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Monday, June 4th, 2007
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1:58 pm
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I was attending a sort of adventure holiday camp, the kind where you go and do extreme sports out in the woods to develop your mettle and such. I was supposed to go down a rather high, rather long zip-line (a/k/a "flying fox"), but backwards, and with a parachute (worn on the front) that I had to open once I passed a certain landmark, that would allow me to land safely. I was pretty scared of such a high zip-line to start with, but completely balked at the idea of going down facing backwards. They were trying to talk me into it, saying how many people had done it successfully, but then by the time I decided I'd give it a go, it had started to rain or snow or something and the ride had to be closed down for the day.
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| Sunday, March 11th, 2007
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12:35 pm
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I had gone back to New York City and was looking for places to live. My aunt showed me a listing for a 1BR apartment that she'd seen, and it was *really* cheap and had a roof patio, being on the top floor of a 6-story, elevator building. I went to go check it out, and it was a great apartment, but since it had been unrented a group of people had decided to squat and turn it into a sort of social club, a hangout space. They told me that they refused to leave and the landlord couldn't kick them out, so I couldn't rent the apartment.
Then I was back here in Melbourne, and I looked on my calendar and saw that I had booked a week-long return trip to Bali that I had completely forgotten about, and it was coming up in just a couple of days, when the first manuscript was due. I woke up worrying about how the hell I was going to manage going back to Bali, and why had I planned that, and could I cancel the trip without losing too much money.
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| Friday, January 26th, 2007
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11:28 pm
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I had left Australia and moved back to the US, and I was with my mother. We were driving around in someone's mini-van and I was being kind of bratty and we were having spats. We got dropped off at a restaurant, but my stuff (my laptop and some other things) wasn't in a bag, so I started picking up all my things separately and told her to go on in and I'd meet her inside. Then I started walking past the restaurant (I think I needed to find a trash can), and suddenly I realised that I'd never see Australia again and got very upset. I was walking on the wooden steps around the retail plaza where the restaurant was, and didn't notice that I had started walking into another section, this physical challenge structure where you were supposed to climb up to the highest point and turn a light on, which meant that you were fit enough to join the army or something like that. It was built to sway when you shifted your weight, so that the rickety-ness would add an extra challenge, and before I realised where I was I had climbed up too high, and was holding on, facing outwards. The ground was far below me, and if I moved even slightly the structure started to sway and it felt like it would topple over with me on it. I couldn't jump, or I'd fall to my death, and I couldn't even turn around to grab on the other way to start to climb, because the structure started swaying again. I was terrified and had no idea how to get down, and had to force myself awake to get out of the dream.
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| Saturday, October 14th, 2006
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5:24 pm
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There were these two girls who lived down the street from me. They were mid-20s, middle-class, quite nice, but also crack addicts. They were always smoking out of these really long bongs. One of them gave me an old car that had been her brother's or something. It was a Mazda, a tiny little muscle car, in a burnt orange color. The handbrake didn't work, and the pedal brake had to be pushed down really hard to engage it. There were also a few cosmetic issues, but it was free so I figured I could fix it up and then sell it off. I took it to one mechanic but he and his assistants were really patronizing and insulting, so I told them off and left with the car, saying I'd go somewhere else.
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| Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
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1:54 pm
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I was nine months pregnant, and about to give birth very soon. Hamish was the father. I got stuck in a building with a broken lift, though, and me and another person there were trying to contact someone to help us get out of there. I felt my pregnant belly a lot, and at some point I realised that I had never felt the baby kick, which made me wonder if the baby was dead – and if it had been dead all this time and I never realised it.
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| Tuesday, March 7th, 2006
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8:12 am
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My friend Alae and I are at the movies. I've smoked up before going and am a little bit stoned, so I'm reclining over some of the movie seats, which are the kind where the arms go up. My eyes are closed for a moment and suddenly I feel almost indescribably strange, and I realize that two ghosts are walking through me in their incorporeal state – their spirits are merging into my body and moving through it, almost like Kitty from the X-Men or something, and I feel a bit like water that someone is travelling through on a boat. The sensation is incredibly, physically strong, and after it passes I immediately ask Alae if he saw anything, because I think two ghosts just walked by us (and through me), and he says, a bit freaked out, that yes, he saw them. Apparently no one else has, though, and we're talking loudly enough to get people pissed off, and suddenly I realize this and I tell Alae that we should get out of there. I apologize to the people around us as we leave, and then we exit. For some reason, to get out, we have to cross through a room that's filled with shallow water, and there are boats and docks floating on it that we have to cross over, from each to each, and I get my feet wet. But then I see some of the theatre's employees sitting on one of the docks and I go over to sit with them, and I ask one of them if there's any possibility that the theatre's haunted. "Oh, absolutely", she says, and tells me that she and the others have seen ghosts around plenty of times. I tell her about what just happened to me and she's not surprised at all. I woke from the dream feeling so strongly that these physical sensations were real that I lay there for several minutes trying to figure out if perhaps there had been a ghost in my room that had touched me in real life, and I ended up dreaming about it because I was asleep. Even as I write this I can't say either way for sure.
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| Saturday, August 27th, 2005
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11:58 am
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I was going to the movies with the woman who heads my program, and her husband and son. At first I thought they were both very cool and felt like I got along with them, but then when we sat down the husband became really taciturn and the son started getting obnoxious, and I felt really out of place and alone. I'd already seen the movie once before, a grand horror-themed epic, but I had fallen asleep during the second half of it and wanted to see it again. At some point, though, I left the auditorium and went to the cinema's lounge, where they also had it playing on a TV screen. I made a wax cast of my face and head for some reason, and at some point tried using it as a bong. It didn't work. I was getting hungry and realized I had some vegetarian chicken cutlets in my bag, but no microwave or other way of cooking them was available. Finally I decided I'd been in the lounge for too long, so I went back to find my seat, only to see the credits rolling. I'd missed the end of the movie again
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| Monday, June 20th, 2005
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12:30 am
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I'm at a school reunion gathering. I'm playing around with a knife and throw it up in the air at a wall as a joke. It bounces off the wall and lands right in the back of some girl's neck — she falls over dead at her table, the knife sticking straight up out of her. I'm absolutely wracked with guilt and shame and horror and grab another knife and slit my own wrists, but after they bleed for a bit I wipe off the blood and put on bandages to stop the flow. I'm in shock for a while, at how drastically everything can change in just an unthinking second or two, but eventually it turns out that the girl was unconscious, not dead, and although hurt, she'll live. I'm enormously relieved but horribly embarrassed and ashamed of my stupidity.
(from August 2004)
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12:26 am
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I go to seattle to visit Carl and see if I'd like it enough to live there. I drive around and get lost for a bit, and am amazed to see snow-capped mountains right outside of the city...but overall I'm disappointed with seattle and try to find my way back to his place through the confusing city streets.
(from August 2004)
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| Sunday, June 19th, 2005
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1:48 am
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I had a friend, a girl in an Islamic country with a strict father. I was going to help her run away, and so we took off and hid in a store, hoping he would keep going down the street. However, I had supposedly dreamt this before and what happened that time was that her father came in and found us, and shot and killed her. So this time I was determined not to let that happen. My dad was there, too, and I was pushing him to call and make the plane reservation so she and I could get away. I pushed her back away from the window and wrapped her up to hide her. Her father came in as I had dreamed it before, but this time I stood in front of my friend and her father shot me instead, hitting me once on the right side of my stomach; his other shots missed me entirely. Then he dropped the gun and the people in the store restrained him. I looked down in shock at the small, bloody hole in my shirt. Then I got mad and starting hitting the girl's father, until I felt weak and slumped down. I went to the hospital, going down some escalators and through a supermarket on the way in, and was taken down to the basement, where the doctor wanted to patch the hole in my abdomen with caulking compound. I raced back upstairs to the ground floor of the hospital but I kept getting lost until I finally found where my father was. At that point my mother and grandmother had joined him. I yelled at the hospital staff and demanded to be treated by a real doctor.
(Undated past dream found written on a piece of paper.)
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| Friday, January 14th, 2005
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12:17 pm
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My friend John, who killed himself last March, came back to visit, and we were talking and reminiscing. Our friend ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) madbard was also there. We played music and we talked about all sorts of things from our lives, including how he had accidentally killed a young boy a short time before he died and he felt really bad about that. [That did not actually happen in real life.]
Then I asked him why he killed himself. He said he had to go and left, not answering my question. I woke up feeling sad and frustrated.
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| Wednesday, November 17th, 2004
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10:42 am
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I was going out to a nightclub with the characters from Sex and the City. On my way to meet them, I had to climb out of a parking garage (the road up became a steep wall and I had to scale it to get out), and my light-colored tank top got all dirty, which I didn't notice until I met up with them and the Kim Cattrall character pointed it out. I said it probably wasn't the biggest deal, since I wasn't trying to impress anyone anyway, but she insisted we go back to her place and look for a new top for me.
Her bedroom had a really high ceiling with all these old pre-war details, including a bunch of little doors up high on the wall. I asked what they were. She flipped a few switches and turned off the lights, and showed me how they hid lasers that formed a sophisticated burglary alarm system — if anything broke the lines of the lasers, the alarm would go off. She also showed me a very small video projector that sat on her nighttable and projected movies and TV against the opposite wall.
Meanwhile, I was still in search of a nice top. The Sex and the City characters decided to head to the club ahead of me, and told me to catch up. I was trying on various tops when all of a sudden my father and his wife came in, saying that they had come to pick something up from the Kim Cattrall character (who my stepmother was friends with). I decided to hitch a ride with them back downtown and forget about the club. I asked my dad to leave the bedroom so I could change again. He did.
Suddenly, as I was, I heard a coughing sound, and looked down to see a little black-and-white cat emerge from underneath the clothes in the closet area of the bedroom. "How cute," I thought, but then noticed that something wasn't quite right. The cat was limping along after something, and the beige carpet was stained dark all around it. I looked closer, and noticed that the cat's back paw was off his leg — as if something or someone had chopped it off — and actually still moving forward on its own, jerkily. The cat was limping and crawling after it, meowing piteously, with blood coming out of its leg.
I screamed for my father. "The cat's leg is off!" He came walking in obliviously and very nearly stepped on the cat and its itinerant paw. I yelled at him and started crying and screaming about the cat. I had to force myself awake.
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| Saturday, July 3rd, 2004
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11:33 am
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I was back in Prague with my mother, her husband, and my aunt. Mom and I were walking around, and I was trying to get us back to where we were staying off Namesti Miru, but I was in a part of town that I didn't recognize. I saw a train coming and said we should grab it. I got on and asked the conductor in Czech, "What's the next stop?" He didn't answer me at first, so I repeated myself. But by the time he did answer, the train had started moving, and we had to stay on board. Meanwhile, Mom was angry with me because I didn't want to hold her hand while we were walking around, and she was being petty and loud and complaining to everyone in English about me. I told her to please shut up, because she was making us look like "ugly American" tourists. I soon realized that the train was going in the opposite direction that we wanted, and realized we had to get off at the next stop, so we did. Now we were even further from where we wanted to be, and in a neighborhood unfamiliar to me. I had to stop to tie my boot, but Mom was still having her little tantrum and walked away from me. By the time I had my bootlace tied, she was gone. I looked around everywhere but she had simply vanished. Now I was completely freaked out and didn't know what to do, especially as I was exhausted and trying to stay awake. I tried the doors on some apartment buildings until I found one that opened, and I was in a small but clean and newly-decorated flat. No one was home. Exhausted, I fell asleep in the bed in the bedroom, a modern Goldilocks. When I woke up, I started looking around and realized this place belonged to a well-educated couple (their books showed what sorts of subjects they read and that they spoke several languages) and at least one child. I knew had to get out of there and look for Mom, but then the front door started opening. I hid in the bedroom and watched through the crack between the door and its frame as the young couple and their two kids came in. Everyone else walked by the bedroom without seeing me, except the little girl, who stood still and stared. I came out of the bedroom and immediately explained my sob story, throwing myself on their mercy and telling them they could check my bookbag, I hadn't taken anything; I just needed a place to sleep. The couple, at bit surprised at first, believed me and had me sit down to dinner with them for mini-pizzas. Then I decided to rewind the dream and change it a bit so I wouldn't have to deal with the family at all, and this time just the mother came into the bedroom and I hid under the bed. She got on the bed and soon fell asleep. I snuck out from under the bed, grabbed my stuff, and booked out of there fast.
Then I was back in this strange neighborhood, and I was trying to find a tram line that looked familiar so I could get back to Nam. Miru and try to get Mom's husband and my aunt to help me look for her. I walked back to where I had gotten off the train and looked for a tram that was going in the opposite direction. The #9 was there, and I was trying to remember where it was going, and I got on to look at the map real quick but then it took off, so I was stuck on it. But as it was going I realized it was going in the right direction, except I was so rattled by the whole experience and excited to be seeing parts of Prague I recognized that I got off at Stepanska, two whole stops before Miru, and realized I'd have to walk a ways up a hill now, and should have stayed on the tram. Just then, my phone rang and it was Mom, saying she was back at the apartment and where was I, they were all waiting for me.
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| Thursday, June 24th, 2004
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4:45 am
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(Just had to wake myself up twice from this nightmare.) I can remember only tiny bits and flashes of the beginning, but by the point I had to wake myself up, I was being pursued by a female black ops/paramilitary operator (i.e. exceptionally well-trained in hunting and killing people) who wanted to kill me possibly because she thought I had been having a dalliance with her husband, another black ops/paramilitary played by Val Kilmer (earlier tonight I saw the movie Spartan, with him playing that kind of character), which I wasn't. It was all taking place in their apartment, which I and a number of other people were staying in as guests. In between trying to call him on his cell to beg for his help (slow in forthcoming), asking the others there for help (not forthcoming), and managing to slow her down by whatever means I could (locking doors, barricades, etc.), she kept dogging me with a chilled berserker rage, intending to kill me.
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| Friday, June 18th, 2004
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10:00 am
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It was a scenario like from out of The Day After Tomorrow (mixed with 28 Days Later) in that the world was freezing outside and people were doing what they could to survive, and I was somehow attached with a group of scientists (I can't remember what my role was). However, if you went outside and froze, you didn't die, but turned into a sort of ice zombie, with glowing white-blue eyes. One of the main things about surviving was, if you went outside, you were to avoid looking an ice zombie in the eye, or you would be turned into one of them. So anytime we went outside (e.g. we had to transfer from one location to the other), we had to avoid the freezing cold and also the ice zombies, and especially being captured by them and made to look them in the eye.
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| Friday, June 11th, 2004
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11:50 am
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My apartment that I'm going to move into was now a big, one-story house with a round, open living room area, and while there was some really nice new appliances in there (washer and dryer, nice vacuum cleaner, etc.), there was also everyone else's stuff in there who had been living there before me: my half-sister's, her son's, his girlfriend's, etc. I was there looking around when someone who looked like Steve Buscemi showed up to start getting his crap out of there. The place was filthy, though, and I was freaked out to notice cockroaches crawling around on the floor, a big lizard up on one wall, and a flying bug that flew right at my face at one point. Then I noticed a strange man in the corner, and when I told him to get out and threatened to kick his ass, he stood up and I saw his tail and realized that he was a demon. But he was very unthreatening and a bit scared of me. He explained that he was there on assignment, that my house was over an old, unused portal to Hell (which explained the cockroaches). Then there was some stupid story he told that had something to do with his having to find and befriend "the King of Buddha", who was his spiritual opposite, yin-yang style, and I don't remember much else except that at that point I actually thought, "Oh, come on, that's a really stupid plot, even for a dream."
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| Tuesday, May 25th, 2004
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1:09 pm
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I had three dreams in a row, in one night, with similar themes of escape, crime, and public transit:
* The first dream took place after the most recent episode of The Sopranos, but instead of being shot in the woods, Adriana and another woman who was to be disposed of were taken to a remote subway station where several lines crossed. Adriana managed to get her hands on a metal crowbar of some kind and proceeded to beat up all the guys who had taken her there; then she escaped by jumping tracks to other platforms and getting on trains. She got off at a particular station, where she hid for a while, then cut off her hair to disguise herself, stole some new clothes from a store, and called her FBI contacts, who came in and picked her up, so she could go into their witness relocation program. (I guess this was just wishful thinking, that Adriana could be strong and kick-ass since she was one of my favorite characters.)
* In the second dream, I was some kind of criminal in training, and my boss was played by Eminem. We used the subway to get around, and had passkeys and detailed knowledge of which stations and tunnels to use. I had cut my hair very short and looked like a boy to throw people off from guessing my real identity. There was a particular station in the north of Manhattan that we used as sort of a home base, that had some kind of history as being on the spot of a former nunnery from olden days (a reference to The Cloisters, perhaps?) We evaded the police by jumping across tracks, changing trains, hiding out, etc.
* In the third dream, which occurred at the end, just before I woke up, I had gone back to Prague for a few weeks, but because I didn't have the proper visa to be there at that time (I was supposed to wait for a bit until some earlier one ran out and I could apply again), I ended up running from authorities at the airport and the train station, along with a friend of mine, another girl who had come to Prague. This one woman from the police kept dogging us, and after zigzagging with my friend through the streets, unable to lose her, I eventually had to knock the woman out by pushing her down a small flight of stairs; I apologized while doing so, because I genuinely didn't want to hurt her, just evade her. Then my friend and I rode the light rail system for a while in the outlaying suburbs, doubling back and going in different directions to spread misinformation around and make it harder for us to be tracked. Eventually it occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to leave the country without getting caught, since my passport would have some sort of special status that would show up when they scanned it at the airport on my departure. I thought about taking the train to another country (e.g. Poland) and getting a flight from there back to the U.S., but then thought that I'd have the same problem there. Then I met someone on the trains who had done a similar thing and had gone to a corrupt transportation official, the daughter of a man who had run the system years ago and had several stations named after him, and bribed her to get rid of the criminal flag on his passport so he wouldn't be stopped at the airport. I asked him where to find her and how much he had offered her, and then went and holed up at my old roommate Beth's place to figure out what to do. She was newly engaged to some guy, but told me that they were both still virgins and were saving themselves for their wedding night. The corrupt official, who was only in her 20s, also had a radio show that we tuned into; she played drums while another guy sang and played keyboards.
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| Tuesday, April 27th, 2004
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11:40 am
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I had bought a cheap old car, a small manual-transmission convertible (a VW Jetta or a Saab?), thinking it was a good deal. I had also been hired to be in a movie with Daryl Hannah (among others). One night, a bunch of us from the cast and crew went out to get something to eat. I couldn't make up my mind what to get from the couple of delis that people were getting stuff from, and everyone ended up being finished before me, so I had to go back with some of the crew who were still finishing up their meal. We were upstairs at a deli on Sixth Avenue, and one of the crew members (he might have been the lead camera operator) and I started getting into a fight. He pulled a knife on me, and I pulled out my pocket knife, but his reach was longer and he grabbed me by the throat. Some of the other crew members grabbed him off me, and one of them had a knife, and ended up stabbing the guy in the side. He lay there on the floor bleeding. I started freaking out and called 911. The cops and the ambulance eventually arrived, and I started to tell the cops what happened but then was afraid that they'd think that I stabbed him since I told them that one of the knives they collected was mine (even though it wasn't the one with the blood on it). Eventually, everyone left to go to the hospital or back to the set, and I was the only one left. I tried collecting everyone's things, but there was too much for me to carry by myself (cameras, books, phones, etc.). I asked the deli if I could keep a box of things there and then send a driver from the set back for it later. Then it was much later, and I went back to the mechanic to pick up my car with my friend Freya, who was visiting from out of town. Some of the crew members had been driving my car and it needed repairs because they had been kind of rough with it. The head mechanic was this sexy butch woman who Freya and I flirted with. It still needed some other stuff taken care of (the seats, the mirrors), but it was okay to drive, and with the top down and the sun shining I took Freya on a drive around town, which suddenly wasn't NYC anymore, but some weird of amalgam of Melbourne and some other city.
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| Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004
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12:13 pm
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I had recently returned to my father's house, where he was was having a big new patio built outside. The men who were laying the stone were under secret investigation for criminal activities; it was suspected that they were hiding contraband in or underneath the stones. The investigators went undercover as animals to infiltrate my father's household unnoticed — as a koala bear and a cat — and once I found out their secret (the talking koala bear piqued my interest), I began to help them try to get the goods on the workmen. Dan Aykroyd played the koala bear.
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| Thursday, March 18th, 2004
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12:13 pm
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I had come into possession of a picture that, like the videotape in The Ring, would eventually kill you, although all I knew at first was that it was kind of a gruesomely weird photo and I didn't want it around. I kept trying to get rid of it but it would pop up later somewhere else in my things, and the face would have a slightly different, more terrifying look on its face. At first I thought someone was just playing a little trick on me, and then I realized the photo was going to kill me and I started going crazy. [At this point I became aware that I was having a nightmare and tried desperately to wake myself up.] I went for a pair of scissors to cut it up, but then suddenly I knew that if I tried that, the photo would make my hand slip and I'd cut myself all over with the scissor blades. Then I thought of burning the photo, but then I also realized that the photo would make the fire spread and my whole place would be on fire. The face in the photo changed again and I started getting really scared, because I knew it was going to kill me soon. [At this point I was finally able to wake myself up, but I was shaken and scared and it took a while before I could get back to sleep.]
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