What the hell does "Semi-formal" mean?

I was going to a graduation dinner, and a girl in black was my date. At first I thought she was way overdressed, but when we got there I realized that I had underestimated how formal everyone else would dress and looked bad by comparison. We ate tacos, and it wasn't very fancy at all.

Strange Dream People

There was a man and woman in my backyard. They appeared to be impossibly tall and thin, as if they would break. The man was much older, and he began to wade in the pool. I walked outside and began talking idly, trying to figure out who the girl was because she seemed very familiar. My parents walked outside and knew the people immediately.

The girl explained to me that she had been my tutor for something and I began to remember. She gave me a hug and was taller than I was. I never really fully remembered who she was, it was as if I had met her in a previous dream that I couldn't recall.

An Uncharacteristic Dream

I was playing a video game and quickly became a part of it. I was soaring through a huge city at night in torrential rain. Everything was in foreboding shadow, lit only by the people who were still awake in the dead of night, and even then the light was muffled by curtained windows.

I landed silently on the second story of an apartment high-rise and looked in the window. My goal was to kill everyone in the room, except a woman who was sitting on her bed. Maybe the woman would see the world as I did, after searching in futility for a meaning and eventually finding no answers, only an enhanced sense of cold reality. There was a man inside, dressed sharply in a suit as if he had just gotten back from a date somewhere nice, and the woman had a small living doll at her feet.

I burst in through the window and whey were so stood perfectly still, paralyzed with fear. I had no weapons, so I looked through the drawers in the dresser and found a knife as long as my forearm in a shallow drawer, sitting in foam shaped to fit it snugly. I turned and lunged, burying the knife upside down just above the man's belt and wrenching it upward to the base of his ribcage in fluid succession, causing him to lurch off his feet. I then spun around, knife tearing crookedly from his body, and beheaded the doll as the man spun off his feet into the floor, sputtering unintelligible last words.

I left the woman in shock and tears, and glided to the balcony where I had landed. I stood there, soaking in the rain, until I saw the woman run to the phone in the kitchen to call the police, and began to climb the building. They would be here any minute now. It made sense to me that going up the building would be a much less obvious way to escape.

At the top of the highest balcony, I armed the grappling gun I was carrying on my back and shot it up toward the top of the building. It slipped and fell off the top ledge, but caught on something on a landing four stories above me. I pulled myself up onto the ledge, and saw that some villains I knew were in an alcove talking and taking refuge for the night.

There were seven of them, four female and three male, with me making eight villains in the city in total. One of the villainesses had the power of ice. She had wispy white hair and other than a shattered white scar one side of her jaw line, the rest of her was translucent as a dark crystal glass, and parts of her shone with sparkling highlights against the shadows like a black polished stone with distorted lights from distant windows passing through her as she moved. Knowing that I had no powers of my own, she gave me an assault rifle as a gift.

We took a group photo and started talking about our motives. With the sirens below beginning to converge on the building, I stated, "I feel no joy in killing. I do it for the chase," and I took a running jump off the edge of the landing.

I hit the pavement solidly on my hands and feet. Surrounding me were not the police as I had expected, but a band of thugs. The ones in front of me drew their knives, and began to close in. I drew my loaded semiautomatic weapon and began to shoot the ones behind me so that I had a direction to escape. I took most of them down as I retreated from the initial ambush point, but several of them continued after me no matter how many rounds I fired at them. As they got closer I began to panic and fire less accurately, blowing off the skin from arms and shoulders where I had previously embedded bullets in their heads or body. The ones that ceaselessly came after me were missing skin on their faces, blood soaking their clothes, and several were missing at least a hand, but they came after me with their knives regardless. I threw my gun at them, since I was out of ammunition, and it collided with one of them with a sickening crunch and scream as it broke his fleshless jaw. This bought me some time to gain some distance on them. I ran into a nearby residential building to hide, and suddenly the dream shifted viewpoints.

I was now an old man who long ago was the leader of a gang like the one outside. I hid the woman who had just rushed into my home on my balcony by having her lie flat. The balcony was very old and poorly constructed. When it was built, the balcony was mainly intended for growing plants, so it wasn't really large enough for anyone to step outside on to. I had a vase with bamboo growing in it and some miscellaneous junk from the house rusting out there, but I shoved the vase to a corner and there enough room for the girl. The floor of the balcony was several inches lower than the doorway leading to it, so she could lay there with a the mat over her without being spotted. The gang searched my house, but they knew who I was, and out of respect they didn't ransack the place. Eventually they left, without finding my new guest. When the coast was clear, I went to ask her what had happened.

Short Mix of Ideas

My family was traveling to a weird place in the middle of nowhere in the desert. We went to a town with many gift stores. Outside of one, a man offered me $20 for a box of pop-rocks I had bought for $1. I had only bought one box, and I wanted to eat it. I went to go buy another box from the store nearby. When I went to pay, my wallet had a bunch of twenties and hundred dollar bills to thumb through before I got to the fives and finally ones. My mom told me not to carry around so much money.

We wend to the airport, and that same guy was there. I kept one hand on my wallet. I saw my friend there, and she had just bested everyone at a game of golf. We went into an elevator and I contemplated putting it into express mode by holding the floor number and close door button after pushing the floor button the first time. I decided against it, since I didn't want to be a jerk and keep other people from getting on along the way.

Creepy Attic

I dreamed that my friend was living in a creepy attic in my house and my family was keeping it a secret from me. I found an unknown computer on a list of ones connected to the home network, so I looked around the house for it and eventually climbed up a knotted rope into the attic and found her there, hidden away in the back like a spider in a web of structural beams in the darkness.

Sports Superstar

I started out in a field outside a large building. I was walking around looking for the entrance, when someone I know vaguely walked up to me and asked me out. I kept walking and saw one of my friends. She was excited to see me, and wanted a piggyback ride. I walked with her on my back around one more corner and went into the building with her.

By the time I saw what was going on inside, I was almost stepping in the court. The people inside were warming up for a basketball game. I dropped my friend off in the stands and spotted my history teacher, who was the coach. She asked me to play, and I agreed to.

I was a basketball superstar and never lost the ball in a struggle. I also made all my shots, even one left-handed shot where the announcer started flipping out and yelling in disbelief. Near the end, the other team gave up and stopped playing so our team played with YoYos and shot them in to the hoop instead of basketballs. After the game, I got back into normal clothes and found one of the basketball player's regular clothes hidden away behind the stands, so I gave those to him.

Secret Place

My dad took the whole family to a mansion for something that had to do with his job. Inside was a big rack of clothes, and everyone found some new clothes that fit them except me. We sat at a large wood table with a bench for seating. It seemed that the whole event was a goodbye to a woman that had worked at the same company as my dad for a very long time and was retiring.

After eating some rice and pasta with herbs in it, we moved upstairs. I saw a place where my younger cousins had been playing with blocks, but it was a dead-end so I turned around to look for other places to go. I found a flight of stairs leading to a third floor. Now on the third floor, I continued to wander until I found myself at yet another dead end. This time, however, I spotted a steep flight of stairs that were placed out of sight. At the top of those was a big tunnel like the inside of a barrel made from thin strips of light wood and sanded very smoothly. It led to a bright and very luxurious room, and I sensed that it hadn't been used in a very long time.

Crummy

I was in my school's parking lot wearing a nice black shirt and blue jeans. On someone's car, one of my friends was there and we just sat around. A friend in black came and told me that black and blue don't go together. My first friend introduced us to a game called "Crummy" which involved eight of us sitting in a circle and rolling a die to see who went next.

Just before waking up I had decided that it was really stupid and I fully agreed with the name.

Birthday Party at School

I dreamed that I was at school and it was an acquaintance's birthday. I was on a balcony and had a white rose. I blew the petals off the rose like it was a dandelion, and they grew back smoothly as if it was only natural and sensible thing for it to do.

I realized I was dreaming, and I decided I would try to summon another white rose in my left hand. I tried three times but nothing happened. I decided to move around, and I went down a ramp to get off the balcony. At the bottom, I saw a cart that wasn't there before. I lifted a table cloth draped over it and on the bottom shelf were three large white roses, much bigger than the one I originally had.

Someone announced the arrival of a girl from school and the girl in black as if it was gossip and they might fight since they weren't getting along. I asked where they both were and discovered that they were at opposite ends of the school. By now I had fallen back in to the dream, and I walked to the girl in black and gave her a hug, and met another friend that she had come with.

I went to the other side of the school into my chemistry teacher's room. There were touch-pad payment consoles on a table, as if there were a fee to be at the party, and I decided to see what I could do to mess with it. I drew a triangle and a square on it, and it started blasting the Bill Nye the Science Guy theme song.

Paranoia

I was in a small room. The building was compartmentalized and extended in one direction like a train, and was situated to the side of an airport runway. The planes had people stuffed into tiny slabs and stacked them inside. One plane overshot the runway and went up a dirt deceleration ramp at the end, and it came back down relatively undamaged. The next plane went up the ramp but turned at the top and smashed its nose on the way down.

I started at the front of the train/building and walked past people I know sitting in the forward-facing bench seats. I walked out of the car I was in and looked inside through the tall windows.

At the end of the train I spotted my friends playing cards. I grabbed a deck from a drawer on the back of the train. Two cards were discarded from the game through a couple wood boards. I could reach the cards from the outside of the train, and I picked them up. They had two sides, and both sides showed that the cards were aces.

I went inside and saw another friend playing cards. She leaned over to me and told me she knew where my secret documents were, "under the bottom shelf of the bookshelf." The only person I "knew" I had told was the lady in red, so it shouldn't be possible that anyone else knew of their location.

I went to the front of the train to relocate the documents before anyone else got to them. Once inside the room, I closed the curtains and shut the door. There was a bird that had flown in the train and it just outside the door. I felt very paranoid.

There was a false shelf sitting on the base level of the bookshelf. I raised it and removed an AP study book. Tucked between the front cover and the first pace were my secret documents. My sister began to come in the room and I got her to leave without seeing anything I was doing with the bookshelf and papers. She left the door open and I saw the lady in a red nightgown walk up the hall and then turn to go in to another room. I put the papers back in the book, and hid them in a small gap between a standing dresser and the floor in the closet.

A Peculiar Mansion

I was in a mansion on the peak of a mountain and had my camera with me. There were several possible routes to take in order to get from a room to any of the other rooms in the house. One of the routes I explored took me in to a narrow tunnel on the second story so small that I had to crawl through it. There windows in the tunnel facing outside over ivy covering the mountain below.

A scepter began to rise out of the ground on a flat spot on the mountain below me. The top of the scepter looked like a giant human iris, with wispy tangles of darker color coming from the center. I noticed that some distance away was a dark patch on a different mountain that was almost an oval in shape, and so I moved along the tunnel looking through my camera and tried to line the two up to make an eye. Unfortunately, my movement in the tunnel was very linear and I couldn't quite find a place to sit that would allow me to line the two up properly.

I moved through the tunnel and ended up in a medium-sized room with wood floors and paneling which reminded me of something I would expect in a fancy colonial-era building, like where an American founding father might have lived. It had four staircases with two situated in the front corners leading down to the lobby. I went down one staircase in the middle of the room. A service lady was coming up the stairs. I got out of her way and she said something about her lower status.

At the bottom of the stairs was a small alcove with some crowded seating with walls on three sides. It appeared that the staircase I chose was one for servants.

Lucid Party

I was dreaming that I was at an outdoor party at night. As this situation is extremely unlikely, I immediately realized I was dreaming and became lucid. I decided that it would be wonderful if there was someone I could share the experience with.

Nobody at the party seemed very interesting, so I decided that I would try to wish someone into existence. I subscribe to the idea that talking to and interacting with someone new in your dream is as close to communicating with your subconscious as you can get. I looked around the corner, expecting to see someone new, and my attention was immediately absorbed by a pretty girl walking in my direction. I invited her to sit down with me on a thick concrete barrier. We began to talk and she held on to my arm.

I was only vaguely still aware that I was dreaming at that point, but I decided that I may as well play along with the dream for fun, and so I went to get her a drink from the cooler by the barbecue. I poured something tropical orange into a glass and put some ice in it for her.

When I got back to her she was sitting there alone, looking into the afterglow of a light-polluted horizon. I gave her the drink and when I sat down put my arm around her. She turned toward me and pulled me in to a hug. She buried her face below my shoulder and squeezed hard like she really needed it.