i slept fitfully from 2:30 to 630, which is a start. i had disturbing dreams. there was some stuff where i was in a college, and then i had to run away. i was with my girlfriend, who i’m not sure really existed in the dream besides in concept; i knew i was with her but don’t remember what she looked like or her saying anything. i ran down the street and pretended to join some kind of joyful parade with my girlfriend, and we were hiding from the officials who were patrolling with helicopters, so i ducked into a huddle and met some confident attractive asian chicks. they were in pigtails. we didn’t know what the parade/march was about. we ran with them down the street, comforted by the huddled masses around us. we were blending in. we were getting away. one of the girls was Fritz’s ex (who does exist in real life) and when i shook her hand and told her my name, her hand went limp and she gave me a suspicious look, because she suspected that Fritz was now my boyfriend. i didn’t think this was weird (having a girlfriend and a boyfriend at the same time) until after I woke up; also i’ve met this person in real life and she’s never been anything but nice to me, and i liked her so i don’t know why i dreamed this horrible chilling feeling. just then a siren rang, and all the other young people disappeared into the nearby stores to hide. my girlfriend and i were slow and felt like we got ditched. they were coming for us! we looked around at the empty grey street with all the storefronts and the shutting doors, and ran for the nearest store, and slipped in the door. there were 3 or 4 other kids there already semi-concealed, at least from the outside, so it wouldn’t look like there were hiders here. i hoped that the person working the counter was friendly to us. we all assumed the storekeepers would be; that’s why we dove into the shops when the officers came to break up the merrymaking. my girlfriend and i looked around for a place to hide. we were horribly tense. the officers were outside. what if they saw us? we jumped up into this little stairwell thing that was walled all the way around and jutted into the room, and couldn’t see the window at all, which was a great hiding spot. “no, the other side will be better,” i said, and at the last second jumped out the other side into a space between the raised turret-stairwell and the store counter, behind a chair, which for some reason had looked like a great hiding spot but was terrible: you could see the whole window at streetlevel from there, which only meant that the officers could see us. we watched them talking to each other, and it looked from their hand motions like they were diving the street up amongst themselves to search in the store. i was panicking. i looked up at the store counter and there was wc in a pink shirt and suspenders, looking afraid, and he turned to me and said “they don’t know that this is what i do when i’m not there” or something that meant that. he decided he needed to hide too and jumped, long-legged, somewhere beyond my line of sight. the officers were coming in the door, and i could totally see the door, so i dove down and tried to make myself really small under the big velvet chair (i guess kind of like the one we have outside my door here at arch house). i thought i was concealed but then the man who came in the door and turned on the lights stopped in front of the chair. the storekeeper (who was still wc but my dream had forgotten that he left) behind the counter said “what are you doing” or “can i help you” or something, and the man had bent down to me where i had been putting my face under the chair to try to hide, and he held a lit cigarette in front of my face (i couldn’t see him besides his feet on the floor and this hand) and i was terrified, and the horrible man (in the dream i knew he was horrible) said “no, i’m just offering this nickelbiter a cigarette. don’t you want a smoke, nickelbiter?” i couldn’t tell if he was joking, so i took the cigarette with my right hand and made my left hand into a ball, and leapt out towards the right (the middle of the room) on my hands and knees, saying “this nickel is mine! i was just picking it up!” as an excuse for why i was on the floor. the horrible man sat down in the velvet chair behind me and reached out his hand and grabbed my leg, forcing me to splay out on the floor (cuz i was moving forward in a crouched leap and then got stopped) and i landed on another hider’s backpack. “give me a nickel,” i hissed at the terrified hider, who was in a shadow, and who i could plainly see, but i guess he was hiding from the horrible man successfully. he did nothing to help me, only stared at me in horror and fright. i saw some coins in his backpack’s front mesh pocket. the horrible man was cackling and pulling at my leg. i flailed my left hand (still in a fist) around to draw attention to it, pretending i had a nickel, and with my right hand i grabbed at the mesh pocket. quarter, quarter, dime, dime, fuck, he didn’t have a nickel, oh there’s one, i can see it through the mesh, peel back the mesh faster, he’s pulling me, he’s going to see what i’m doing in a second, got it! and as he pulled me around back into the light i managed to put the nickel in my right hand into my left hand and i fisted it up again, and then opened my fist in front of the horrible man. he looked really shocked, like he thought that it was a coincidence that he thought i was trying to trick him by saying i was looking for a nickel AND that i was actually using “i’m looking for my nickel” as an excuse, but then when i showed him the nickel i had, he believed me, and no longer thought i was hiding or a threat. so he cackled and took it and said “it’s mine now” and it felt really bad. then all of a sudden it felt good in that room, and it was understood that he wasn’t that bad after all, and then after a blur of something fast and nonsensical, i was out of myself and watching myself with the hiders (who were anonymous) and wc (who was still in his pink shirt). there was a quick montage of us reading books, us at a dinner table, and some other stuff i don’t remember. i continued to not be inside myself, and then the person i was watching who was previously myself stopped being myself… she had short hair and a different face. by this time it was like i was watching a movie that i was no longer in. then fritz and i were walking down a dark alley and these two people walked by. we were scared. one of them turned out to be dean, who said to me “go to eudemonia” and i thought they were going to kill me there, but then he said “no, just because since you’ve been gone, we can’t accept packages from igames addressed to your name” and i was like “oh of course” so i went to “eudemonia,” but dream-eudo was just this cluttered room with a single desk, and i didn’t know the person behind it, but i sat down and got a bunch of packages that look just like our outgoing magic singles sales, and got a sheet of white paper and wrote “i, judy tuan, authorize eudemonia to accept packages” and signed it. there was something else that happened, and then wc turned into an evil witch, and it was understood in my dream that she was delusional: when she thought she was having dinner with the hiding people, she was actually abandoning her baby. the dream played like a movie, switching back and forth from what she saw and then to what actually was happening. the “actual” part was really horrible, like something having to do with food, or not feeding her baby, and doctors, and some kind of horrible science lab, and other things happened that i don’t remember. i woke up feeling really extraordinarily terrible.

i’ve had a lot of really bad dreams that make me feel really terrible, so it’s really hard for me to get out of bed or stop sleeping. this is the first time in recent history that i’ve happened to get out of bed and go to my computer. they make me feel like it’s pointless to be alive. it’s weird because it seems like “really terrible things” don’t actually happen in my dreams–i don’t die, i don’t watch people die–it’s just that i always experience really stressful emotions while i’m sleeping. like i dream a lot of people censuring me or telling me what my mistakes were or telling me i did something wrong, or just of feeling really bad. so i don’t wake up for a long time because when i’m at the border of wakefulness, i decide that life isn’t worth living, and i keep sleeping. this is a problem because then i don’t ever do anything, which only makes me feel worse, and the cycle continues.