magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

i had a particularly odd and vivid sequence of dreams last night. it started as i was coming home from an evening out with my roommates, two women. our apartment was a lot like my current apartment, but there was a bedroom directly off of the living room, and i'm not sure whether it still had the other two bedrooms or just one. i was flirting with both of my roommates, we might have all been a little drunk. i went looking through my cds, which were in utter disarray, as they are now, but in the kitchen. i was looking for cracker's most recent album.

then things switched. i was still looking for the cd, and the apartment, time of day, and everything else was the same, but george was my roommate. we talked briefly about something inconsequential.

the next thing i remember i'm in my car (maybe my vw, it was definitely smaller than my van), driving west, with sam. george was s'posed to be following us, but i didn't see his car, so i started looking for a place i could pull off to the side of the road and wait. traffic was very heavy and going very fast, so i was a bit scared to slow down and pull off. when i found a place to do so, i noticed that it had started snowing and the road was icing up. the car slid a little bit, but i managed to pull over. a few other cars were doing the same, presumably because of the weather. i figured that we should turn around and try to catch george before he left, because we shouldn't be making a long trip in the snow. i waited for an opening in traffic so that i could make a u-turn, but my car went skidding off of the other side of the road and into a ditch.

sam and i got out and started heading back towards town. we were in the woods along the side of the road and he was now on a snowboard. after a while we came across a bunch of ski gear, the skis, poles, goggles, hat, jacket. a narrator's sort of voice asked "and what was his fatal mistake?" sam said something about how he had been on skis instead of a snowboard, but i noticed these arrows shot into a nearby tree trunk. they had blue feathers. i pointed them out. i knew that we were the next target.

eventually we got to a town, and found ourselves in a building that was like a cross between an ancient castle and an abandoned paper mill. our dad was there too, as well as a bunch of tourists. so were the people who were after us. somehow we got separated. i found myself in a stairwell that had stairs from landing to landing, but also a couple stairs here and there that ended in empty space or into a wall. i was following a man down the stairs, and after a few floors i noticed that he was carrying a bloody axe. i stopped, and so did he. i backed up a few steps and he glared at me maniacally. i continued down and so did he, preceding me. every time he got out of view i'd increase the distance between us, and then he'd round a corner and i'd continue down. eventually we got far enough apart that i sprinted back up to the top floor.

i looked out a window and saw sam in another building across a courtyard. i knew that there must be some evil magic at work and that the people in charge of the castle/mill were the ones out to get us. sam was on the second floor and had a long stick, so he jumped out the window like a pole-vaulter. i ran down the stairs and met him in the courtyard. his stick was also a blowgun and he shot it at someone in the window that i had seen him from. we ran out into the street with a bunch of other tourists who had escaped.

we stood there for a while trying to decide if we should go back in after our dad. we knew that we would never get out again, so instead we began running down the street looking up at the building to see if we could see him in any of the windows. we reached a corner and turned to run along another side of the building. a girl with a gun stepped out behind us. she began shooting. sam and i ran down the street dodging bullets. my mind was running about fifty feet in front of us, playing out various possibilities of ducking into alleys and such. we were headed for the river. it was a dead end. i knew it would be too hard to swim against the current and being swept downstream was not an option for some reason.

i was running through the only alternative in my head. we would jump into the river. it would be cold, but there were pipes that ran along the dock with hot water i them. we would have to swim under the dock and hope that the girl chasing us thought we had been caught up in the current and pulled downstream. this is when i woke up.