - the sort of look and feel that you get on medical devices - which had a blank screen a few feet wide mounted at the top, a robotic arm that either sprouted off the top of the screen or was attached to the ceiling, and a control pad with four translucent buttons on it marked with arrows. I took the pad, which was connected to the screen with a long cable that dangled down off the side of the screen, and tried to operate it but I couldn't work out how to control it.

There was a bed in the corner of the room near where we had come in, but I still didn't know where we were and went off to find the reception desk. I walked down a short corridor towards where I could see light (towards the north of the diagram), and entered a much brighter part of the building that looked like an upscale shopping centre, decorated for Christmas and with polished wood surfaces everywhere. It was busy, with throngs of people queuing up at the many gift shops - but I couldn't find a reception desk or someone to announce our presence to. I remember I found the front entrance somewhere and realized that people were paying for parking there, but I decided that our car would probably be safe and unnoticed where we had left it. Besides, I didn't want to go outside because it had started snowing.

I returned to the A/V room, where the robotic arm on the ceiling was now moving. It whirred around and grabbed a VHS tape from the floor, then spun again and carefully inserted it into a VCR that was part of the device with the screen. We still saw no picture, and I realized that the room had been set up so that a hacker could load the videos and transmit the medical lectures and notes on them to himself. Even though it looked like they were scattered around in a haphazard way, each tape had actually been meticulously placed, with the machine knowing the exact coordinates and orientation of each one so that it could pick up and load it. I remarked on what an elaborate plan it was, and how much easier it is now to get at files now that they're stored digitally.

I needed to find a bathroom before we could sleep, so I went in the same direction I had before, but didn't go into the corridor to the north this time, instead opening the door at the east end of the shorter corridor. This room had its lights turned off, but I could see two rows of small beds arranged one on each side of the room, each supporting an adult body that had a white sheet over it. As I looked around, a couple of them began to stir, and I backed out and tried elsewhere.

The next room I went into was to the south of the small corridor, and was very bright, the light exaggerated even more by the way the walls and floor were covered in gleaming white tiles. A glass wall with three doors in it separated the tiled area from a corridor that ran alongside it, and I headed for the door, opening it and stepping out into the corridor to the south. I turned and realized that the door was going to latch behind me and that I didn't know if I could get back - I tried putting my glove down on the floor so that the door couldn't close all the way but was still unsure.

Several people - older men in lab coats - were walking from elsewhere in the building down this corridor now on their way out. None of them seemed bothered that I was there, but one of them noticed that I was having trouble with the door and told me about its lock. He directed me to go back to the tiled side of the door and look at the mechanism, which was a small serrated piece of metal (not sharp - just a bit like a key sprouting off a rotating handle) that had to be turned correctly so that the door wouldn't latch. The door had to be closed to change it and it was soundproofed, so he had to mime exaggeratedly to me and I still couldn't get it right.

By this time, the people who had been in the room with all the beds had started to come into the white room - more and more of them came through the door that I had first entered the room by. They weren't threatening, just milling about - even so, I remember thinking of them as "zombies" in the dream. They were the specimens that were being kept in the lab, and I realized that I couldn't leave my side of the building and risk them getting out. As the man who had been talking to me had left, I decided I had to go and get Whitney to guard the door - even though by this time, a night-watch woman had arrived, and was looking up from the inside of a cylindrical bank of black monitors in stark contrast to the white of the room.

I went back to the A/V room and decided that I was uncomfortable staying the night - Whitney agreed and we gathered up our things and ran down a larger corridor (the location of which is unknown to me on the map) to escape. The specimens were chasing after us until we jumped through a door that had a drawbridge on it as it was closing - behind us, we heard the specimens falling into the water, and I remember saying that it was perfect to get them off our back and humiliate them at the same time.

We left to find somewhere else to stay.

I had a Hatoful dream/semi-nightmare last night! It was about a secret route that we'd never discovered before, a choice that made an appearance in the infirmary under certain circumstances that led us down a different path. In this one, the game took you into Shuu's secret experimentation room which was in the shape of a dome, where a number of emaciated or clearly otherwise unwell bird-photo characters were shown on screen, giving pained groans as their only dialogue.

After that, we met a uniquely human character, who was a photo of a man with long brown-blonde hair who had been photoshopped to remove the section of his face containing his nose, so that his head was shorter than it should be - I made an attempt at recreating him with an unpaid-for stock photo: http://imgur.com/RYWSXAa . He said that there was some seat(?) upstairs that we needed to see, but that it was dangerous... I woke up before I found out any of what that meant.

Here's another nightmare I wrote down on my phone to share with you all! I think it was caused by seeing the musical 'Assassins' last night.

In the dream, I had a fictional older brother - bald and with a black goatee, like Kane from Command and Conquer - who I knew was planning to go on a gun rampage, starting near a fast food restaurant that had somehow wronged him. He thought he was alone in my parents' house, and for some reason I had to wait in hiding until he took both his guns and left before calling for help. I called 999, they asked me which emergency service I required, and I said "oh, all of them".

I walked around outside, the town was quiet and I thought that he might have given the idea up. Later on I went to a bar nearby where a singer that I knew was performing... and after a while there, he turned up and started shooting. I ran outside, where the streets were now lit in red and bodies were strewn over the road, keeping on running but not being able to get out of the area where he was.

Then I kept going back in time and trying slightly different things in order to prevent the event from happening - I remember trying 911 for emergencies instead. Sometimes he would come back into the house after leaving and I would have to hide until he left trying not to make a noise. I was always hopeful that something was going to happen differently, but it always ended with everyone being killed again... on one path, the singer from the bar rose up and led the ghosts in a beautiful, mournful acoustic guitar song about how it had been their destiny to die like that (I have since completely forgotten the music).

Eventually, I found a way to get myself outside and following the brother with a friend that I'd convinced to keep an eye on him. We followed him through a group of street performers, keeping back so he didn't notice us, but I had to wait for the friend to recognize him before we ran forward and tackled him from behind. We got him to the ground, and found that he was wearing multiple gun belts but had no weapons on him.

He laughed and said that he had changed his mind - we dragged him back to the house and into his bedroom, where I spoke to him as he sat on the edge of the bed. I told him "I know you kill me in the end. This time it wasn't today, but I know it happens."

I closed the door, then went and had a jacuzzi with some investors who told awful jokes.

I had a dream about lobsters. Specifically, that my dad had bought two of them and was keeping them in the garden of the house in Scotland overnight. I noticed that the fencing around them was frankly inadequate and that they would easily be able to escape, but he said that they would be fine.

To demonstrate, I took a little tracking device off a set of keys (I think they actually exist - little things you can attach to a keyring that beep when you hit a remote so that you can find them?) and put it in the compartment on the side of the lobster. Soon, we saw on the tracking device that the lobster had escaped and was heading down the driveway to the road.

Night had fallen, and I went out to the front to watch the lobster as it scuttled over the pavement. It turned on the large headlight that was built into its front and began to cross the road, but it had misjudged the gap and a car on the near side of the road had to swerve and crashed into a car coming in the other direction.

I retrieved the lobster and it apologized for the crash, speaking English in a very refined accent. It told me that it was a relation to the other lobster in the garden, so I gave them both a large cake box as a home.

I had an absolutely Christawful dream last night.

( Are you sure? )

After two very early morning starts in a row and allowing myself to finally sleep in, I had a dream...

I was staying at some hybridized combination of the Furfright hotel and the academy that I went to from 1996-2002. The dream started off in what I thought was my room - this was the alcove off the main corridor that housed the trophy cabinets, except it had a king-size bed in it. There were two other people there of my age milling about with me, and we were vaguely unpacking, when a teacher walked past and leaned in to talk to me.

This teacher - who I didn't recognize, but had glasses with brown hair and a beard - asked me about replacing one of the large baubles on the Christmas tree in the assembly hall. Evidently I had agreed to do this by buying a replacement red bauble and then painting it so that it looked like the missing old one. I had forgotten the arragement, but I reassured him that I would remember to do it, and he stepped back again and said that something in the room smelled wet. We looked around for a while trying to identify it, then I realized that someone had come in to water the pot-plant in the corner yesterday (by which I meant I had seen him just a minute ago) but nobody else had seen it happen.

At this stage, I was staying with kjorteo and I left him getting dressed in an arrangement of wooden screens while I walked outside. On my way I noticed that there was a red alarm light rotating in the corridor, and there was an anime-looking red-haired woman with a sword wandering around - I didn't talk to her but knew that she would become an important character later.

When I went outside, the academy was on the edge of a town built around a bay, where the cruise ship that we had stayed on last month had arrived. They were lowering the tender boats so that they could take people ashore, but this was a far less organized arrangement than in real life - people were on the deck of the ship just flinging masses of little boats and dinghies and inflatable flotation devices down into the water over each other and leaping down to get into them. It was like a blowup recreation of the Dunkirk landings. Stepping back from the chaos, I took a couple of friends up to sit down on a hillside where we could observe the proceedings, and I saw Kjorteo walking up towards us (now in woodrat form but with his pixel Livejournal icon as a head). I declared that I loved this place, where everyone was anthropomorphic for a couple of days a year.

As he got closer, I realized something was amiss, because - though I was unsure whether this was what was happening or had been added later for censorship - he was wearing a large round bush around himself, because his clothes had been stolen. He sneaked past us up to where I had left my car, presumably to find some spares there, but instead got into a white cardboard box and rolled down the other side of the hill back towards the academy, a difficult feat in a square container.

I excused myself and followed him, picking him out of the box, and - because he was incredibly light and curled up - carried him back to the entrance to the library and English department. For the sake of simplicity I will explain this part with American indexing from floor 1 on the ground - the first floor had now been infected with a colony of large mechanical red spiders (who presumably ate clothes), so I avoided going into it and climbed the stairs to the third floor, where the red warning lights were flashing again. The infection in the school was spreading, because the spiders were reaching maturity and turning into glowing white slimy pillars that stretched to the first floor's ceiling, eventually reaching up to the third floor where the pillars stopped at head height with vague faces notched into their rounded tops.

I saw all this from the stairwell, but looking through the window in the door to the main corridor, I saw the woman with the sword from earlier fighting the creatures. Either she called to me, or I just somehow... gained the knowledge that the creatures were growing through a break in reality that encompassed the second floor, leaving it clear.

I went down the stairs one floor again, and saw that there was nothing out of the ordinary on the second floor, so I took a chance and ran for my car sitting there. I drove us away to escape, and the satellite navigation projected arrows on to the street to take us away on a circuitous route that ended with a long straight on a bridge that curved down into the water for a few metres and then back up again. So I zoomed down there, splashed through the water, went up the other side and launched off the other side of the bridge... where after spinning madly, I landed us on the deck of what looked like a pirate ship.

Then I woke up and found that a woman's magazine that I'd never heard of had been delivered to the house, addressed directly to me. That wasn't part of the dream, but it seemed to be worth mentioning.

As expected, I did have a weird dream last night, but thankfully it didn't involve malevolent flowers at all. Instead, it was about Whitney telling me worriedly that the carbon monoxide detector in our living room was pulsing faster than it had been.

I took a look behind the curtain because it was on the windowsill, and it was a thing you might expect to find in the TARDIS - a six inch high red tube on top of a base with a pulsing light inside it, connected up to various cooling devices and a host of dials and gauges, for the battery life, amount of petrol remaining, and so on. It was definitely pulsing faster than it had been before but the alarm wasn't going off and the carbon monoxide gauge itself was still in the green zone below the red one (although the dial was a bit ambiguous about this).

The problem was apparent when the huge fan on the front of the arrangement started going at jet speeds, and blew papers and eventually furniture around the room. After seeing that happen, I instantly found the problem - the "behaviour" setting had somehow been switched to the preset "Jeremy Clarkson". All the other options were also names of personalities, but none stood out as loud and annoying, so setting it to a random alternative one solved the problem.

I had a confused, tangled mesh of dreams last night! The trouble is that I can't remember much about how they were related...

Someone from work moved into our basement (which was much more spacious and conceivably livable in than our real-life basement) and I had to deliver his friend, an elderly priest in a wheelchair named Father Conley, home before bedtime. To this end, I remember having to search through a multi-storey car park, only just making it to the area with a roof overhead before it started raining heavily. Then it was revealed that there were three cars that we had to take back, one of which was parked so that it was touching one of the car park pillars - the one at the front was an off-brown Volkswagen Beetle that I remember I was told to think of as "mine".

Meanwhile, at work, there was a problem with some sort of insects invading the office. They lived downstairs and would construct vehicles and exoskeleton suits out of Lego Technik to come up the stairs and steal cakes. I can't remember how or if we got rid of them - maybe just keeping cakes on a higher shelf? But now I'm imagining them stomping their little Metal Gears around and piling them all up into a giant wobbling column to reach and carry them off anyway.

There was also some sort of subplot at an outdoor swimming pool, which had a huge pit of orange slime next to it - I wish I could remember more about that, though I know that I was pushing an older but not unattractive woman into it.

No Metroid tonight, but I did put up an "ask me anything" voice post in response to people's questions last week - thank you for providing prompts!