Amelia's Dream Journal

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I have always had vivid dreams, and my dreams have become even more intense since I started HRT. Many of my dreams are copied over from the #dreams channel of my storm chaser group chat called "Quasi-Gayostrophic OMeGa".

My dreams have a few recurring, often incredibly detailed and absurd settings, and I might decide to make a subpage detailing each of those as I remember them.

Note: Dreams are assigned by the morning after the dream, not the night before the dream.

July 24, 2024

I was drinking alcoholic grape soda on an altered, slightly more forested and spacious version of the University of Oklahoma campus on the day before my 21st birthday. My brain copy-pasted the taste from a special soda I got from Walmart once with my partner, and this is how I found out I can taste things in my dreams.

July 23, 2024

My mom had a way bigger and taller, mansion-like version of her real-life house. There was a majestic version of my childhood bedroom, and whenever it rained the ceiling would leak near an air vent. My room was actually clean, the most unrealistic part of the whole dream. I looked outside the window in my sister's childhood bedroom down to the neighbor's backyard, and clouds were swirling around under fence level. I saw a crisply sculpted mesocyclone hovering right behind the similarly tall house across the street, and I watched the right side of it sway downward as if there was some wavy ascent-descent pattern within it. The supercell's structure was rotated 180 degrees from normal, with the mesocyclone on the northeast corner and the forward flank stretching to the west. I tried to climb that neighbor's tree, and he got really pissed about it. I can't remember specifics but I swear that's happened in other dreams of mine.

My mom had just adopted a new cat, which acted like my dream world childhood cat named Nuclear, who had died before the dream. This cat was so much like Nuclear that I would call it by that name instead of its real name Messy. Nuclear and Messy appear to have both been based on my real-life childhood cat Molly. Nuclear's name was almost certainly coming from this Reddit post. I googled the shelter my mom was adopting cats from, and the search results said that the shelter was known to be somewhat unethical.

July 19, 2024

Even my weirdest, most absurd, or even physically painful dreams usually aren't unpleasant at all. Most of the time, I love the weirdness of my dreams. This one, though, was a nightmare and an awful one too. I wish I remembered more of it, but I do remember that it was set in an altered version of the neighborhood to the west of my dad's house. There is a large lake to the west of a tree patch near a playground complete with a bridge and a dock for small boats. There is no such lake in real life. This setting has been in my dreams a few times before. I don't remember much but I remember crawling through an unsettling playground, all the color being drained out of the world around me, and my car getting stolen while I was crawling around.

July 16, 2024

This dream is gonna stay off the record.

July 10, 2024

Even more fake geography. The Kit Carson Mountain Range stretched from Haswell, Colorado to Akron, Colorado, making a mountain pass on I-70 near Flagler.

July 8, 2024

My mom wouldn't let me get my bangs done because having bangs meant you were done with school, and having my forehead uncovered meant I wasn't done with college.

Reflection [July 22, 2024]: I've been insecure about my forehead before, and I still need to get a haircut that would help cover it. This dream might have been a manifestation of that insecurity.

July 7, 2024

My dad’s house had super tall trees in the front yard, they looked a lot like the Jungle trees from Minecraft. I was also able to fly if I jumped really high and caught the synoptic-scale rising motion. It didn't work whenever there was synoptic-scale descent though. There was a thunderstorm approaching and being in its inflow made it even easier to fly. There was another fake interstate called I-35C, which ran through the Mid-Cities in DFW.

July 3, 2024

My contribution to SHARPlib, the Storm Prediction Center's new codebase, got merged in.

June 15, 2024

I was getting in position for a Des Moines chase the night before with a whole group of people (including Anthony from Millersville) and we overnighted at an absurdly beautiful version of the Iowa State campus. I drove along an entirely fake interstate numbered I-688, which ran north from Percival, Iowa through the Loess Hills, and turned sharply east to lead into Ames.

June 14, 2024

My landlord scheduled a funeral to be held in my house without my consent.

June 13, 2024

I drove to the Northern Plains and after driving back and forth across all the counties in southern South Dakota, I got stuck in a version of Yankton that was in the middle of the state instead of on the southern border. I had to abandon my Accord on the riverside. I got home to downtown Oklahoma City by sailing down the Missouri River and spent the rest of the dream trying to get my car back. I also joined a jam band of indeterminate genre that met in an extremely wide room as a guitar player and my sister was the drummer there. I spent a good long while trying to work out my guitar tone with the band leader, all while waiting for my car to be found by Yankton police and returned to me.

I also dreamt that I-405 in California was absolutely massive. It ran through San Diego, Ontario, Bakersfield, east of Visalia, east of Fresno, and then finally reconnected with I-5 a bit south of Modesto. I might upload the drawing I made of the path later. Nothing else in the dream had anything to do with California.

June 9, 2024

I got bottom surgery in Argentina and I had to be awake the whole way through the procedure, and then I had to drive myself all the way back home to the US. The whole time I was driving, presumably sitting on one of the donut pillows they give you, I was thinking "eh fuck it worth it". Once I got home, I came straight back to a wind-driven Moderate risk.

June 8, 2024

There were two dreams from this night:

Dream 1:

I was chasing a high-precipitation wedge tornado around Guymon, Oklahoma and for some reason I was being super competitive with another chaser. Something like Jason from Twister. I ended up behind the rear-flank downdraft approaching from the west, but I could still see the wedge clear as day.

Dream 2:

There was this weird sort of dystopian group battle thing going on, and my house was slightly different from real life. It was also haunted. I could jump extremely high and leap extremely far (a repeating thing in my dreams), and I had this cat that I was awful at taking care of. I had a really cute dress on though, so that was nice.

Note: No idea what the dress looked like. All that the Discord message contains is "I had a really cute dress though so that was nice".

June 5, 2024

I had a dream that I was chasing for a seventh day in a row (I had just finished a six-day chasing streak). The cell was starting to look really good, but it never ended up planting a tornado.

May 30, 2024

I had a dream that I had to change chase targets to San Angelo, Texas.

Reflection [July 22, 2024]: This might have been influenced by a wxtwitter tweet from the 2023 season about how severe weather kept happening south of where the SPC had forecasted it. The tweet read something like "You think you're chasing Wichita Falls today? Have fun in San Angelo bitch."

May 29, 2024

I drove from Pembina, North Dakota to Winnipeg, Manitoba and was about to do a road trip through Saskatchewan over to Alberta. I spent a long time swimming in a fancy Victorian-era-looking indoor fountain and doing stunts off the spire for some reason. I heard somebody come into the building containing the fountain and since I didn't have any clothes on, I went to hide in a room to the left of the fountain (as viewed from the front door). There was a low box-like area that I crawled into to hide.

May 21, 2024

There was a restaurant on Alameda and 12th that was a lot like a fancy dessert place, but it only sold edibles. For some reason, my mom was buying them for both me and my sister. The weird auroras with lightning discharges from April 23 were back. With those shining overhead, I was trying to stumble down 12th avenue back home.

April 30, 2024

It was already 11:30 AM. (The original Discord message recording this dream is timestamped 8:58 AM)

April 23, 2024

My friend Jeff, my classmate Matt, and I were traveling around a version of Maine that had Colorado's mountains and hiking up some of the taller peaks. One day, we had acid rain that burned off enough skin to make me bleed, but I took shelter in a campsite building, was treated very quickly, and was totally okay. That night, the northern lights were absolutely amazing and also had these weird lightning discharges all throughout them. The next morning, I wasn't able to find my car in the parking lot near the campsite, and apparently I had left it in the previous town. Matt said I could use his camera since mine was in the car I'd left behind, but he never did.

I might have lost the car when this dirt road in the mountains suddenly dropped 1000 feet at an 85 degree angle out of nowhere. I have no clue how I survived that. Jeff pulled up in his Hyundai Sonata after I came to from hitting the bottom of the cliff. The first three letters of his license plate were accurate to real life.

Reflection [July 22, 2024]: This was from before I had seen the northern lights clearly with my own eyes, and all I had ever seen was some faint diffuse light and short-lived faint pillars. My brain was probably going wild with guesses at what it looked like close up. I remember considering an overnight trip to Omaha for a G2 somewhere around this time, but ultimately I never went, so this dream might have been influenced by the Omaha drive I never did.

April 13, 2024

This is probably the most absurd dream I have ever had in my life. Mr. Beast was horribly abusing an octopus by making it live in a kiddie pool that wasn't deep enough to keep it underwater, and the whole time he was joking about the octopus needing to work through its transphobia.

March 30, 2024

I was watching the eclipse at a random gas station/kitschy gift shop in southwest Iowa, just across the river from Nebraska City. The parking lot was very dusty and almost more reminiscent of West Texas than actual Iowa. For some reason, once the sun was mostly covered, it started zooming up and down and in circles across the entire sky so quickly that it was impossible to take pictures of. Once totality finally fell, the solar corona started off as white but became yellow just a tiny distance away from the moon. However, I couldn't see what it really looked like, because even though I thought I was outside watching it I was actually inside watching it on a TV screen. I tried to dash outside to see it for real but no matter what, I always ended up looking at a TV screen instead of the real thing.

Reflection [July 22, 2024]: This was definitely a manifestation of my anxieties around photographing the upcoming solar eclipse. I usually take a very laid back, go-with-the-flow approach to photography, but I practiced my eclipse photography ahead of time. I learned an entirely new photography technique (HDR compositing) just to capture even more detail. I knew that those four minutes would be something I could never get back and I was scared to death of missing my chance.

March 27, 2024

I was chasing in West Wylie, Texas near Wylie High School. There was a massive tornado-warned mothership visible to the southwest. I'm pretty sure the RadarScope image I saw on my phone was copied from the Alta Vista 2024 tornado.

March 25, 2024

There was an adblocker for iPhones and it was actually good.

March 24, 2024

My new car, Victoria, got a check engine light while I was driving on Main Street in Norman. This version of Norman was different, and had a lot of brick towers just south of the street. A new light came on, a yellow version of a low oil pressure light, and I decided to go to the nearest O'Reilly two blocks away to get my codes checked. By the time I could get there I had a yellow roman numeral VII in a bold sans-serif font, and after I parked, a VI also came on. The car didn't start again.

Reflection [July 22, 2024]: I think the brick towers from this Altered Norman setting was likely influenced by my mental image of the academy that one of my D&D characters (also named Victoria) lived near. The academy's architecture was partially inspired by the University of Oklahoma campus, and particularly the area west of the Bizzell Memorial Library containing the clock tower.

The car not starting again and the engine not even turning overcoincidentally happened in real life too, right after my July 4th chase.