Someone was trying to kill me. I was in a house. The house was familiar, but I don’t think I’ve ever been there in real life. All I remember about my killer is that he was of average build. I don’t think his face was ever revealed to me in the dream, as if he didn’t have a face, but he just struck me as “average”. Not ugly, not handsome, nothing unique about him. Your generic murderer.

He said: “You can either have sex with me or I can kill you.”

“I can’t, I have a boyfriend.” I said.

“Then you’re going to die.”

I bolted and ran into the bathroom, I knew where it was. The bathroom was small, just a tiny rectangular space with a toilet – the actual sink and shower must have been in another room. I flipped the lock on the gold-colored metal doorknob (not the kind we have in Australia, but the kind in the U.S., with the rotating lock in the middle of the doorknob). I heard him outside the door, can’t remember if he said anything. I think he banged on the door a few times, but couldn’t get in so retreated.

There were mice there…I didn’t see them, but I knew there were a few gray mice in the bathroom. I’m not sure why they were there.

I had to get out of there. I looked in the toilet and (this is really gross, but I have to describe everything I can remember) a bit of poo floated up from the pipes. It didn’t smell. I started messaging HHRay, asking him to come and help me because someone was trying to kill me. He replied, saying he’s on his way. I kept messaging, asking him to hurry. I breathed as quietly as possible so as not to attract attention.

I waited, scared, probably crying. It was getting difficult to breathe. I kept thinking that the person wanting to kill me was going to break through the door at any minute, I heard him moving around the house.

Then HHRay came, I heard him talking to the killer outside. I can’t remember what they said exactly, HHRay was asking where I was. I felt so happy, I’d get out of there soon. But HHRay’s voice was gone. I sent him an SMS: “Where are you? Please come. He’s going to kill me.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about where he was. Why wasn’t he coming to rescue me? I was going to die, why wasn’t he there?

I kept messaging, begging him to get me out of there. Couldn’t he at least call the police? Why wasn’t anyone there yet?

I heard footsteps pounding toward the door, then retreating. There was someone outside. I thought maybe it was HHRay. I sent him another message, panicking.

I heard the killer’s voice from the yard somewhere to my right and back: “It’s HHRay, open up!”

I held my breath. It was obviously not HHRay’s voice. He was trying to make it sound like whoever was at the door was telling me it was HHRay. “It’s HHRay! I’ve come to save you!”

I knew it wasn’t him. There were two of them now. The original killer was in the yard and he must have had an accomplice who was now at the bathroom door. I heard the footsteps retreat from the door and cautiously opened it a crack. I kept doing this, realizing that one time I forgot to lock the door back up and it was actually already partly unlatched. All the killer had to do was nudge the door to get in. I was relieved that they hadn’t noticed and locked the door back up. I felt my throat closing up, it was more difficult to draw breath.

Then, I saw something fall from a little nook at the top of the wall to the right of the toilet (when facing the toilet). It was a mouse, dead. There was blood around its mouth, as if it coughed up blood and died. I heard the killer say something along the lines of “Don’t worry, you’ll be dead tomorrow.”

I looked at the time on my phone – it was late night, but I still had a few hours until 12 so I knew I’d probably have barely enough air to last until then. I realized that he was probably either poisoning the air or cutting it off in the bathroom. He used the mice to show me what my fate was going to be because the mice would die before I would.

I think that’s when I started waking up. Everything spun, I think it was a mild form of lucid dreaming. I realized that I was sleeping, I was feeling myself wake up, but I was still in the dream setting. I had slight control over what I was doing. I could think, and my thoughts reflected what my body did but I had no direct movement control. I thought that I had to escape. I would soon suffocate and had to find air. First I tried to get fresh air through the toilet opening, leaning into the bowl, thinking maybe fresh air would be entering through there. Then, I saw a small window with flywire over it above the toilet. I as quietly as I could stood on it and pulled the latch, trying to stay silent as I peeled the flywire window open. I was already thinking ahead through my plan, almost fully awake now and feeling myself laying in bed as I got fresh air into my lungs through the small window. I was thinking about how I’d quietly climb through the window. It was dark outside. I would sneak from bush to bush and quietly get off the property, then bolt.

My alarm rang. It was kind of a seamless awakening, not the jolt you sometimes get when your alarm wakes you up, as if I was already on the brink of waking up naturally.

I had a freaky dream last night. It wasn’t scary, just…freaky. The jist of it was – I agreed to get pregnant. Then I got really freakishly scared. Freakishly scared. I couldn’t believe I had agreed to this – I hate the idea of pregnancy, why the heck did I say I’d get pregnant? I couldn’t go back now.

Something happened – suddenly I was looking at myself from the outside of my body, but the me in the dream didn’t look like me in real life. Everything was black and then I woke up with a closeup of my face. It slowly zoomed out. I was still pregnant. I was sitting in something that looked like a jailcell or a really crap hospital. It zoomed out farther. My legs were cut off at the knees and what was left of them was bandaged. SEE WHAT PREGNANCY DOES TO YOU?! SEE?!

New scene. I thought I was still myself. I had my legs back. I found myself in an empty city with wide roads. I had stumbled into a 1-million-mile race and started to run. I ran a bit like a monkey – kicking off with my legs, then with my arms. When I got enough speed I crossed one leg behind the other and just kicked off with my back leg and thrust my arms out to the sides and swam through the air, catching the wind.

I thought I was winning. I passed everyone. I wasn’t sure where the finish line was so I kept going. At one point me and the people behind me stopped at two white lines, thinking they were the finish.

“You’d think it would be more accentuated if it was the finish line, though.” one of them mused.

I took off again. Then, as if in a computer game, I heard a high pitched ‘prize’ sound and a purple name float up into the sky. Turns out someone was ahead of me the whole time! I sped up. I came second. I had won $500,000.

I went home to Ukraine, to the apartment in which we lived (it was in a tall apartment building in our old Ukrainian neighborhood). My mom was there. Then I wasn’t myself anymore- I was looking at us from the outside and switched between my own and my mom’s character. My mom found out that the me who finished the race wasn’t the me who was pregnant. The pregnant one was dead!

She got an invitation to the awards ceremony delivered to her (for the race) because I got the Silver medal for second place in the race. The invitation put her seat in the 33rd row!

“What if I come in a car? Will I still have to sit all the way back there?” She had a sneaky look in her eyes.

The man who delivered the invitation said: “No, ma’am, if you arrive by car you can have any seat you want.”

I woke up.

I had a really strange dream last night. I dreamt that my work’s offices were in a shopping mall and the company was going down. I then found out that Football Superstars had their studio in the same shopping mall and went there to talk to someone about getting myself a job there. I think I got one, but I can’t remember as I woke up and remembered that that wouldn’t be allowed anyway.

I was engaged to be married to a guy I had known from high school, Brad E. I can’t remember how I found out. In the dream I don’t remember even dating him and suddenly someone tells me he proposed and I said yes. He was right there.

Me: “What? You proposed?”
Him: “Yup” *smile*
Me: “And I said yes?”
Him: “Yes”

I didn’t know what to do except go along with it. At this point HHRay didn’t come into the dream yet, as though he didn’t exist.

I supposed that it would be really cool to be married and Brad was a nice guy in the dream (he was nice in real life too, but I didn’t know him well)

It was Saturday, my wedding was at 2pm.We were at a river with my best friend, Brad E., and someone else. I had a ring with a flower on it that gave me +1 Speed. Brad tried to get it from me as he wanted to win, but it didn’t happen as the ring got lost or broke!

My friend said: “Oh my gosh we have to find that ring.”
So we spent hours looking for it. Her dad died on the river in the process but we didn’t seem to care.

In the end we’re in my friend’s car with Brad in the back.

Me: “So you really proposed and I said yes…”
Brad: “Yeah” *smiling*

I look at the watch, we’re five minutes late. Looking for the magical +1 Speed ring made us late and I don’t even have a dress or makeup! I decide that I can’t look at my future husband with no makeup! I start putting on concealer, but it’s too light for me so I have to smudge it tons to make the marks go away.

Me: *turning around and putting hand on thigh (he’s wearing jeans)* “You know I don’t want kids, right?”
Brad makes a funny face and goes: “Mm..I guess..”
Me: “It’s not the idea of kids, it’s the idea of giving birth. We can adopt.”
Brad makes a funny face, as if he doesn’t want to push the subject just then.
Me: “Well..I guess one day if it makes you REALLY happy I’d consider it.”

Then I remember HHRay. It’s as if his existense suddenly appeared in the dream. I think at this time I’m starting to kind of wake up and get in touch with out-of-dream reality.

I lean over to mumble to my friend: “What about HHRay?!”
Her: “Just tell him it’s over.”
Me: “…yeah, you’re right.”

I can’t help but feel uneasy. On the one hand I really want to get married and Brad is a really nice guy. But on the other I don’t even remember dating him and I’ve been dating HHRay for like two years.

My mind keeps going back and forth – marriage, HHRay, marriage, HHRay.
I think about how horrible HHRay would feel when I suddenly tell him I’m getting married – he doesn’t know I’m even involved with someone else. Heck, I didn’t know until I found out Brad proposed and I said yes!

I can’t decide.

Then I wake up.

We imagine that waking-life is real and that dream-life is unreal,
but there does not seem to be any evidence for this belief.
Chuang Tzu, in the third century B.C., put it in an amusing way;
having dreamed that he was a butterfly flitting from flower to flower,
he stated that he was now wondering whether he was then a man dreaming
he was a butterfly or whether he was now a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

- Wei Wu Wei “Fingers Pointing Toward the Moon”

I’ve often wondered about this – what if right now I am in a dream? What if there is no such thing as real life? On the one hand this doesn’t seem possible because we have many different dreams as opposed to one current consciousness. Then again, we rarely remember our dreams in full – how do we know that while we are in a dream, we do not perceive that dream as our one consciousness and have many different dreams there?

We were in some kind of camp with a bunch of people my age. It was a holiday type of thing. After one of our male friends [We'll call him E] left to do something, a tall guy came up to us in the street and asked us to show us where the friend (E) was. He said he was his dad. The guy looked too young to be his dad.

“Oh I mean his brother” he said, and pulled out a bunch of hand-written ‘proof’ that he was the brother. We called him on it and said we wouldn’t show him where the friend was. He threatened us in some way, said that we can either believe him or something bad will happen to us.

I got scared. I stammered out: “We’ll let him know that his brother called.”

The man seemed satisfied with that and walked away.

There were little books inside a brown case. [not sure what was up with that.]

I had to find E, but he kept missing out on all of the group activities. People started to get mad at him because he wouldn’t show up for anything. Then some dude got mad at me when I asked him where E was. He said: “And where were you for the photos, huh? Both of you decided to blow us off now!”

I got mad: “What photos? I wasn’t even told about any group photos! Thanks a lot.” and walked off. [I really didn't know about the photos.]

I went to find E, found him. We had to leave for some reason, to look for something. I lost my phone several times throughout the dream [Sony Ericsson s500i] and lost it again. I went to look for it, but other people had the same phones as me. One was the same model but white and one didn’t glow geen at the middle circle, but was all black. I finally found the phone and put it in my little brown bag [HHRay brought me the bag from Bali in real life] so that I wouldn’t lose it again. Some papers and makeup was there, too.

Some dude was talking to other dudes about how someone found a way to hack ‘Windows XP Live’ on his phone. And showing them an arcade game – they were all impressed.

I found a BMX bike and E had a motorbike and we left. We went along a road, me on the left – my bike kept straying left and onto the gravel along the road. When I tried to turn it right again it felt like I was going to fall. E kept going right along side me, on my right, saying: “Yeah, those are pretty hard to control at first.”

When cars would pass by behind us we’d have to get onto the gravel again and then it was hard for me to get back on the road.

I couldn’t sleep last night because I kept having nightmares about spiders. I got tired really fast for some reason and went to bed at only 9pm.

All kinds of spiders were popping up – jumping spiders, white spiders, big spiders, little spiders. I woke up after each dream and when I fell back asleep, a new one was waiting for me. I think the most prominent dream of that night was one where I remembered that PG – a horse from the farm in Alabama was moved out of the country with me. I wasn’t in Australia, not sure where I was, but in the dream I moved away from the farm and the farm owner allowed me to take PG with me. He was a big old Arabian bay, heart of gold. But for some reason I forgot about him. So when I remembered I went up to him (he was in a closet) and decided to give him some exercise. I was a bit afraid of not being able to ride that well anymore, but decided to give it a shot anyway. As I groomed him and tacked him up, I noticed a white spiderweb all over his saddle – and then I noticed it on his back. A white spider was crawling across PG – it was small. But then the spider got scared and started jumping. It would flatten itself against the surface of the saddle and launch itself into the air.

I freaked out. Someone was there with me and I asked them to get rid of the web and spider, but the spider kept getting away. PG started to freak out a bit because we were waving our arms around trying to get rid of the spider. I woke up.

After waking up each time, I kept finding myself curled up in a little ball in the middle of the bed. I was afraid to touch the edges because I thought that there were spiders under my bed that would crawl out – I thought they were in every corner and nook.

So I decided to turn on the light and not sleep anymore. It was about 12am when I woke up and decided that I can’t sleep anymore. I stayed on the laptop until about 6am and began to get sleepy again. So I took my sleeping bag to Keeda’s room again and snuggled in with her.

Weird dream. I was at home, some guy and girl came by. The guy had a poodle and I had Keeda. They ran around and played. I went outside to the bus, but the bus was a limo and the guy and girl were there with their poodle. I asked the girl if this was the bus and she said yes and that we had 7 minutes left until departure.

“One dollar thirty, then, please.” I handed her the money and got into the limo through the window. It was very cramped inside and I couldn’t fit myself on the seat right behind the chauffeur because my head kept hitting the roof of the limo. Another girl climbed into the empty passenger’s seat in the front and I thought Why didn’t I sit there when I had the chance?

I moved to the row of seats behind the one I was on, but the seats were torn out. Nevertheless, I could position myself quite comfortably as my head was not hitting the ceiling anymore.

We drove up to a public pool with a lot of people and dogs. That’s when things started to get weird. The guy with the poodle was eating a meaty meal and I didn’t mind, but refused to eat any when he offered because I don’t eat red meat. He then grabbed me and tried to kiss me to force the meat in my mouth. I ran away, calling Keeda, who came with the poodle. But the poodle was not normal anymore – it was completely bald and looked like a skeleton with skin on it. It started attacking Keeda, who began trying to ward it off.

While I was distracted by the dogs, the dude pushed me out of the door and onto the ground, still trying to make me eat the meat. He started trying to rape me and I got really scared, but not as much because of the actual raping thing as compared to the idea that if he succeeds, he’ll be able to make me eat the meat more easily. I thought about just giving up because there was no one else there, even though we were right outside of the pool area with the doors open, in some kind of an empty hall.

I slid out from under him and ran around the pool, calling Keeda with me. I got lost in the crowd of people around the pool. After screaming for help, I stumbled across a policeman with a pit bull by his side. I explained what was going on and the policeman ran after the guy with his dog. The guy disappeared and the cop couldn’t catch him, he was still somewhere in the vicinity and I was scared. The policeman said that these people (meaning the guy and the girl in the limo with the dog) often go after people who put a book of curse words inside a bible and carry it around. I looked down and my hands and saw a purple book of curse words inside a bible. I don’t remember bringing this.

Pretty sure some other stuff happened, but I can’t remember any of it.