I went to a BMTH concert that Oli and Matt dj'ed after, but I got caught up with some "friends" (outside?) and when I went back in Oli and Matt were gone. Later, maybe the next day, I was dropped off in a car at home by some of these people ("friends") and thought how I didn't want to see them again and I kind of what regretted hanging out with them.
At some point I dreamed of a conversation with [my boss, director of research]. We were in a bedroom I think, on a bed, but without any implications. I was disagreeing with him about recruiting and compensating participants with a mental condition above those without ie a control group. I said that wasn't allowed or something like that by ethical standards, and I knew because I had just been screened for a study like that. He looked at me for a protracted amount of time and there was tension. Then I second guessed myself and started looking in unravelled rolls of paper on the floor next to the bed between it and the wall to see if that was true of that study.
After that, I dreamed that I was in some kind of intense and deadly competition to become a research assistant with a team of maybe 7 other people. We started out as a single team doing non-lethal challenges, but as the competition progressed it got more dangerous and eventually we were split up. One of the later challenges had us flying fighter planes, but they were like a cross between old school, early, open cockpit fighter planes but made of wooden barrels. Each had two flags on its nose. One of them was a modified confederate flag. I think the two planes' flags were modeled after the union and confederacy. To shoot, there were rope cables on either side, and I was the gunman. I simply had to pull to shoot while someone else steered. After some confusion, I found a second pair of cords which fired more powerful guns. But I had to be spread in a weird position to do this, and I hung and almost fell out of the plane several times.
Eventually we reached some kind of temple or tower, and now now we were in two teams fighting lethally. We were each given a weapon and began ascending the tower which was a series of rope suspended walkways that you could fall off the side of to your death. As we ascended up the tower, the fighting got more intense. I had a long sword that turned out not to be very sharp. At some point we stopped being in teams. There were several distinct levels with other challenges and monsters to contend with. At each level, you had to discover what that was and we moved carefully and cautiously as we tried to figure it out. We were still joking a bit about near misses. Eventually, the accessory challenges stopped, and it was just down to killing each other. After trying to slash at my former teammates turned opponents, I found I had to go for the throat, catch it, and pull in a long deep stroke to cut it. I started killing that way. Some people it took more than once, and I almost decapitated a couple that way before they would die and fall through the wood-plank suspension bridges down through the center of the tower. One guy came at me with a knife in each hand, slashing at me, and I dreamed an extended one-on-one face off with him. We all kept moving upwards, and eventually we arrived at a level where we were offered pills to kill ourselves. I couldn't understand why anyone would go through all we had been through and choose that. But some people did, apparently unwilling to do these heinous things anymore. I'm not sure what happened at this point, if I took the pills willingly or unknowingly, but it consumed me, and I fell to the floor on stomach and started crying music. It was the sound of long sweeps of a low string of the viola. And the words came to me, A band will never hold power over you again. I felt like I needed to stay there in that state with that message for a while, but I immediately woke up, breathing hard, forceful in and out through my nose. I'm not sure if I actually dreamed that too. Eventually I did wake up with the melody of a song in my head and soon added a guitar and strings behind it, and just heard the melody in a loop with those backing elements wandering and transforming and elaborating. I recorded the melody. I wondered, maybe thought about hoping to make it into a real song one day.
