squid's dream journal

January 2026

2026-01-02

I was visiting a seaside town with a friend on vacation. We decided to check out a church; it was well-known as an unusual place, much smaller than most other churches and with no windows, but worth the trip. My friend had gotten an entry ticket some time earlier so they were allowed in through the side entrance, but I had to go through the main entrance.

Entering the church through the main entrance was a multi-step ritual. Doors had to be opened in the correct sequence, and at the end you had to donate some blood by allowing a centipede-leech creature to bite you. An attendant at the entrance walked me through all the steps, but just before we got to the bloodletting, he mentioned that I also needed to follow the church's account on Twitter. For some reason, this was the step that I thought was too much effort, so I left without seeing inside the church.

September 2025

2025-09-18

MC was a time traveler trying to fix a bad future at the request of a friend. In this future, every household was controlled by something called a "committee": a thing made of some black fungal material, in the vague shape of a bunch of humanoid figures standing side by side and fused at the shoulders and arms. The committees would appear somewhere inside the home and scatter spores into milk. If anyone drank the contaminated milk, the committee would gain some control over them. Primarily, they influenced people's vision and opinions, making them unable to see anything that criticized the committees and recommend the milk to others. In emergency situations, though, they could also take direct control of these people and make them say things or perform actions.

MC used a large anti-committee sign to evade the controlled people (since they weren't able to see the sign), and snuck into a house. They found a committee and cut one of the humanoid figures loose. It became slimelike in texture and capable of shapeshifting. It seemed confused and barely able to move, but once it got its bearings it agreed to help the MC, implying that even the committees were under the control of some greater hivemind.

2025-09-05

Everyone inside a school building had contracted a dangerous, contagious disease. The doors were all locked to prevent anyone from leaving and infecting anyone else. One woman, who was immune, was sent outside to inform the mayor about this in hopes that he could do something about it. But before anything happened, the sick people began to liquefy one by one, and the goop filled the entire building and burst its walls down, spreading into and infecting everyone else in the town.

The dream was framed as a movie I was watching with friends, and when it ended on a shot of the mayor's gravestone as if this was a really serious and meaningful conclusion, we all lost our minds at how stupid it was.

2025-09-01

I was returning to a dorm room I rented after some time away. It was dirty and garbage bags were strewn over the floor. When I moved the garbage bags, a creature flew out from the pile. It resembled a millipede with the head and protonum of a cockroach, and the wing casing and wings of a beetle. It was pretty large, maybe a foot long in total. It began flying around the room, with its head and most of its body dangling awkwardly below the wings. I managed to get it outside, but it wouldn't leave the yard; it would hunt smaller bugs by flying toward them and clumsily tackling them the ground, and swooped at me a few times in the process.

July 2025

2025-07-30

A group of people were cursed by some sort of demonic being. Below the neck it had the body of a portly gentleman wearing formal clothes, but its head was made of some kind of dark grey metallic material, and consisted of a large sphere, stacked on top of a misshapen blob with spikes coming out of it, stacked on top of a horizontal cylinder. At some point it told the MCs that its true head was the cylinder, and indeed you could see eyes on either side (but they were invisible unless you got really close). The rest of the "head" was supposedly an accessory, like some kind of hat, but it melded into / had the same texture as the true head.

All the curses were things that would happen repeatedly and increasing in intensity until they killed the holders. One person's head would twitch in a random direction, harder each time, until they break their own neck. Another one would vomit from time to time until they literally vomit their guts out. MC wasn't cursed for some reason, and the symptoms of the curses seemed to get better whenever the others were in physical contact with them. They went on a journey to find a way to lift the curses, but in the end they were captured by the demon again and tormented until most of them died.

2025-07-24

Monsters or aliens or some other threat had invaded Earth, and the plot of the dream followed a group of people who were holed up in a large building [maybe an abandoned school or warehouse?] trying to survive. The monsters sent one of their kind to threaten / negotiate with the people. It looked like a woman with black clothes and long black hair. A full-sized tornado of black wind streamed out of her mouth and up into the sky. Although the wind battered the humans, her hair and clothes stayed in place as if there was no wind. She did not move her mouth when speaking.

June 2025

2025-06-08

The plot of the dream was not very coherent, but throughout the entire thing I was simultaneously dealing with a more notable weird thing. Growths that kind of resembled enoki mushrooms, with long stems and a small round cap at the end, were sprouting out of my gums. They wound themselves through the gaps between my teeth and wedged themselves in place. I had to get them out of my mouth by grabbing them by the cap and carefully pulling until the entire growth came out by the root. If I pulled too hard, the cap would come off of the stem, and I couldn't get them out anymore.

March 2025

2025-03-20

I was infiltrating a castle with some friends to rescue someone. Hidden underneath the castle was a sprawling labyrinth / dungeon separated into many floors. Each floor was populated by fake people, who acted out normal everyday scenarios in settings such as malls or offices. We could pass them freely, but if they realized something was out of the ordinary, they would freak out and reality would start to unwind, forcing us to calm them down or get to the next floor before something catastrophic happened. The fake people on the first few floors were very gullible and we could basically pretend to be janitors just by swinging a broom around. On lower floors, though, they became more observant and more fragile. Eventually, even gently bumping into them would knock them over and they'd splatter when they hit the ground, leading to mass freak outs.

We eventually made it to the bottom floor, called the abyss, where the person we were trying to rescue was supposed to be. This floor also had fake people, but they were so fragile they would fall apart instantly upon being created, so there was no time for them to freak out, so we could search freely.

2025-03-07

In this world, the UK government would hold polls every few years to rename the sun. Whichever poll option won would become the sun's official name until the next poll. I was scrolling through their website looking at past sun names, which included "Total=226 Ours=36", ["dfgklhjdfh" or some other similar home row keysmash], "The Star of the Solar System", and "Gimlet". I then spent several minutes frantically trying to wake up and write these down so I could tell my friends (but I still forgot some in the end).

January 2025

2025-01-06

The main character was a man who woke up one day and realized he was inhabiting both his own body and his house. He could see himself in third person from the house's perspective, and whenever he touched the floor or walls he could feel it from both sides. He stumbled around the house trying to get used to the doubled senses for a while. Once he was oriented, he attempted to leave the house, but some kind of magic force prevented him from doing so.

2025-01-05

The main character was a high school girl who had been transported into another world. This world was inhabited by humans drawn in a very simplistic and cartoony art style, but once a person found their passion, they would mutate grotesquely into detailed abominations. The only example I remember was the protagonist's older brother, who was a dentist; he had a blobby, roughly spherical and completely hairless head, beady black eyes half hidden between skin folds, no nose, and a gigantic gaping mouth filled with bottlecap-sized molars.

MC went to school, where the usual cliques (nerds, jocks, etc.) had basically speciated into different types of monsters. She was terrified and tried desperately to stay away from everyone so she wouldn't turn into a monster herself, but eventually winds up making friends with some other characters. (Parts of this dream were framed as a comic book I was reading, and I got annoyed that the MC's friends had inoffensive mostly-human designs even though they were also supposed to be monsters.) She learns a lesson about how people are still interesting and varied even after finding their passions and teams up with them to defeat some greater evil.

November 2024

2024-11-27

I was playing some kind of action RPG. One of the enemies was a cardboard standee, with a life-sized human silhouette-shaped hole cut out from the middle of it. All that was visible was the person's dark, floor-length hair, which surrounded the hole. This enemy did not move, but would attack by screaming if the player character got close, or by summoning meteors if the player was far away.

2024-11-21

I had to kill some little white dogs to protect some crops. I hit them in the heads with an axe, but then felt bad about doing so and tried to pat their skulls back into shape so I wouldn't have to look at the wounds. Their eyes rolled backwards into their sockets, and white fur started pouring out of them.

October 2024

2024-10-28

The Discord mobile app had been discontinued, and it was no longer possible to check messages from your phone. The new version was a physical skull you had to place in your room; when you get new messages, it would rattle loudly to get your attention, then open its mouth. The messages would be printed on a long strip of paper like a receipt and come out of the mouth for you to read. There was also a panel somewhere on the skull where you can adjust settings; I used it to turn the rattling off.

2024-10-27

My university was displaying a performance art installation in a room with no furniture. Inside, several people were dressed in full-body costumes and SFX makeup to make them resemble various monsters, and they crawled slowly around on the floor in a circle. Other people, dressed like normal students, stood watch over them. You were meant to experience this installation by sitting at the edges of the room and watching, and a lot of people were doing so.

September 2024

2024-09-17

I was at some kind of party or event. There was a menu with five different beers on it to choose from. The first four were normal, but the fifth "beer" took the form of a tiny green bead with a black center embedded into one of your finger joints. If you squeezed it like a pimple, it would shoot up out of your finger and explode like a firework.

2024-09-12

I was wandering through a restaurant. One of the tables had a father and several children seated at it. The father had an oval-shaped hole where his face should have been, allowing a clear look into his empty head. All the children except one were completely headless, with shadowed necks. I caught a glimpse of circuit board patterns in the empty spaces, and wondered if these could be cybernetics of some sort. I pulled out my phone and searched "head prosthetics" on Wikipedia, and it redirected me to the page about meat.

July 2024

2024-07-23

My friend sent several dark, blurry close-up photos of the interior of a car into my Discord server, captioned "I bought a bunch of basketball equipment, excited to start playing!". Everyone else in our friend group responded to this as if it was completely normal, while I squinted and tried to figure out where the basketball equipment was. Eventually I gave up and simply reacted to the original image with an emoji of half a basketball peeking out from the bottom of the frame.

2024-07-08

I tried out a new laundry service. You would drop off your clothes, and once they were cleaned, they would be hung up in an enormous, maze-like warehouse along with millions of other pieces of clothing. There was no system to help you find your clothes, beyond a very rough categorization system (all the t-shirts were sorted together and so forth). I wandered around in the warehouse for a while and managed to find my backpack because it was a distinctive bright blue, but could not find my shirts at all.

I got into an argument with a friend who was convinced that this was a great service with no downsides. I tried to explain that I would never find my clothes, but they argued that this was actually a good thing, because clothes that sat in the warehouse would eventually "reproduce" with each other to make new interesting pieces of clothing that you could also take home. I argued that I would never find those new pieces either...

2024-07-04

I was playing a video game and learned a cheese strategy for a boss. The boss arena had a wooden signpost in it; by placing two dogs in a row behind the sign and then standing on top of it, you would become invincible because the dogs' hitboxes would block any attacks from reaching you (the dogs didn't take any damage either). From there, you can simply blast the boss with ranged attacks until it dies.

I normally wouldn't consider this one interesting enough for the log, but I did have it on my birthday, so... for posterity?

June 2024

2024-06-07

I was angry at my mother and decided to pretend to be dead in order to scare her. I accomplished this by becoming lighter than air and floating up to the ceiling, limbs hanging limp below my body.

I did this in some kind of outdoor courtyard place with a ceiling held up by pillars. My mother wasn't there yet, so I watched motionless as some stray cats wandered by. Eventually she arrived, but didn't seem to be convinced that I was dead. She pulled out a folding umbrella, extended it, and used it to nudge me around to see if I would move. I kept pretending to be dead until the dream ended.

May 2024

2024-05-03 (2)

The MCs are a human and an android, who are touring a secret scientific facility that exists to contain and study anomalies. One anomaly is a large vaguely humanoid figure, covered in white fuzz with two black eyes. It is so dangerous that a guard has to stand in its cell wearing a full hazmat suit and monitor it 24/7. The MCs watch as the guards change shifts, but something goes wrong and the anomaly escapes.

The anomaly has the ability to burrow through most types of matter at high speed, while filtering inorganic compounds out of that matter and constructing it into machines. It begins to burrow toward another secret facility, and the MCs try to outrun it so they can get there first and warn the people before it shows up. However, the anomaly stops when it reaches an abandoned amusement park, and uses the metal to create what looks like a white flip phone and drops it on the ground. The phone begins to transmit a signal toward the other facility, informing them of the anomaly's location.

The MCs investigate this phone. The human picks it up and handles it with no ill effects, but when the android picks it up, their innards begin to spontaneously convert themselves into more copies of the phone, which they vomit up violently. The effect only stops when they drop the phone. The MCs realize that the anomaly is trying to lure humans toward itself, while preventing them from sending machines to contain it.

2024-05-03

I leave my apartment to go for a walk. Outside is a beautiful seaside garden park, in vivid green colours. There are flower boxes on either side of the path. The "flowers" growing in the boxes are straight poles sticking out of the ground tipped with pointy cones, like wrought iron spiked fence posts but in a variety of pastel colours. Impaled on the spikes are dead alligators, their blood dripping into the soil.

Past the flower boxes, there is a row of motionless fishermen standing along one side of the path. They all hold fishing rods which have been cast into the bushes on the opposite side of the path. I have to duck underneath their fishing rods to pass by.

April 2024

2024-04-11

I was reading a book. Some of the pages were normal book pages, but others simply had a rectangular hole where the text should be, extending downwards as if the book is hollow (though flipping these pages would reveal more normal pages). Inside each hole page were human organs, arranged roughly as they would be in a human body cavity, floating in a thin layer of clear fluid. I was annoyed by these pages, since the liquid and organs spilled out whenever I turned the page too fast, making a huge mess.

2024-04-08

I'm watching a video essay[?] about the symbolism of two playing cards, the Red King and the Pale Queen. The video has these two cards displayed in the background, with the presenter in front of them like a weather reporter, pointing at the cards' features, etc. and explaining their interpretation.

As the video goes on, the images on the two cards melt and distort, until they turn into two mounds of vaguely humanoid white wax. The two are completely indistinguishable except for one feature: the Red King's short red hair doesn't melt, instead sinking and settling into a ring at about neck level. The presenter continues to point at the two cards as if they didn't melt, pointing at features that can't be seen at all.

March 2024

2024-03-02

The dream's villain was a demon called the Grey Man. He resembles a normal human man, blond and blue-eyed, generically handsome in a famous actor kind of way. He sometimes appears at crosswalks; if you acknowledged his existence and then tried to cross the road, he would grip you by the wrist and drag you across the road, and you would never be seen again.

MC somehow survives an encounter with the Grey Man, but he continues to pursue her, so she has to go on the run with some friends. During their road trip they meet some other demons, who are non-humanoid monsters and pretty friendly. These demons also have no idea what the deal is with the Grey Man; apparently he's just weird.

February 2024

2024-02-10

A short time ago in this world, everyone became invisible. MC, a photographer, attends a wedding. The bride and groom have had their faces painted to resemble their former visible faces. At first, the illusion is perfect. However, as the evening goes on, their makeup smears and drips until their faces look horribly distorted, and the event is ruined.

MC leaves the party, and laments that things are like this because the gods withdrew from the world. They go to an abandoned lot, where there's a small patch of ground covered in irregular squares of grass. There are stars in the sky directly above this patch of ground, but the rest of the sky is empty and dark. MC laments that this is the only "window" to the gods' realm that remains, and even then, the gods don't seem to pay attention to it.

While they're watching the sky, it pulses audibly, and a giant exclamation mark forms where the stars were. Then the window expands to cover half the sky, and incomprehensible noise plays while text scrolls across it. MC tries to write it down, but can't get their notebook out in time. They watch helplessly, and assure themselves that someone else must have heard the noise and be recording this message from the gods.

2024-02-07

I was doing an escape room-esque challenge, where the goal was to create a homunculus within the time limit - find the recipe, gather the ingredients, assemble them, etc. In practice, the challenge mostly involved furiously filling in requisition forms to convince a mysterious organization that you're trustworthy enough that they can send you the ingredients. The questions on the forms were mostly video game-related - one asked what my favourite Pokemon game was. Time ran out before I could finish writing.

January 2024

2024-01-17

A friend and I were on vacation, sharing a hotel suite with a rich family. Much of the dream was about wandering around in the suite, which had way too many rooms and an inexplicably office-like design (glass walls, file cabinets, etc).

Just before checkout, the rich family realized they were a metaphor for stagnancy, destined to play out the same scenes for eternity without progress or satisfaction. The father of the family was particularly shaken by this. He boarded the elevator with me and the kids, but barred the door with his luggage when his wife or my friend tried to enter.

Once the elevator reached the lobby, the father began laughing maniacally and slitting his throat repeatedly, gurgling through his blood that he can't die because he's a metaphor. However, it turned out he only had partial immortality, and fell to the floor unmoving after a few tries. On seeing this horrific sight, the children morphed into circus animals (a lion, a tiger, a couple others I don't remember) and began attacking everyone in the lobby.

My friend arrived at this point, and we worked together to subdue the animals. They trapped the animals in huge rainbow balloons, while my role was to fend them off / distract them using a large pin while they worked. The animals sometimes attacked using balloons as well? So I had to pop them while avoiding popping the rainbow balloons.

December 2023

2023-12-21

I was on vacation at a lakeside cottage with some family. To get around the place, everyone rode these strange manta ray-like creatures which could fly through the air. They were brightly colored (one red, one blue), had a single eye each, and their large mouths were filled with square molar-like teeth. A bar handle protruded from their back, which could be gripped for safety while riding them. When they weren't flying, they used a ring of tentacle-like "legs" growing from the middle of the belly to crawl around.

Apparently, these creatures were widely used as beasts of burden, since they can carry a lot of weight, don't tire easily, and can land on water or solid ground. The only drawback is they were universally obsessed with advertisements, and would refuse to move if they couldn't hear one. Thus, we had to hear radio ads blasted at full volume while we flew over the lake sightseeing.

2023-12-18

I was participating in a community garden, where I grew a number of plants. A group of four shirtless people wearing jack-o-lanterns over their heads appeared. All of them were extremely muscular, like Olympic weightlifters. They were apparently popular YouTubers, and they commandeered the garden in order to record their video show there.

They uprooted practically everything in the garden and rearranged them to fit their show's aesthetic. Many of my plants were thrown away entirely, because they were wilting a little. My flytraps survived, but they were replanted in a "spooky" themed area that was so over-watered that they were practically standing in a puddle.

After setting up, they sat down around a table and began to broadcast live. They recorded for hours on end and showed no sign of wrapping up or leaving. Nobody else seemed bothered by this, or made any attempt to shoo them out. Eventually I had to give up on my plants and leave.

2023-12-16

My [MC's?] family was keeping a deviantART adoptable-esque thing as a pet. It was humanoid, with long messy straight hair, sharp teeth, horns that swooped backward, and a large snake tail. The design was entirely one shade of offwhite, except for red eyes and gold [diamond-shaped?] details on the horns and tail. It wore an oversized t-shirt and nothing else. It was drawn in something resembling Zoomutt's art style.

It did not seem to be sapient; it didn't speak, and spent most of the dream crawling around on the ground (using its limbs like a human). The parents in the dream spoiled it greatly, giving it human food and letting it crawl wherever it wanted, which stressed me out because I was sure something bad would happen if they didn't keep a better eye on it.

Somehow, I ended up in a fantasy dungeon with it, where another adventurer used clairvoyance to predict that one of us would not survive the trip. The snake thing was already crawling off, so I assumed the prophecy meant it would wander into a monster and get killed or something. I tried to call it over so we could get out and go home. It stood up and walked toward me, arms outstretched and mouth open. I thought it might bite me, but figured that'd be fine as long as I could get it to come quietly. It proceeded to tear out my jugular along with a quarter of my neck, accompanied by a sickening multi-layered crunching sound effect, and I died and woke up.

2023-12-15

MC was a college student who had awakened a precognition power. Visually, this was represented by "ghosts", like in racing games: if they considered a course of action, they could see a transparent version of themselves acting out the action and the outcome, then adjust their plans accordingly.

While on their way home from class, MC's power attracted the attention of a murderous villain. They weren't good at controlling the power yet, so all they could do was escape. They took refuge in a mall bathroom (which contained a bizarre clump of a dozen toilets connected by a mess of pipes, for some reason). The villain threatened to kill everyone in the mall unless they showed themselves, causing a panicked evacuation.

MC's grasp over their power improved rapidly until they could preview thousands of potential actions per second. The dream culminated in an epic battle, where they held the villain off so everyone else could escape. MC's special attack split their arm into a myriad of dark shadow centipedes which would rush at the opponent from all directions, then once one made contact the others would disappear.

November 2023

2023-11-25

I was at a whimsical fantasy magic school type setting, with quirky marketplaces and cobblestone roads. While making my way to a candy store, I saw a sign about a special lecture being held by the school's founder, and I decided to check it out. However, the lecture did not explain anything about magic or the history or the school; he just walked between the audience seats, acting like a celebrity, signing autographs and high-fiving people, etc.

I decided to try learning some magic on my own, and managed to change the color of the text on a note I found. Someone else in the auditorium saw this, and told me I should stop doing magic since I could run out. Later, my dorm roommate explained to me that magic is a solid substance that can be extracted from humans. Each person only has a limited amount, and if it runs out they permanently become non-magical. The "magic school" isn't really a school, but rather a sort of gated community that maintains its whimsical nature by sucking the magic out of alternate dimensions.

October 2023

2023-10-22

I was playing with a little girl. She had an intricate tiny dollhouse set (a bit smaller than 1:24 scale?) of a fancy mansion in the middle of a party. Instead of dolls it came with little figurines, which had the exact same texture as those realistic animal figurines you can buy at toy stores. She wanted me to place the figurines inside the house.

Each figurine had a name and a title written on the packaging, indicating the character's role in the playset. They were all overly long and elaborate; the only one I remember fully was "Jon the thief who's definitely going to die one day (but not today)", who was a James Bond-esque spy who had infiltrated the party.

All the figurines fit the fancy party theme, except "[Judy?] the cat (one out of zero out of 90 cats)". She was a cat, posed so she was lying limply on the floor. One of her front legs, one of her back legs, and most of her head was missing, so that she only had one eye and a bit of head attached to the neck. The damaged areas were simply smoothed and furred over as if they naturally grew like that. She came with her missing limbs and an entire cat head (with two eyes) as separate accessories, which were supposed to be scattered artfully around her body. Apparently, you could also buy additional accessories for her, which consisted of even more cat parts.

I don't remember if the kid told me this or if I just knew due to dream logic, but I got the sense that the cat was supposed to be some kind of slime-like colony organism that can detach her parts and ooze around.

2023-10-18

The dream is animated in the style of a Studio Ghibli movie. A woman comes to a destination hotel on a floating island in order to seek revenge against her teacher, who had killed her parents. She climbs rooftops and asks everyone she sees, but is unable to find the man. Frustrated, she asks the sky what to do, and it replies "jump".

She jumps off the side of the floating island and falls into the ocean. She chokes on the water and begins to drown. Before she can die, the ocean speaks to her, saying "I will allow this consumption. It is the traditional medicine after the illness. Use me to find the one you seek. And then CEASE."

The woman's eyes snap open. She struggles to the surface and swims to a nearby island to recover. It seems she knows what to do now.

2023-10-05

I was at a pool party, which provided snacks in the forms of small bags of potato chips. Some of them were labeled "Yogurt Bar Flavor" and tasted exactly like BBQ flavor chips. Others had the branding of a movie [maybe titled Chameleon?] on the bag, and were supposedly of a special limited-time flavor specifically based on the movie. They tasted exactly like regular flavor.

September 2023

2023-09-29

MC and a friend take on a popular "challenge", where the goal is to drink a whole syringe full of mysterious green liquid and survive. The liquid is harmless, but while your body is processing it, several extremely powerful fighters become aware of your location, and attempt to reach and kill you by any means possible. There are all kinds of strategies: some people drink a little at a time and hope it gets out of their system before the enemies can catch up, while others drink it all at once and fight the enemies off so they can get it over with.

MC is losing a desperate battle against the enemies in a park when she touches a huge pimple behind her ear and it pops into a mess of greenish white goo. Horrified and disgusted, she asks the enemies for a time out while she fetches some tissues to deal with it. The enemies agree and step back. I suddenly realize this is a dream, and go "oh, man, it would be really funny if I woke up now". I wake up.

2023-09-01

MC was a student at some kind of magic school. They were out late at night after staying too long at a restaurant, and had to make their way back to their dorm room. In the hallways of the school were dozens of "guards", which were people in full bodysuits and blank black masks who moved in strange jerky ways, occasionally waving their guns around. Apparently, nobody knew what the deal was with them except that they always appeared at night, and general consensus was to keep your head down and avoid confrontation as much as possible.

As they walked, throngs of normal people joined the guards, dressed in normal clothes but moving in the same way. They met up with a friend who was also trying to get back to the dorms, hovering nervously in front of some bathrooms since these strange people were milling in and out of both bathrooms in orderly lines. They decided to team up, since MC could use their "clear magic" to hide them from view and the friend could carry them and run faster.

The two of them noticed a wall screen playing a cartoon, which went off-script as a character leaned to the side and swallowed a flower whole and then licked their lips. MC wonders if something is going on, and uses their magic to dispel illusions. Their magic revealed the floor was covered in flowers and thin-stalked mushrooms, growing in sinister clusters over a grid of text - some were short messages like "Oh", "Yes", "No", while others were longer but completely gibberish sentences.

They desperately run for the friend's dorm room, jumping and trying to touch as little of the floor as possible. I think the strange people started actively chasing them at this point too. The dream ended soon after they made it to safety.

August 2023

2023-08-29

A friend tells me about an obscure MMO based on an anime. Apparently, the game is surprisingly good, with a focus on interesting physics simulation, so lots of people are still playing it even though it was released years ago and the anime was already over. I decide to make an account and check it out.

Within the MMO, there is an underground area with a pool of lava. A crowd is milling around along the edges of the pool. By asking around, I learn that a boss monster spawns periodically near the pool of lava. Players can use certain skills to push it into the lava, which kills it instantly, netting a bunch of experience points for everyone present. I stick around and watch this happen a few times. The boss looks like a perfectly normal baikal seal with the world's most pathetic expression on its face. One time, a rare version of the boss spawns - the same seal, but blue and with a turtle shell - and everyone cheers as they push it into the lava once again.

2023-08-14

Some friends and I were playing around with a new neural network trained to identify photos of fish flesh. We gave it a photo of cement ground with some weird pockmarks in it, and it identified it as "500kg sea angel meat". I looked this up and was surprised to find a bunch of articles about how "500kg sea angels" are real, and eating their flesh grants you supernatural longevity.

The rest of the dream was about me wrestling with my computer's clipboard so I could send this information to a friend who has a sea angel character.

July 2023

2023-07-19

Talking to Len in a large, dilapidated mansion that resembles a jungle but indoors. Plants grow out of the walls and ceilings. All the furniture is made of damp, rotting wood. Pencil-sized hagfish writhe around on the wet plank floor. I scoop one up and put it in a mug full of stagnant water and fallen branches in hopes that it'll survive.

Len pulls out a knife and [accidentally? somehow?] stabs it into a table. Yellow slime mold gushes out of the cut like pressurized blood. Pulsating as if in a time lapse, it engulfs the entire table and then withers into an orange-red color and dies, like a blobby fire.

It doesn't seem possible to leave the mansion. Someone carves their name into a branch every day, to keep track of time while they find an escape route. On the tenth day, they turn the branch over and their name is already written a tenth time on the other side.

2023-07-05

Reading a fairy tale-themed [story? roleplay?] by my friends. A Princess was locked in a room; human ears grew out of their body at random intervals, and a Knight was tasked with protecting them and cutting the ears off with their sword as soon as they appeared. However, the ears were only symptoms of a larger problem, and cutting them off without addressing them properly made things worse, eventually turning the Princess into a giant monster.

June 2023

2023-06-30

Some scientists were using an "evolution machine" to mutate octopuses and make them genetically predisposed toward performing certain tasks. Their experiments were very successful, most requiring only 2 or 3 iterations in the machine to achieve the desired effect.

Then, they decided it would be funny to make them reblog posts on tumblr. For some reason, this task is exponentially more difficult - the octopuses warped and mutated wildly in the machine, growing dozens of branching tentacles, then escaped and tried to strangle everyone they saw. In a few iterations they grew human fingers, which the scientists considered progress / "a step in the right direction", but they only used them for strangling purposes. After more than 50 trials, they were forced to give up.

2023-06-24

I'm at university and I'm searching for the classroom I need to go to for my next class. I'm outside, but the greenhouses around me are packed as close together as classrooms, with only a hallway's width between them. The university is built at the edge of some salt flats, which are occasionally visible through the gaps between the buildings; the sun is harsh, and the metal in the greenhouse walls is rusting and flaking.

As I pass each greenhouse, I peek into it to see if it's the right one. I somehow know that they're abandoned laboratories where someone tried to make barnacles grow on turtles. Each greenhouse is filled with failed trials - twisted and shattered bones from both types of animals growing out of and warping around each other.

At the last greenhouse, the experiment is still in progress. Bone-white turtle shells are suspended from the ceiling like hanging planters. "Barnacles" grow out of them, but they resemble long writhing worms that split fractal-like at the ends, like feathery bronchial tubes.

I feel a sinking sense of inevitability, as I know this experiment will fail and these barnacles will die as well. It's not the right classroom, so I move on.

May 2023

2023-05-22

Another dream about coding a HTML/CSS layout in my sleep. See the details here.

April 2023

2023-04-03

MC and a friend go to a city inside a storybook to retrieve an important object. MC's friend knows someone who lives in the city, and asks him for help locating the object. The local tells them that the object is in a fancy library, underneath a big marble set of stairs. However, he advises MC not to take it, because some wizards rule over the library, and it is too dangerous to cross them. To explain just how powerful they are, he recounts that the wizards once created a cinnamon roll so transcendentally delicious that, when they ate it, it retroactively erased all other cinnamon rolls from the timeline, and now the concept of cinnamon rolls no longer exists.

MC's friend is skeptical. He says there's no way that the wizards could have that much power, and questions if cinnamon rolls are even real. [He says, roughly, "what even is a cinnamon roll? Like a pizza roll, but instead of tomato and cheese, there's - "]

Halfway through his sentence, the wizards in the library eat a transcendental pizza roll, erasing the concept of pizza rolls from existence. MC's friend pauses, takes a moment to process what happened and the words he just said (which he no longer understands), and reluctantly admits that the local might have a point.

March 2023

2023-03-30

I'm at the mall with some friends. We're curious about one store, some kind of gift shop with a big brightly-coloured display window in the front, and decide to go in. There is a staff member at the door monitoring the flow of customers, so people line up outside the store and are let in in small groups. The staff member seems worried and haunted, despite the cheerful aesthetic of the shop.

Inside, the store is ocean-themed. The walls are lined with displays and fish tanks. It's vaguely reminiscent of Bass Pro Shops, but no pretense is made that it's a natural place - everything is neatly stacked and in 90 degree angles. All the displays are conspicuously fake-looking - fenced-in ponds with acrylic water, and too-small fish tanks with no decorations, full of overly colourful fish swimming in place.

Near the entrance, one of the friends I'm shopping with points out a hidden security camera. I turn to look and see an animatronic seal, whose head turns to follow the visitors so smoothly it's hardly noticeable. Other displays include a tank filled with man-sized moray eels, all of them positioned vertically and staring at the floor of the tank; a second camera animatronic, this one a shark that constantly snapped its plastic jaws at the air; and a booth you could use to somehow "possess" an animatronic mermaid in one of the fake ponds, so it would gain your face for photo taking opportunities.

2023-03-14

A modern art museum was doing a special exhibition. Inside the exhibition were info sheets on a variety of closed species pasted on poster boards, like low-effort middle school science projects. A sign at the entrance told you that you can play tag with the other patrons in this section, by loudly declaring yourself as "it" when you entered.

I went through the exhibition, reading the info sheets, and occasionally glancing over my shoulder to scan for playful patrons who might want to tag me. [I don't think I got tagged, but other patrons were definitely chasing each other in the background.] At the end of the exhibition was a cafeteria-like area, where the artist showed up, and informed the patrons that the exhibition was actually a human behaviour study. They showed charts and statistics about who participated in the game of tag and how.

Most of the patrons ignored the charts. They just discussed how cool closed species were and how they should really get back into that scene, over cafeteria burgers. The artist was pissed.

February 2023

2023-02-15

I had extra fingers on my left hand - one growing perpendicular out of the middle of my palm, and a second branching off my thumb to the side. I turned my hand over to examine them and thought "that's going to be inconvenient".

2023-02-11

A man who had escaped from a deadly game he was trapped in wants to go back and figure out what happened. He gets on a bus, pays for a ticket, and asks the driver if the bus goes to Paradox. Everything goes monochrome. The bus driver stares at him and chants "Tooth. Tooth. Tooth." Then every person on the bus turns to look at him and chants "Traitor. Traitor. Traitor." repeatedly. He is confused and has no idea what's going on. Just as he begins to consider getting off the bus, things snap back to normal; the driver tells him they do go to Paradox, and gives him change for his ticket as if nothing happened.

The bus is full, except for the section at the back, which is completely empty save for a single woman. He sits down beside her and asks her about the deadly game. I don't remember their conversation, but she seems normal at first, even relieved that someone wasn't ignoring her, but says stranger and stranger things until the man is deeply disturbed. Every time he looks away, there is a new duplicate of her sitting in one of the previously-empty seats around them. She starts pulling an endless supply of used wet wipes from her purse until the ground is littered with them. He can't get away from her.

The man grabs one of the wet wipes and tries to strangle her with it, desperate to get out of this situation - but she keeps talking, even as her head distorts unpleasantly under the tissue as if she had no bones. The man turns his head and sees another version of himself in a different seat, strangling a different version of her.

I woke up at this point, but during the dream I was convinced that it was a horror movie I had seen before, so I know how it ends: the "tooth" chant turns out to be some kind of inoculation ritual that protects from whatever the woman is, and the man uses it to escape from her somehow.

January 2023

2023-01-30

I fought a "stuffing ghost" in a whimsical magic school-esque setting. The ghost's true form was a tiny piece of cotton, cinched in the middle so it appeared to have two sections - a slightly smaller "head" and a slightly larger "body". It can slip into plushies through small rips in the fabric and possess/control them.

The plush the ghost controlled was about 1.5x as tall as me; it was a roughly humanoid plush made of sock-like material, with a pear-shaped body and a simple snouted head, kind of similar to Everyman from Undertale. It had a different colored patch on its belly with pins sticking out of it like a pincushion, and the ghost could shoot these pins out to attack.

December 2022

2022-12-31

A woman and a young girl try to take the subway home. Along the way, they are joined by a strange man with a leering bearded face, a round distended torso, and disproportionately thin tapered legs - sort of like a turnip or a ginseng root in shape.

The subway stretches into an endless series of grimy trains and empty corridors, and the pair can't seem to get anywhere no matter how many transfers they take. Worse, the woman gets sicker and sicker the farther they go.

The woman notices some leaves sticking out of the man's mouth, and realizes he is a mandragora - she calls out to the girl and tells her to rip them out of his mouth. She does, and the man vomits a grotesque stream of bright pink candy; the woman and the girl gather the candy and mash it into goo, upon which the man collapses.

After the man is defeated, the woman recovers and the subway becomes normal again, and they're free to go home. They decide to forgive and befriend the man, though.

2022-12-08

I went "fishing" in the rest area of a museum/aquarium. There was a petsite-esque interface that facilitated things, so all you had to do was dangle a line and hook above a bucket of water; then you choose the type of bait and location from dropdown menus, and the line would automatically lower and raise back up with a dead fish.

Things went well for a while, though the water became muddier and more blood-colored with each catch. Then I selected the "deep sea" location, and the line raised up with a volleyball-sized clump of jagged barnacles on the hook. Small crustaceans and worms were swarming all over it.

I tried to catch them, but I didn't have any equipment. They were slipping out of my hands and crawling out of my bag. One of them, a bright orange-red crayfish with a long thin body like a boba straw, shook violently side to side when I touched it, making a sound like a cartoon skeleton rattling, forcing me to drop it. The other museum patrons started giving me suspicious looks as the escaping creatures crawled away from me.

October 2022

2022-10-31

A friend asked if I wanted to watch a Tales of Berseria playthrough with them, and I said yes. They put on the video, but instead of the animated intro to the game, a cartoon about puppies started playing. It was animated in a strange, wobbly style with varying line weights. It focused on two puppies playing with a ball in a house resembling the setting of a 50s sitcom. There was no dialogue, but the TV in the background was turned on, and we could hear the newscaster talking about the harsh and competitive scene of puppy tennis.

The puppies passed the ball to each other in increasingly unrealistic and stylish ways, until eventually they were using little paddles held in their mouths to hit the ball. Then the human owners whipped out tennis rackets and started playing doubles tennis against the dogs, with a baby gate in the middle serving as a miniature net. One of the puppies made a mistake and missed the ball; one of the humans immediately replaced it with another puppy from somewhere within their coat, and left the scene holding the original puppy by the scruff.

The scene cut to the Berseria characters watching this cartoon on a TV, and then the game begins and the rest of the playthrough plays out as normal.

2022-10-15

The actual plot of the dream was uninteresting, but throughout the entire dream while other things were happening, my mouth kept filling up with small plastic objects, about 1cm in diameter on average, and I had to keep scooping them out of my mouth so I wouldn't choke.

I spat a mouthful of them out onto my hand and examined them; they were in a variety of shapes, but all were green and had a texture like artichoke heads or pinecones, with petals/scales jutting outward. I showed this to one of the people I was with, who casually identified them as "bones" and told me to stop playing with them.

July 2022

2022-07-29

MC is a university student. A class is being held in the room right next to their dorm room at 1-3 AM, so they grumpily join to see what the fuss is about. The class turns out to be some kind of cult which involves using a forbidden technique to sculpt flesh and transcend humanity.

Using the technique, MC creates a "salt jar" - a little mug-sized cauldron with three spider-like legs that taper to a point, made of some kind of dark leathery material with a really unpleasant texture. It can move on its own, though it totters awkwardly on the legs. This is apparently a holy symbol of the cult and extremely difficult to accomplish, and earns MC the title of leader.

2022-07-21

MC brings their friend into a world they created during a lucid dream to show off. They walk through an art and history museum in a brutalist concrete building; MC keeps pointing things out to the friend, but they aren't impressed.

Various mysterious things happen, generally implying that something in the dream world has gone wrong in MC's absence. Exhibits are missing or in the wrong places, a man was turned into a shovel, etc. MC and their friend investigate.

The Rose Princess, a character in the dream world who can force other dream world characters to do anything by asking 6 times, turns out to be behind the events. She found out that there were other people outside the dream world she couldn't control, and the idea was so unbearable to her that she is trying to break out of the dream world and destroy them.

MC quips that there are 7 billion people out there, possibly more if they can also manifest dream worlds; the princess's plan was doomed from the start. They arrest her and the dream trails off.

2022-07-19

MC is touring a secret facility. She looks over the edge of a dark metal catwalk to see a water tank. Inside it are several human brains; the brains wrinkle and un-wrinkle, which somehow propels them forward so they're swimming like jellyfish. Someone stabs her in the back and pushes her into the tank.

June 2022

2022-06-11

Some sort of MMORPG game, in which people were trying to deliver some data to the other side of a big tundra. The mission description says that reviewing the data will help them deliver it properly, but there's no video footage to watch.

The tundra is infested with mysterious black goopy monsters with neon accents, which permanently destroy characters they touch; they move slowly, though, so players just sprint past them and reset the game if they're about to get caught. This also resets the mission, forcing them to start over from the beginning.

It's implied that, in some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, the "data" to be delivered is the real-life players' memories of how best to get past the monsters.

May 2022

2022-05-07

I dropped a big blocky analog phone; it shattered into pieces and spilled blood all over the floor. I spent the rest of the dream trying to remember a word for "blood that you are relieved to see", which I was convinced existed and was just at the tip of my tongue.

April 2022

2022-04-19

MC is a girl confined to her home due to a special power she has: anyone she makes eye contact with immediately goes into a coma.

To be cured, the victim must be left lying exactly where they fell down; the household keeps a bunch of extra pillows and blankets to prop them up and keep them comfortable. As long as they aren't moved, eventually a black lumpy spiky mass will drip out of the ceiling directly above the victim and crawl into their body, upon which they will wake up.

2022-04-13

The facility [wizard school?] I was in was being invaded by magical creatures. I was given a pistol, some nonlethal rounds, and a stun gun, and told to keep watch on an open laptop. "Daemons" would ooze out of the laptop's keyboard every so often and I had to knock them out before they entered the facility. The nonlethal rounds were because the daemons were linked to innocent humans who would also die if the daemons were killed.

2022-04-04

I cut my left arm open with a cheese grater. Underneath the skin, instead of muscle and bone, there were a bunch of little white flakes [maybe salt?]. I shook my arm and watched with detached interest as the flakes fell out of the newly created holes.

March 2022

2022-03-21

MC is a stereotypical fairytale princess. During her adventures, she finds out that her mother (who she believed went missing soon after she was born) had violated some law of spacetime and became something called the "Crimson Empress".

It was impossible to destroy the Crimson Empress, and acknowledging her existence or other concepts "adjacent" to her (e.g. constellations) would damage the fabric of reality further. The king locked her up in a safe place and spoke to her by having a fortune teller read various omens to interpret her will. Under the king's orders, all communication in the kingdom was monitored and censored as necessary to prevent the universe from collapsing.

February 2022

2022-02-25

A stealth roguelike video game where you play as a completely ordinary dog, who for some reason really wants to reach the bottom floor of a weird underground apartment complex. You have to sneak through each apartment without being seen by the residents (an elderly woman and her three nieces).

For some reason, Kirby was also in the apartment complex. If the human characters caught you, they would just throw you out of the building and you can try again. However, if Kirby spotted you, the game would turn into a terrifying chase sequence where you have to stay out of his reach long enough for him to get bored and go back to sleep, or he would catch and eat you, and you would die permanently.

I have never played a Kirby game in my life. I don't know where this came from.

2022-02-15

A woman [with long black hair and robes?] appears on a crowded beach. Even before she says anything, everyone's attention turns to her. In a quiet voice, she orders people with particular characteristics (those wearing a specific piece of clothing, those with birthdays in a specific month, etc) to approach her, issuing a new order every few minutes until most of the people on the beach are surrounding her.

The people on the beach don't seem to be brainwashed - many are uneasy, and two friends in particular crack a joke about her being some kind of weird kidnapper - but all of them obey, and those who weren't called don't do anything to stop the people who were. [I think at some point some people drown trying to reach her and nobody does anything about that either.]

Once the woman is satisfied, she and all the people around her disappear and none of them are ever seen again.

2022-02-12

I signed up for some kind of xenobotany course with a focus on "dissecting" a variety of weird plants [with meaty red flowers?]. During the class, I made a vertical cut in a dandelion-like stem and pulled the two sides apart to see inside. The gap stretched impossibly wide, and inside the stem were full-sized potatoes growing from a vine.

2022-02-06

MC was being hunted by someone with lightning powers. They were rescued, brought to a hotel-like building, and told to find a room to sleep in for the night. There were no hallways and the rooms just connected directly to each other, so MC crept through a seemingly endless series of identical bedrooms trying to find an unoccupied one, but in each bed was an identical blond person.

Eventually, it was explained that everyone there (including MC) were alternate universe versions of the same person, and the guy with lightning powers wanted to hunt them all down for unspecified reasons.

January 2022

2022-01-11

I was coding a HTML/CSS layout in my dream and then woke up and crawled out of bed to recreate it in real life. Layout & details here.

2022-01-09

MC joined an adventuring party or a school treasure hunting club or something. The club leader offered them angel meat; they were reluctant to eat it but the leader assured them that, as a mundane human sitting on one of the club's mundane chairs facing north, there would be no problem. They eat the dish; its taste and texture is exactly like regular store bought meatballs.

A series of increasingly worse short scenes play - MC trying to watch videos in bed but being unable to focus their eyes; various news reports about increasing death and disaster rates; a being voicing concerns about their human growing white mold and another being suggesting they change the human enclosure's prayer candle

2022-01-05

MC was talking to a sinister man dressed in formal wear sitting on a bench. When MC pointed out what he was saying made no sense, he became frustrated, liquefied into light blue slime, and jumped into a nearby trash can. His clothes were left sitting on the bench in the exact same pose as before, like an empty shell.

Later, a student sat down on the bench next to the suit. The slime jumped back out of the garbage can and washed over the entire bench; once it cleared, both the suit and student were gone.

2022-01-04

A guy was ordered to kill me. They opened their mouth and an endless stream of [grain? rice? worms??] poured forth from it, the idea being it would fill up the room and suffocate me. However, we were standing on a little rope bridge above a giant circular pit with snakes at the bottom, which would take forever to fill up, so we just stood there staring at each other until the scene changed. I was not concerned about my eventual death at all, just deeply embarrassed by the awkward situation.

Older

Dreams from before I started the journal that I still want to feature.

2021-12-30

MC was a kid who'd just arrived at a new school. They bumped into a friend who had been the [groundskeeper?] at their middle school, who had now been hired at their new school too. They were excited to catch up and maybe do classes together.

The friend was an "anatomy homunculus" that someone had built to strangle people. It resembled a collage of organs from old-timey medical diagrams, woodcut or wound man style, arranged in a roughly humanoid shape. It was mostly soft organs like brain or intestine, but it towered over MC and had a lanky shape with long limbs. The organs were labeled like countries on a map [not always correctly?]. Its head was a sideways brain with eyes [and teeth?] growing out of the folds roughly where they would be on a human face.

Date Unknown

I was at a capsule hotel and the lobby clerk asked me to fill in for him by sitting behind the desk with a burlap sack covered in eye patterns over my head. If a customer comes by, I was to "sign" what they wanted me to sign with the appropriate eye pattern (I do not know what "signing" would actually entail). I agreed to do this; a while later a customer came over, and from the way they talked it was clear that they thought the bag was my actual head and the eyes were real.