32. Warriors' Honor
I 'm a prince, or some other monarchic type, and I 'm at war, against- I don't remember who it was anymore. I 'm carrying western- european early- medieval style weapons, fish- scale mail and a broad sword, and a conical helmet, and I 'm a young man with curly ash-blond hair. The fight went bad, and I got killed. My body was lying dead, on the battlefield, among those of my soldiers. Then, somehow, I get up, and I start walking. I remember passing under a bridge, and then I find myself in a town. There's people coming and going, and nobody seems to really care about me, but I 'm really nervous, afraid they might see me. I sneak around in streets with little circulation, until I get down to the river, where there is a harbour. I keep going, until I reach my home. I can't remember how I got in, but I think I must have sneaked past some guards, or climbed over a wall or something. I 'm standing behind a tree, in my orchards, and looking at my wife, sitting on a bench in the front yard. She doesn't know I 'm dead yet. I 'm so embarassed I lost the fight. Finally, I muster my courage, and get out from behind the trees, and I talk to her. She got really upset, my wife. It seems all that time I was walking without my body. She immediately sends some men to retrieve it, and we can do nothing but wait. My wife is a dark -haired, grave matron, but really strong looking and lovely. I was feeling safe and loved sitting with her. Now it's getting dark, and I 'm out on the town again. My wife is with me. I 'm losing hope, but I 'm not really scared, I can't really believe I 'm going to die such a stupid death just because my men can't find my body in time. I feel my feet getting cold, but I dismiss the thought, because I know that if I let death creep an inch in me, it will creep a mile before I know it. We 're standing on a bridge, but suddendly I 'm elsewhere. I 'm talking with a young boy, a soldier from my army, who says he found my body, personally. I 'm overwhelmed with joy. I start dancing, quite unappropriately for a prince, and I tell the boy I love him, and I 'm going to buy him all the Kinder eggs he likes, as I know he's fond of them. Now, that must have been some anachronism, but you never know, in dreams. Then I 'm back with my wife on the bridge, and her brother is there, who's also a king, or prince, or regent. He sent his own men out to help mine find my body, but he doesn't really seem very happy when I inform them it's been found by my boys. In fact, when I 'm not watching, while I 'm hugging my wife and crying with happiness, he creeps up behind me, and draws his sword and dagger, and throws himself on me. I block his sword, but I feel his daggers' steel piercing my belly. I manage to stop it, but only barely, and I don't know how longer I can hold it like this. My wife is staring petrified, not knowing what to do, who to help, her husband or her brother. "What the hell, are you killing me?" I say. "Yes" he says, "you are a threat to me. If I let you live, I will have to keep you as my regent, at the south borders." I feel really vicious for a moment, not like someone who would beg for his life. "Are you sure you would like to have me watching your back?" I snarl. "Yes, if I had someone watching my back, I 'd rather it was someone like you." he replies. This catches me off-balance. I stop fighting, but he doesn't shove his weapons deeper. The way I get it, what he says, is that he trusts my honor, and that he knows I wouldn't brake my word, even if it was given under threat of death, because he regards me as too honorable to give a word under threat of death that I wouldn't have given otherwise. Or he knows I 'll just think he does. Anyway, I fall for it, and I tell him "All right. I 'll guard your borders". I wake up feeling utterly stupid. After all, I was a prince already, and I outranked the guy, there was no reason to accept being second to him. Of course, he did have me at knifes' point. It didn't seem to matter as I slept again.
33. The Word
I 'm walking in the streets with a friend of mine, and we 're having an argument, about how we 're going to access the primordial Word. A quite fierce argument, and we 're yelling and gesticulating, screaming some abuse at each other. We reach a park, surrounded by green thickets, and I say I want to go pee. But after I take a couple of steps, I see two tall, lithe lizzardmen, coming towards us. No, I 'm serious, I really saw these guys. They looked and moved sleek like the best CGI I 've ever seen, and better. I almost peed my pants where I was standing. I turn on my heels and run back to my friend, who's still yelling. "Come on, we 're leaving" I shout, and point back to the lizzardmen, just bursting out of the thickets. At that point, I had a momentary flash of a Magic the Gathering card, Razorfin Hunter, called a "pinger" in Magic jargon. We start running, but it's as you might expect. We can barely move, unless we 're jumping, not running, only jumping with great leaps, that cover quite a distance, but still not fast enough. In the end, the lizzardmen overtake us, and we turn to fight. One of them shoots a dart at my friend, with a blowstick, and my friend falls to the ground, I hope just only unconscious. I look at my feet, and see a blowstick, discarded by the lizzardmen probably. I pick it up, arm it with a dart I found there, and shoot it at one of them. He faints. The other one comes pouncing, and I 'm trying to arm the stick a second time. I 'm really really slow at it, but then, even when I finally manage it, the dart doesn't seem to hurt him, in fact I think it just bounces off his scaly hide. He gets close enough to touch me with his long slithery hands, then he just takes the dart from my hand, as I 'm trying to arm the blowstick again, and sticks it to my forehead. I faint, and wake up. Well, at least I tried...
34. 30 Euros Bad Sport
Me and Ada are on a hill, at night, probably Strefi hill, in Athens, and there's a dozen or so Albanian brats around us, and they 're being very rude. I don't really mind, but it pisses me off the way they 're harrassing Ada, so I start yelling at them and waving my arms about and in general make a lot of noise and scare them off her. Then, I see a strange thing lying on the ground. It looks like a copper medallion, but it's a coin of 30 Euros. I 'm dumbstruck. There's lots of them lying around on the ground. I start collecting them, greedily, until it dawns upon me, that they don't print 30 Euro coins, not yet at least. I stop gathering them, and I see a guy, standing twenty paces away. He has a handful of coins, and he starts throwing them at me, with one hand, gripping them like a discoboles' disc, but using one finger and his thumb instead of his whole arm and palm. The first coin swirls over my head whistling, and I try to catch it. Then I catch the second one, but the third lands on my face. We keep that on for a while, I answer back with a couple of coins that miss him, but mostly I try to catch the point, doing Jacky Chan style acrobatics, and I manage to catch most, but there's a fair amount of them that hits me in the face, and they really hurt badly. Now, the guy comes over, and he seems really impressed and enthusiastic about my skill in catching the medallions, even though I caught most of them with my face and quite unintentionally too. He's practically beaming, and he asks to shake my hand, but boy am I pissed off. My face hurts and I can feel it throbbing with pain. I start screaming abuse at the guy, and throwing punches at him. He's surprised, then he starts screaming "don't hit me, come on now, don't hit me!" like we 're old friends or it's really bad sport of me to punch him, which just makes me more angry. I keep hitting him, he rolls over, with his belly on the ground, and I punch his back and kidneys, with real malice. He gives off a low moaning sob, and I think he faints. The dream ends there, but I don't remember waking up, although usually I do after that kind of violent dreams. I think these are dreams about the way people treat me in life, and the way I react. I know I get it all wrong, and I 'm very often getting angry with people that are just trying to show me how they appreciate me, but the fact is that I can't help it when something hurts me, and if I keep making friends and accepting congratulation from people that hurt me, I 'll end up messing everything up, about pain and pleasure in my head. So I bash people that meant well, and I isolate myself. Life stinks, and now dreams are catching on. Bah.
35. I bide you be gone, demon
I forgot a large part of this dream. There where those demons hunting some group of people I was a part of. For a moment, I was a wizzard/ shaman person, and I tried holding off the demons with some chants and summons I thought I knew, but somehow everything I should have said that could have helped, wasn't there in my mind where it should have been, when I tried to remember them. For example, I yelled "this is the domain of so-and-so" and indicated an area of land right in the path of the demons as they where running after us, so that, supposedly, they would be scared of desecrating the holy names' domain, and stop chasing us, or at least slow down. But I couldn't remember the right names, that would be powerful enough to put the demons off, instead, I was imporvising, only hoping to scare them and just slow them down, whereas if I had managed to remember the right names, that I absolutely knew where somewhere in my head, something really bad would have happened to them if they stepped in those "domains". After that, I was another member of the group, and I was trying to fend off the demons the old, and reliable way, by swinging a crowbar at them. They didn't really seem to care, and then, I saw one of my friends, behind a rock, waving and calling for help. I ran towards him, but he vanished behind the rock, and then reappeared behind me, on the other side of the rock. I started thinking it was weird, when I realised the guy was actually me. I freaked out, but it was too late. The demons were at us. I woke up, of course. Note, now, that I usually wake up when something goes really wrong, like I 'm going to die in a dream, or like when someone actually kills me, shoots a gun at me or whatever. I guess waking up corresponds to dying in dreams, but then that sounds like really simplistic. Whatever.
36 . Gas maniac.
I was at Adas' place and I think I was sleeping. Suddendly, some crazed guy came in through the window, breaking glass and stuff, and he was trying to shoot at me with a machinegun. I fought with him, and I managed to take the gun and throw it away, I think ouside the window, and kick him in the face or something equally serious, so he fell down semi-unconscious. I ran out of the house, to the street. The moment I got out, I realised something was wrong. There was a sort of thick fog everywhere, and it smelled weird. It was butane, the guy had opened some butane cannisters, and left them lying there, to fill the air with gas. I figured he was planning to ignite the gas, and burn me alive, and that was why he had let me get out of the house in one piece (I did think it was fishy the way he crumbled with just one little kick in the face, a guy as ferocious as he was looking). Otherwise the gas was there just in case he didn't manage to kill me with that preposterous gun of his. He hadn't killed me yet. I thought of putting my jacket around my head, so that my hair wouldn't catch fire. It seems I was under the impression that this was the only real danger, like, if my face doesn't burn, then I 'm OK. Vanity... There were people on the street, and I ran towards them, yelling at them to run away. Then the guy with the gun came out, only without the gun, and he had set himself on fire. I stared at him in awe for a moment. I mean, like, what can I say? Was that the best way he could think of to light the damn thing up? Really! In the end, I managed to move, and put the jacket around my head, as I had thought, and I dived behind a garbage tank nearby. Then the shockwave hit, and I heard the cars around me go boom. Damn!
37. Freak Convention?
I was with Ada, who was sad because I was going to go away. I think we were at a bar or pub, or something. I couldn't remember where I was supposed to be going to, but I think that became more clear later anyway. I was back at Adas' place, with a strange little guy that looked like a cross between Fileas Fog, and the weirdo scientist from "Les Cigares du Pharaon", that adventure of Tintin, I think this ones' name was Philemon Cyclone. We were sitting on Adas' bathtub, in the bathroom of course, and the guy was doig something with some weird -looking device, a steampunk thingy with lots of lamps and cables. I was sitting next to him, and he was talking, and saying that whatever happened, we should not lose contact. He meant bodily contact, not that we should write to each other often. I was touching him, while he was operating the device, but for a while nothing happened. Then I got up and went to the bed/living room, but I can't remember what I was doing there. Obviously, I had disrupted our bodily contact. When I got back to the bathroom, I felt panic waves rushing out from it. I tried to open the door, but something was trying to push it shut. I stuck my foot in and touched the man with my big toe, and the push on the door stopped. I saw him looking relieved, and he said "I thought it was her". I got in, and sat next to him. He said "it's not working". I took his hand into mine and we clasped our fingers. He tried again with his machine, and this time it must have worked, because we were somewhere else. It was an inn or hotel, by a railroad line. My friend was freaked out by the possibility that we could meet real, living people there, and to tell the truth, I was scared shitless too. After all, we were in an alien world. For some reason, what scared us most, had to do with the clothes we were wearing. In the end, I told him to wear a dress (no idea where it came from), and I put on a tuxedo (still don't know where I found it), and we looked like a newly wed couple. Well, apart little details, like, the bride had a beard and a tall hat, and the groom looked like a tranny. I suppose I was thinking, whoever saw us, would think we came from a place were gender roles were inverted, and so I was the man of our relation, and my friend the woman. I can't think what sort of comfort could anyone find in that thought, but whatever. We went inside the inn, and nothing terrible happened. We booked a room, and I went to look at the salon. It was full of freaky weirdos, a la Mairilyn Manson, watching TV. They turned around and looked us up and down. Then I was out, near the railroad. I was looking at a strange letterbox. I think I was trying to work out how to open it. It opened on its' own, and a man, small like Tom Thumb swung out the edge with one hand, all smiles and whoops. All of a sudden, I found myself looking at the letterbox from a safe distance, so I conclude that I retreated discreetly. The Tom Thumb guy called me back, and he asked me to help him get down, because he was too high up to jump. I remember wondering how much lighter than a normally big human being he was, and what exactly was "too high to jump from" to him. I don't remember what happened after that.
38. Mom, I 'm flying!
I was in some suburban area looking vaguely like Agia Paraskevi, or Chalandri (you can find these on the map of Athens, don't worry). I think I was watching a police van chasing some kids with bikes. I was standing crouched on a iron pole, sorta like Spiderman-style. When the cops and the bike gang left, I stood up, and I started to catch the wind with my hands and climb. I was flying over a crossroads, and I could see people gathered on the ground, but they dispersed, maybe because they saw me and they were afraid I 'd fall on them. Then, while I was trying to swim around, the wind started blowing, and it pushed me around, almost carried me away. I could hear the narrators' voice saying sth about some model that had some problems, or malfunction, and I had the impression it was talking about me in some way. Eventually, I couldn't keep afloat, as the wind was hitting me in sudden gushes and unbalancing me all the time, so came down. I landed on a little park by the road. Night had suddendly fallen. Inside the park, more people were gathered, and there was a little girl there, looking at me with an impish grin on her face. For some reason, it looke to me as she had something to do with my sudden landing.
39. Cops
I was still around that same suburb, with some guys, and apparently we had stolen something, a stereo or similar thing. I can't remember exactly. At some point I saw myself holding a tape recorder. We wanted to run away with a car, I think it was ours, when some cops came round. I told the others not to worry, I 'd stall them while they 'd went away. I walked to one of the cops, holding the tape recorder. He was standing in front of a banks' ATM. He said "Police". I replied "If I tell you I don't give a fuck, will you take it in a wrong way?". Apparently he did, cause he kicked me, quite reflexively seemingly, in the ear. And I, also quite reflexively seeming, lashed out with my hand and hit him in the face. He freaked out, and I started moonwalking backwards, and going "woooooo" Bruce Lee -style. I told him he should be more careful what buttons he pushes, and then he took out a gun. It looked like a childs' make-believe pistol made out of wires, or a composite tube bent in the general shape of a gun. It didn't look particularly menacing, but I looked it straight in the eye, and thought to myself that I was looking Death in the face. Of course, the cop didn't shoot me. I felt safe. I didn't believe he'd shoot me, because I was unarmed. I could hit him all I liked, and he couldn't shoot the gun at me. More cops came, while I was playing hit and run with the guy. I pulled his "gun" from his hand a couple of times, but he held on to it, although he didn't shoot it.
40. Burglar
I was at my fathers' summer house, in Oraia Eleni, it was early in the summer after noon, and I got into the house opposite to ours' -Ioannas' house. It looked different than in real life of course. I can't remember how I found my way in. Maybe someone had left a window open, or something. I was looking around in the sleeping rooms for something to dress up with, when I heard people coming. I went down to the basement, and I looked for a way out. I found a door, and I oppened it, but then I thought "oh, what the hell" and, getting outside, I clacked the door behind me. I started walking in the garden, heading for the exit, when I heard someone calling at me. I turned and saw a woman (who wasn't Ioanna or her mother), leanning out of a window. She started yelling at me. I tried to play innocent, but shoe wouldn't believe me, as she had heard the door banging, and she knew all about me and my dressing ups.
41.Durry Hurry
Either I was, or I was seeing through, a cop. I was in a car, with some other people (cops?) and we were looking for some guys. Not for any good reason, I bet. We stopped at a gas station, Texaco, but it had the colors of EKO (a greek brand), and we were asking about the guys we were looking for, and generealy snooping around like good cops do. We got back into the car, and in the next corner, there was another gas station, of the same brand again. I thought to myself (or maybe it was the narrating voice telling me) that Texaco (or whoever) was very abmitious, and so it had built gas stations all over the place. So we stopped at that one too, and we started looking for them guys again, and from the inside, the gas station was huge, it looked a bit like an expo center, with high ceilings and vast walls with row upon row of window panes. It was dimly lit and filled with people. I think I recognised the guys in the crowd; they were coming towards me, whistling innocently, and I started walking to the back of the room, also trying not to raise any suspicions. They followed me. Suddendly, I found myself in a dead end. There were two entrances to a space with no doors, only windows, and a wall dividing it in two, with a door in the middle. I got in from the right side, and through the door. Then one of the guys got in too, and he attacked me screaming, with a syringe in one hand. We fought a little, until I took the syringe from him, and stuck it to him. Then the other two came in and attacked me too. I passed through the windows (or was it the wall?) and I found myself outside the building, in the back yard or sth. One of the guys took out a huge scimitar from somewhere. It was really but really really big. It was curved and it had those ridiculusly pointed teeth in it, like a sharks' grin. But, I mean, it was painted... PINK?!. I got so scared, and first I had a flash of him hitting me with it and splitting me in half. Then I had a flash of me taking it from his hands and hitting him with it and cutting him in half. I don't exactly know for sure which one happened, but I have the impression I saw the second version twice, so the second time around, I might have actualy done it. Anyway, I woke up shortly after (which is usualy a bad sign in such cases).