Dream file. Copyright 2000-2004, David Turner [I've recovvered old dream logs from E2. I can only call up images from two of the five. I've altered them slightly to fix spelling errors and update references]. April 19, 2000 I was in a big, white room with walls that were somehow climbable. The walls were higher towards the front of the room, but there was no ceiling - the room was open to the air, but somehow also closed in. There were many desks in the the room, big police-style desks. There were four cops or rent-a-cops in the room, as well as many (50? 100?) "refugees" (for lack of a better term) like myself. We were dressed in off-white, baggy clothing. I started tweaking the cop-types (especially one of them who I identified with John Wayne). I don't remember how it started - or why we were there (I vaguely remember something about a riot?). I know that it didn't seem that we should have been imprisoned - but we were. At some point, the cops were threatening me, (but I knew they couldn't actually hurt me). Then a woman walked in through a door in the front of the room. She was something like a schoolteacher or an administrator. I was in the middle of a cursing streak, so I started cursing her, too, "Bitch. Whore. All women are whores". She tried to curse me back, but was unable to think of anything after "fuck!" She just made a weird short whirring-spitting-vroom sound like a broken machine. Then one of the cops came up to me (a vaguely asian looking guy) and said, "do you see this form? Now we have to fill in an incident report." And I awoke. April 29, 2000 In a car, rushing to go do violence and save the world. There's someone else in the car. Is this a video game? A wall comes out of no where - I have an eerie premonition of it, but of course, it's inevitable. We hit the wall. People try to kidnap me - I manage to disable 5 out of 7, but then I am taken. When I regain consciousness, I am in a cell. There's one of my friends in the cell with me, but I don't remember who. Strong feeling that this is a video game. We plan our escape. There are about 12 sorceressess casting a huge fireball-like spell; we plan to escape when they are too far in to stop. One of them defects and joins us. The sorceresss, my cellmate, and I are running. We are leaving the fortess where we were imprisoned and going up a hill. The landscape is pastoral, with increasing trees as we go up the hill. It is autumn. We must decide where to go. We are somewhere near Reed College, but the terrain is entirely different. The other guy (Josh?) asks if we want to go to a restaurant to hide, but I think that's a bad idea. I suggest going to Safeway to buy food. Josh says that he can make a Canadian onion dish. We make it to the top of the hill, and we are in a country where German is spoken. There are scattered houses, and we run through back yards, trying to escape our captors. There is a man, lying with his head against the tree, sleeping. I wake up. May 6, 2000 I am in the hospital for some reason. It has someting to do with the time I hurt my foot in my senior year of high school. People, including my family, are looking all over for videos of the event (in real life, there were no videos). I get out of the hostpital, and I am in Greater Nick's car with 2 of my other friends, David and Lesser Nick. We are talking about my cast, and driving. For some reason, we pick up 2 pretty girls, about our age. I work hard not to make any social mistakes. We discuss where to get dinner. This is always a major point of contention among my friends. One of the girls suggests Fujin. It is vetoes because we have eaten there to often recently. We turn a corner, and we are in Seaside, Oregon (instead of Portland, where we go to school). There is a Chinese restaurant; Greater Nick says it's good. We decide to go there, and try to park. For some reason, David is driving (in real life, he doesn't know how to drive). Every time we go into a parking lot, there are tables set up there - the restaurant has like 4 parking lots of seating. Eventually, David drops us off and goes to park (but he's somehow still at the table). A plate of sashimi is on the table. I reach for some and I awaken. May 30, 2000 My next-door neighbor was Mao Tse Tung. I went to his house, and knocked on his door. I wanted an interview. He told me to come back in ten minutes. When I came back, we started the interview. My dad was there. We discussed Napster; the interview quickly degenerated into a political argument (it was my dad's fault). Then something bad (a tsunami?) happened and I woke up. June 12, 2000 I was in a classroom with a bunch of computers in it (looked kinda like a smaller version of Reed College's L18). I was in a class run by my high school English teacher, Dave Mitchell. I wasn't paying attention, I was surfing the web, reading about a new feature in the GIMP. At a break in the class, I went outside. Outside was outside of my high school (in Philadelphia, but a parking lot had been replaced with a smaller version of the plaza outside the school. There was a street vendor there, and I was last in line. I ordered a hot dog, and as I was apparently quite friendly with the three people running the cart, mentioned that I had a cold. Immediately, they began plying me with various cold remedies. One of them gave me a glass jar of some thing that looked a lot like licorice - I consumed it on the spot. Then my hot dog was ready, and the vendor gave it to me. All of the other vendors gave me cold remedies, but there was too much for me to carry, and it all started to spill out of the paper bag, which had ripped. There were multi-colored jimmies all over the cobblestone. I returned to class (I think we were actually in Dave Mitchell's classroom, this time). We were given photocopies of an old newspaper article, which Dave started to read from: "The five men walked away from the scene of the rape. The woman arose, bloody and filled with an inner fire. The men kept walking, unaware of the cyberdemon they had created" Then I woke up. Yeah, my dreams are pretty weird. In this context, cyberdemon meant cyber + demon, not the Doom enemy. [more recent log entries -- I started logging regularly here] Nov 9 2001 I was working late, and decided to go home. I was extremely tired. Then, I woke up (in the dream, of course) in the elevator at work, leaning against a black woman in a business suit. I think I was holding some sort of large pillow, which was between us. I apologised, and said I didn't notice her. I left the office to go home. On the way home (except in real life, I walk the other direction), I stopped at the food court at 3rd & walnut (which doesn't exist in real life). I bought some food, and tried (successfully) to avoid an old friend, who I know is there. As I ate, I overheard him resuming an old argument with proprietor of the place where I bought my food, loudly. I saw bear (of WF), and sat down with him. He told me that he was going to examine a rat that died of rabies on april 19. Apparently, someone thought it might be related to the anthrax thing. Next, bear ~and I were in the subway station (but it wasn't the one nearest to 3rd and Walnut -- it was the one at 30th street). In the subway car, I spat or threw something wet against wall (can't remember precisely what). It dribbled down the wall. Bear chastised me, and I tried to justify my actions, arguing that it was the cleanest way to dispose of whatever it was. I think elefth was there, and concurred with bear but of course I don't have a face to put with that name, so it was a notional, rather than physical presence. Then I woke up. Dec 3, 2001 A large crowd had gathered in a gymnasium to watch (on big TVs) some sort of sports match. An announcement came that it had been cancelled or postponed. For some reason, this was a good thing. So, the TVs were turned to CNN. CNN was showing a war. For some reason, this reminded me that I want to make a phone call to China. Some tiny little country had brought down the USSR. The US wanted to go there and take some of the territory for itself. Some other tiny countries had also sent ships to get their share of the USSR. And then I was not watching this on TV, but on a big world map where different colors represented who controlled what land. The white country now controlled the USSR (it used to be a tiny country on the North American continent). The map did not accurately reflect land masses. The US boats arrived at the USSR. With the boats providing support, tanks and men were landed (about 20 in total). Suddenly, the tanks started exploding. Soon, the survivors were forced to retreat. What was blowing them up was a yellow plastic-looking thing the size and shape of a pair of binoculars. We (I was with the US forces now) left a similar device behind, but ours could move. It started systematially kicking the former soviet binocular-things' asses (because it could move). I went to see another landing party to warn them about these binocular-things. Artemis (my mom's cute orange cat) and "Bear", were there. Bear was my other cat, who looks just like Artemis, but was male (in real life, Loki is my mom's male cat, and looks nothing like Artemis). I went to put them in a boat to keep them safe from the binocular-things. Meanwhile, an amphibious tank was being attacked by the binocular things, which were shooting little bombs under the tank. I grabbed Artemis, put her in the boat, and then went looking for Bear. I found a cat who I thought was Bear, but as I went to check if he had balls, his fur color changed, and his head became disturbingly thin, and then I woke up. Dec 8 2001 I'm at a concert sitting with dad and paige. We're just starting our visit to this alien planet. I meet a guy my age, and we talk about alien math. I walk around, meet another guy my age. He points me to an adult who is "in computers." I say, "me too." The guy says, "I guarantee he knows more about computers than you ever will." I talk to that adult. He says, "I know more about computers than you'll ever know." Concert starts. It is a solo violinist. I wander around the theater. There are aliens here, but they don't have some specific look -- I just know they're here. I walk in front of the front row. Then I see an usher's flashlight, and hide in the shadows. After the show. I am in the room of 2 aliens, looking over their math books. We are sitting on the blonde one's bed (which is a bunk bed). She and I are getting along great -- an intelllectual friendship. Their room looks like a standard college dorm. Their math is like calculus, but easier and more intuitive. The aliens look like people, but I know that they're aliens. A third alien walks in with a short female alien (of a different species, but still looking like a human -- just about 1 meter tall). The blonde tells me about this alien. Under law, the short male aliens can't refuse when a female tall alien want to have sex with them, and visa versa. I ask if female tall aliens and female short aliens (or male pairs) ever happen. The blonde says that no, that's not required. I ask if there are any "gays, lesbians, or bisexuals" here. As I'm asking this, some part of my subconscious remembers that GLB groups had criticized this world for gender stereotypes (In retrospect, I bet this was inspired by reading the same thing about _The Left Hand Of Darkness_ yesterday on Slashdot). She doesn't know those English words, so I explain them. She says, "That's great, sex with another woman sounds like it would be way better than sex with a man." I know that I have started something that will change this world. Two of my (human) friends (Who, in RL, I haven't seen in a while. One was Erin Rickard, but I think the other was just a composite generic FSS person) are waiting for me, so I leave with them. We walk through cinderblock halls to their room, which is L-shaped. The bottom tip of the L (where the door is) looks like an ordinary dorm, but the rest is empty, and has dirty sheets of something covering the ceiling, and sagging. It seems to go a long way back. I start walking under the dirty sheets (ducking at times), and asking my friends why they didn't have this taken care of. Then I wake up. Dec 10 2001 I was in some sort of congress (of about 20 people), and we were deliberating on this law. The first page was all these definitions of greek letters which had no relevence to the law, so I suggested that it be removed. The other people agreed, except for one sentence at the bottom that I hadn't noticed. It said something like, "We, being beetlefarps [or some other nonsense word] of Jesus Christ hereby pass this law." I, of course, had no intention of claiming to be an anything of Jesus, and I said so, but I couldn't convince the other people to remove the sentence. Then I woke up. Dec 11 2001 Oops, waited too long to write this one down. Someone recommended this TV show "A_____" (forget actual name, started with A) to me, so I started reading the book (yes, I know it doesn't make sense). I was suddenly in the world (This didn't seem unusual to me). Bkuhn and I were flying above a jungle in an ornithopter, looking for GPL violators (except the GPL was a patent license) and reporting back to RMS. The jungle was on an alien world and the natives had vulture heads. There was more stuff, but I forget it. Dec 12 2001 I'm exploring an apartment building in the city one afternoon with some of my friends who work there. We find an apartment which isn't supposed to be inhabited, but is. Looking through the stuff, it belongs to (my college friend) David Garlock. There's a computer with Napster running on it. We realize that the feds are coming, and flee. Out of the apartment bldg we go, through somebody's yard (in the suburbs). Now we have ~30 people, including Garlock, and even though there were only 3 of us exploring. Oh, and it's night time. We make it to some safe house. Our whole ring of people (about 30) has to go to France, then Venezuela. I'm the most recognizable -- I'll never make it through security. So, our friends use putty to subtly distort my features, and paint my face black. I put on a shirt, but it still has the coat hanger in it, so I have to remove it and put it on again. We start off to the airport. The next day ... I'm at Elliott's apartment with Elliott and one other person. My face isn't painted anymore. Elliott orders in chinese food, but he doesn't order anything I like. It gets there, and I complain to the delivery guy. He's got a whole bag off stuff that might be used to make chinese food there, but even though I ask him for dishes which consist only of items he has on him, he can't help me. At that point, Rebecca shows up with Garlock (with his face painted like mine was), along with a few other refugees. I'm happy they're here, but sad that they didn't get away. Also, I know that Garlock doesn't get along with Elliott (in the dream -- in RL, they've never met). So, UncleFluffy and I (he must be one of the refugees that came in with Garlock) go to the phone to order some more chinese food. I'm looking around for a menu, but I can't find one, and UF is already calling the place, so it seems like I won't get something I like ever again. I finally find a menu, but all of the items (that are available for delivery) have the same number! Meanwhile, UF is trying to pronounce one of the Chinese names so that the person taking our order can understand it, and failing. I wake up. Dec 12 2001 I'm going into Showcase Comics, thinking I can pick up huge stacks of M:tG cards on the cheap since nobody plays anymore. I get in, and there are four or five peoply from my old HS, and they have huge collections of cards. Unfortunately, they're all completely useless -- hundreds of "Red Ward", and "Circle Of Protection: Black" cards. Then I woke up. Dec 15 2001 Me and 2 friends are trying to figure out how to stop a bad guy, who has used a freeze-ray on some underground waterways. One of my friends uses some long thingy on a pole to take samples of the remaining unfrozen water. We plan to take them to one of our friends, who is a chemist. Maybe she will have some idea about how to unfreeze the waterways. Then I woke up. Jan 5 2002 At some sort of bday party for Dan. Everyone was confused about what sorts of drinking glasses to put out. Dan brings in some bizarre plant (giant mutant thyme?), thinking it's cilantro [in RL, Dan was out during this dream getting cilantro for my recipe]. Then I woke up. Jan 6 2002 I dreamed that an evil alien overlord forced me to watch LOTR (I was secretly happy about this). Afterwards, he sent me into a video game where I had to rescue 3 muslim guys from the ocean, but we could only ever save two of them. I realized that I had forgotten all of LOTR except the opening credits. Then I woke up. well, you'd better watch it again tonight Jan 14 2002 I'm panning for gold. I end up with a small handful of gold dust, along with some tiny rubies, saphires, and diamons. I use them to decorate my room (at my mother's house), putting patterns on the walls but unfortunately, I lose some of the dust on my bed. I try to find it by electrifying (somehow) the room. The patterns on the wall glow, but I still can't find the loose dust. Then, there's a party going on in my room. Somehow, there's about 30 people in there (the room is actually about 15x15, with sloped ceilings). It's a birthday party for someone in my senior class from High School. The DJ, however, doesn't realize this, so when he chooses the prom queen, instead of picking the bday girl, he picks EC (RL note: who is a total moron). Through all this (including everyone singing a completely weird version of _happy birthday_ ("haaaaappy birthday, the night is clear, the moon is here...")), I'm fumbling around my bed trying to find the lost handful of gold dust. Jack Cummings (of WF) enters the room and suggests electrifying the bed. I'm sad that it will make the wall decorations go out, but I do it. We talk about how much we'll miss those decorations when we move. I wake up. Jan 17 2002 This whole dream takes place at night. I am in a helicopter, following a monorail car through a tunnel. We're hundreds of meters above the ground. The monorail operators are pissed, and try to stop the monorail, but for some reason they can't. They also seem to be upset that I'm using the tunnel without paying them, but the monorail itself is free (passengers have to "pay" by hitting a button). The monorail car starts descending, and I break off from following it. On the ground, I see some of my friends getting arrested, because they had been on the monorail, talking about using it as a base for parachuting. They hadn't actually done anything. This made me really angry, and I started ranting. Some of my other friends had to drag me away before I started yelling at the cops. (All these "friends" are generic friends, not specific people) The cops see us, and start walking in our direction, so we walk away and duck into a safehouse type place. It's two rooms, carpeted. After a while, I start to leave, and one of my female friends walks out with me. I see my brother a block or so away, and say to my friend, "That's my brother. You can trust him", meaning trust him not to turn them in to the cops. "Oh, wait, no you can't!" At that, my dad calls from the balcony of a nearby building, "Dave, time to go home." Then a man comes up, and she introduces him as her husband. She amends this by saying, "Well, my male husband. This is what he's good for." She picks him up and carries him inside, while he says, "Hi honey, I'm home!" I start to head home. I'm in a brick plaza, which (in the dream) is in Ardmore. I know that I could walk to Lancaster ave to get back to my dad's house, but I would rather see how close I can get without leaving the area between Montgomery ave and Lancaster. So I start walking. Eventually, I get to this series of brick courtyards with benches (it's dark, so I'm afraid I'm going to trip over something), surrounded by apartment buildings. There keep being more and more courtyards, with no sign of a cross-street or a way out. Eventually, I hit a dead end in a tiny brick (well, everything here is brick) room that seems to be completely purposeless. I figure that there must be another exit from it. Looking around, I see a tiny brass toggle switch. Pressing it dissolves one wall, and I walk through, onto a set of interior (still brick) steps inside one of the apartment buildings. I figure I can probably find a back exit if I go up a floor. I do. I look up at the sky, and see a rift start to form in the clouds. It's very pretty. A plane (a 757, say) comes through, and the rift closes up mostly. Then it starts to open again, and another plane comes through, and five more right after it, only a short distance apart). They're all descending very fast. I start walking again. Feb 10 2002 I was driving with mom and dan to Oak Lane Day School for a Mann Music Center concert (yes, I know this makes no sense). We get there, and Dad and Paige are finally getting married for real (after years of pretending to be married for political reasons). There wass a plot by Paige's brother to poison them. Paige's father was the chef, and he realized what was happening, so the plot was uncovered and foiled. The plot was something like: "Oops, I forgot an ingredient in the soup -- let's just sprinkle in some of this powder. Ignore the almond smell -- that's normal." Then I was eating dinner in a chinese restaurant with Randy and Matthew Gabriel. The I woke up. (dream details missing because I waited to write them down. Oops) Feb 28 2002 I step onto a moving walkway at a theme park. I walk rather quickly, because I want to be through this to do something else. The walkway curls and swerves around, at a reasonable speed, but in a way no real moving walkway does (AFAIK). I come across a guy, who explains that this is a Role-Playing Game. I realize that I'm carrying two steak knives, so I say, "I'll attack you". He brandishes two much larger knives. I put mine up. He explains that we don't fight in live action -- he does some thing with cutting paper, but he cheats so that he misses me. His weapons, if they hit me, would cut off my leg, and he doesn't want to do that to me. We pass a window with a small chinese guy, who asks, "Do you want some fibbies from the year 2001?" I know that this is some sort of food product -- but before I can decide if I want some, we're past. I tell the guy about a better food place further up (I guess I had seen some part of this before). He asks how far it is, but I don't know. It turns out to be very close. The walkway winds past a cafeteria-style chinese food place. It is supposed to represent cuisine from some earlier time period. As we approach, the dude behind the counter steps on a huge (~10 cm) black mantis-roach-bug. We decide to order from this place. In order to get off the moving walkway, the dude I'm with goes behind the counter. I just keep walking in place. The dude orders something, and what looks a dark green vegetable is put on the place with his food. I think I see it twitch. I am trying to decide what to order when I wake up. Mar 1 2002 I had a dream about playing some civ-like board game with Dan (but it was actually a computer game?) But this one was much, much scarier: A meeting of about 10 Enron execs in a fancy restaurant. Someone says something like, "let's see Enron's real secret!", and lifts up two (huge) tabletops which are on top of the real tabletop. There is a 60cm x 1m fold-out display there -- the top is blank. Inside are photos of a little blonde girl, and a monster who used to be her mother. The monster is tall, missing skin (hm, I wonder if this was inspired by Anita Blake #9), raw muscle exposed, bloody. Its mouth is open, dripping blood. Holy shit, is it scary. Apparently, this was caused by some weird shit at Enron's power plants. The mother turned into a monster and killed her daughter. I say, "We have to tell everyone." So, the execs decide to hold an improptu press conference in the restaurant. There's a long staircase with a small sitting area at the top. One female exec stands at the top of the steps, looking down. She starts explaining to everyone what happened, and then goes back into the sitting area to get the display with the pictures. She starts screaming. The little girl is there, eating the exec's stomach. Later, I learn that it has killed her and entirely consumed her head, but I didn't care, because I was being chased by the mother down a long corridor, which I thought looked like it belonged in a mental hospital. The floor was linoleum, and I was wearing socks. I couldn't get any traction, so I kept slipping and falling down. I had to slide myself along the floor, pushing myself off stuff so that I would rocket out for a few meters, then friction would slow me down, and I would have to find something else to push off. The mother kept asking me, "What do you eat? I eat you!" I kept trying to say weirder and weirder things to make her think I was too gross to eat. "Bugs!" "Rocks!" Then I woke up. Mar 4 2002 There is a big rectangular hole cut into the ground, as though a swimming pool was started and left unfinished. The dirt from this hole has been piled back into it. Sticking out of this dirt are human skulls and a few long bones. Dan and I see one particular skull with a bag next to it. We clamber up the pile and retrieve the bag and the skull. Dan thinks it belongs to Lee Sonas, but we have to go through the bag to be sure. There's tons of stuff in the bag, but nothing with any identifying marks. Finally, I turn on the palm pilot which we found in the bag, and it reads, "This Palm Pilot belongs to Aaron Weiss." Since it's not Lee's stuff, we turn it into the police. Mar 6 2002 [This is a pretty fascinating dream, because it has all this weird stuff from Philly.] I was at college. Instead of single or double rooms, we lived communally 10 or so to a room, in rooms decorated more-or-less like kindergartens. I went downstairs to take a shower. The showers were organized in a square of 4. In the shower next to me was Brian Howell (RL: a friend of mine from 8th grade. I had not seen him for years until I randomly met him at the train station a few days before I moved out of my apartment on 13th st.). He was chatting with Frank (RL: an asshole I knew at around that time). It was clear that once the people left, they were going to have sex. (RL: AFAIK, both are straight) I got out of the shower, and Brian did too. I had three huge duffel bags of clothes with me, and I started getting dressed. As I reached for my T-shirt, I flashed back to where I had gotten it. It was a big marble hall, which looked something like the entry way to the Free Library of Philadelphia. As I dressed, I talked to a cute girl. She talked about how hard it was to adjust to an east-coast schedule, and I remembered that I had seen her last at a party in Portland [In the dream -- no clue who she was in RL]. I kept having to move my bags around to let her get to the sink -- they were in everyone's way. I looked around, and Brian Howell had disappeared -- so, when Frank opened the door between their showers, there was only some middle-aged guy there (who looked a lot like Frank, actuallly). Frank looked disappointed, but it seemed that he was going to go ahead and have sex with the guy anyway. I had to go upstairs (to my room) quickly, but carrying the three bags was hard. A friend helped me load up my arms. At the room, 10 of us were going to play M:TG against a Japanese dude. His cards were not actual M:TG cards -- they were smaller, maybe 2x5 cm. Their pictures were in black and white, cartoon style. There was a sheet of rules he showed us, but nobody else wanted to read them -- they just wanted to play. Evreryone else started throwing cards down randomly, without even taking turns as the Japanese dude explained the effects of his cards. They seemed to be insanely powerful, but I couldn't pay attention because my cards had gotten separated into two piles, and I had to shuffle them together. From the back, my cards were Once Upon A Time cards. Then I woke up. March 11 I was at my mom's house, running late for work (it was like 1 or 2 pm). I had to get there soon so I could approve proofs of an article I had written, which was going to run in a major paper. I started walking to the train. I arrived at Matthew Gabriel's (in RL, he's a friend of my brother) house (not his real house). There was a rocky slope leading up to a big stone wall with a gate set into it. On the top of the wall was a stick, which I pulled down to announce my arrival. A crow flew down from the wall and picked up the stick and took it back to the top of the wall. Eventually, someone let me in. Matt was there, but he was leaving in a few minutes. This was a shame, because for some incomprehensible reason, I had brought four pairs of my jeans that I needed him to do something with. My plan was to approve the article proofs while he was doing whatever he was supposed to do. But since he had to leave, I had to leave too. It had started pouring, so Matt's dad (who in RL I think I have never met) gave me a giant plastic bag to put my jeans into. Then I started walking back to the train station to go home. The next morning, someone showed me an advertisement from the Wall Street Journal for two extremely bizarre flavors of cereal (I don't remember what) in orange boxes which looked suspiciously like dish detergent (or maybe laundry detergent) boxes. The ad was from the WSJ building maintenance dept. Then I was in the WSJ employee cafeteria. They were advertising the weird cereal too, so I ordered a bowl of each flavor. They didn't ask if I wanted coffee -- they asked, "What size decaf would you like?" I ordered a small. While I was ordering, Angela (one of the librarians when I worked at Ludington Library) came up behind me. She asked me what I took in my coffee. I was confused for a second (I don't know why), but eventually, I said, "cream and sugar." "Oh, like hot chocolate!" said Angela. I went back to my table (the cafeteria was mostly empty). I was sitting next to a beautiful girl with dark hair who I had a major crush on (not a real person -- just a generic beautiful girl). I ate my cereal and slowly started moving towards the girl. Angela came up to the table then, and said, "Maybe I better sit between you two before Dave gets any closer." "He would never touch me," said the girl "Who, me?" I asked mock-innocently. "Oh, sorry," she replied. With Angela sitting between us, we listened to Randy, Matthew, and my mother talking about a possible trip to Ireland. Randy insisted that it was too dangerous for Matt to go alone, because of the protests. She suggested that Dan and I could go with Matt. I thought this was a great idea, because I wanted to be involved in the protests there. Then I woke up. Mar 12 2002 To understand this dream, you will need to know about this: http://www.fandw.org/Camps/Flyingcloud/flyingcloud.html I'm in some woods, looking for something. I realize that I'm running late to get to Flying Cloud. I come to a house in the forest. Evening Ferret Smiles is there. We decide to fly the house to FC. So, I sit down and start thinking about flying. A few hours later, we land in the woods not too far from the central clearing (ack, I know this has a name) at Flying Cloud. I walk over to the computer to try to check something on the 'net, and I realize that none of the electricity is on (of course! There's no electicity at FC). So, I leave the house and walk to the flat central clearing. Arctic Arrow (the director while I was there) is twenty or so meters away, holding a clipboard. I know I have to get to him to sign in, but walking is really hard, as though it is a long distance uphill. He asks how my journey was, and I blush, embarrased. He asks, "How did you get here?" "I, um, flew. In a, um, house." "We will have to give you flying lessons -- that's really dangerous." Then I wake up. Mar 15 2002 I was hanging out with some (generic) friends, and someone mentions a movie. I ask what it's about, and someone says that it's about this girl who thinks that her college must be the craziest college anyhwere. She tests it out by visiting other colleges, and learning about all the crazy stuff they do there. Then the person who told me these things is that girl. We decide to do something crazy. We shop for junk food, then take it home, and put it away in all the cabinets of an otherwise empty kitchen. The next morning, I go back to the house where the kitchen is with some other friends. We don't own it, but the door is unlocked, so we go in. The kitchen is a space at the end of a long stone hall (see ascii art -- but the hall should actually be about twice that long) -------------------------------------. kkk| ('k's are counters and TOP VIEW k| cabinets and sink, sssssssssssssssssssssss kkk| 's's are snow, 'w' -door------------------------www-----' is window.) The right wall of the hall is packed with snow, and there are many yellow stains in it, as though people had urinated in it. I realized that one day, this frozen urine would be the source of all lemon flavoring in the world. My friends and I start picking through the food in the cabinets (all of which I had bought with the other friends last night). We take handfuls of stuff down to our white Ford Bronco, which is parked outside. Eventually, we notice out the window that there are some road construction crews who are associated somehow with police. We are afraid that they will realize that we are stealing this food. Jackie Mendel-Reyes is standing at the Bronco, reading a newspaper. I start walking back to the house to get everyone else, and I see my aunt Ann, and my cousin Lisa (they are from opposite sides of the family). I know that I'm in trouble. Ann asks, "Are you returning the dog?" I say, "yeah, something like that." I know that I can fool Ann, but that I can't fool Lisa. Lisa asks, casually, "So, who's Lisa?" I know she is talking about the girl we abducted. I say, "Lisa who? Oh, you mean Lizzie, like in the newspaper. I point at an article in the paper that Jackie is reading. Lisa says, "Come with me," and goes inside the house. I know that she has caught onto the plot, and that she will force us to confess. Then I wake up. Mar 16 2002 I mostly forgot the beginning part of this dream, which was about Magic: The Gathering. It was my Angel deck against two other people who were not supposed to be colluding, but were. One was also playing an Angel deck, and one was playing black. Here's the part I do remember: I'm in a classroom with my 6th grade class. We've been divided into three teams: Red, Green, and White. Everyone is wearing clothing entirely in the color of their team. We get into a fight, and there is a big pile-up. Someone on the red team is on the bottom. Brandon Gay, on the green team (like me) realizes that the pile-up must be broken up, so he takes out a knife and starts attacking someone on the top of the pile. Pretty soon, the balance of power is shifted because of the incapacitated guy, and the person on the bottom escapes. After a while, another pile-up forms, and I jump in with my knife and start slicing up Andy Greenblatt. When Andy goes down, Brandon drags me off of him and suggests that we go to the infirmary. At the infirmary, a nurse look sat the bruise from where Andy hit me. She rubs some cream on it. I go over to some chairs where some teachers are sitting with Brandon and Alaina Borden (Who was *not* in my 6th grade class). Someone asks if I've ever used some program, and I say that I don't use proprietary software. Someone else says, "good for you!", seriously. Someone says that they wouldn't want children using anything but Windows, and I ask, "haven't you ever used a Mac?" She says, "Too much clicking and dragging", and I see an image of her clicking and dragging stuff on an old black-and-white Mac. Alaina Borden says, "No way! I used my Mac to organize my ten cds of Anime." I see an image of Alaina using System 8 or 9 to move files around. "It's all organized by the number of letters in the name. I keep meaning to switch to some more normal system, like genre. You know, Battle Mecha here, giant Space Monsters there, etc." Then I wake up. Mar 18 2002 Note: This isn't the first elevator dream I've had -- remembering this one made me remember snippets of another few. I seem to recall that one may have been the beginning of Dec 12's dream. I also recall one at Friends Select School involving a long tower, stairs, elevators, and the theater. Anyway, here's Mar 18's dream: I was in an elevator with a woman about my age. The elevator stoped at the third floor (it doesn't go any higher), and we got out. We were trying to reach a higher floor, so we had to find a different set of elevators that went up. To the left was a door marked something like "Maintainence Officials only", except that it seemed to imply that it was a place where janitors went to be maintained. The woman was initially concerned about going through the door, but I decided to try it. There were two elevators there. One was perfectly ordinary, and the other was of the old-school type with a manually operated iron grate instead of doors. It was filled with janitorial supplies -- buckets, mops, etc. We got into the ordinary elevator, and it took us down, into a huge marble room. When we came through the ceiling, our elevator was revealed as merely a platform enclosed by waist-high black iron fencing. It was attached somehow to an ordinary string about a millimeter in diameter, which was all that was holding it up. This string took a circuitous path around and over the scaffolding which filled up one entire side of this huge room. The elevator reached to the floor, and I got off. I had to reposition the elevator somehow to get it back the way we found it. For some reason, the woman I was with had to be on the elevator for this operation. There were manual controls for the elevator by the ground in the midst of the scaffolding. I pressed the control to start the elevator along the path. While it was going, I pressed another button, which screwed up the whole process. I started the elevator up again, but it had to complete the circuit before it could be reset. I did this a few times (I don't remember each time individually, I just remember that I did it). Each time I screwed up, I got more and more frustrated. Then I noticed that the string along which the elevator ran was looped twice around the protruding edge of a step. I unlooped it, causing the elevator to jump. One time, when the elevator stopped at the bottom, another young woman joined the first on the elevator. The elevator was about half way across the room, swinging over a wide open space, when it fell to the floor. The two women were clearly hurt very badly. A little girl with brightly colored plastic toy gun ran towards me. The elevator string was attached to the end of the gun. I yelled at her for bringing down the elevator, took her gun, and broke it. Then I sat there, looking at the broken pieces of plastic on the floor. I was trying to figure out where there was a hospital I could take the women to, but the hospital had to be able to do injection molding to fix the plastic -- somehow in my mind, the broken pieces of the gun had become the womens' bodies. Then I woke up. Mar 19 2002 Note: I don't know if I ever read _The Swiss Family Robinson_. I have no idea if my dream commentary on it bears any relation to reality. I kinda doubt it, tho. I was in my bedroom at my mother's house with Dan and Laura Simpson, disassembling one of Len Wexelblatt's machine guns (Len is one of my mom's ex-boyfriends. In RL, he does not, AFAIK, own any guns, machine or otherwise). I longed to test it out, to shoot something, but I didn't have anywhere I could safely do that. Then, I was in a locker room with Laura and some other people. I was packing a small gym bag for a trip to a desert island. I think I was going there for something like _Survivor_. Laura and I discussed _The Swiss Family Robinson_. I suggested that the Robinsons were stupid, because they could see the lights of St. Croix from their island, but they never thought to build a raft to get there until the end of the book. Laura pointed out that some of them died when they finally did pilot their raft there. While we were discussing this, I had visions of their trip -- they were on a tiny island with black sand, and St. Croix was a similar island, but with a city of black stone on it. The ocean currents between the Robinsons' island and St. Croix were treacherous -- the water looked more like a river than an ocean. Their raft trip to St. Croix took place at night. I told Laura that I had not read the book in ten years. She said she hadn't read it in fifteen, which struck me as somewhat unrealistic -- she is around my ag, so she would have been five or six when she read it. I packed lots of foam rubber balls. They were ammo for my nerf gun, but I had to make up an excuse to bring them, so I said that they were for cultural preservation -- I explained that I planned to use them to make atoms on the beach, drawing atomic bonds on the sand. I remembered a past time when I ran out of ammunition (the image that came with this was from a past dream which I have mostly forgotten: I was hiking with two other people through a stream a few centimeters deep and around 30 meters wide. Red rock canyon walls rose tens of meters above us on either side of the stream. The stream bed was mostly small rocks). After filling the bag with these balls, I got hot and took off my jacket and sweater. I went to put them in my bag, and found that there was no space for them, so I had to take out some of the nerf balls. I considered taking one of Len's machine guns with me, but I really only wanted it for the extra ammo capacity. I decided instead to take my normal gun, which was a heavy grey metal handgun which fired large bullets -- maybe .44 or .50. I wondered if the people in charge of this trip would allow me to take extra clips. Mar 22 2002 Three dreams: 1. My mom insisted that I replace the carpet in my apartment (the apartment at 13th st.). I called up some carpet people to consult with them about it, but they weren't there, so I left a message. When I got home from work the next day, they had torn up my old carpet and some of my walls, turning my apartment into a construction site. 2. I was in a small room with my mom. It was painted blue. We had some device to let us control the water level in the room. After bringing it up and down a few times, my mom decided she is too hot, so I opened the door and went out into the hall to adjust the thermostat. When I returned, she was gone, so I looked through the second doorway into Dan's room (at my dad's house). There was a bookcase blocking the doorway, but only up to about 1.5 meters. I wondered how we were able to flood the room with water with the open doorway to Dan's room. 3. Long and confusing. On the way when I get time... notes: clothing contest/cat food/dock/marissa miller/5 yrs old at dock/eating/gpl/rocks and paper stacked /miller playing violin/cats (eyes) and october and past sins/ I really will do this one of these days. April 4, 2002 X-Inspired-by: http://stalkedbyseth.com vs. http://www.sethf.com/freespeech/censorware/essays/censorwareorg.php I was in an electronics store with my mom. I had picked out a bunch of stuff, and stacked the boxes on a table. I decided that I needed to do more research before buying stereo components. I was looking at a shelf of stereo components, from A-M, and I needed to find N-Z. Eventually, I discovered that it was around the back of the shelves I was looking at. But when I got there, it was a library. I was in the children's room, looking at books. I walked to the door and saw Michael Klein (RL: a dude about Dan's age, an old family friend. Never actually hit by a car AFAIK) on crutches. We started talking, and I learned that he had been hit by a car and actually run over. He told me that fewer than twenty people a year were actually run over by cars. It was time for me to go, because I had to give a speech. I walked into a room with some long benches around a central clear area. I sat down next to my dad. We were each going to give a talk about a part of our organization, which was some FSF-ish group. My dad somehow leaned the bench way back, and whispered to me, "Do you want to talk about my part, and I'll talk about yours?" "No, I don't even know what you do." "I work on cou le fou", he replied. (I think that's what it was -- some french-sounding gibberish, anyway). "I don't know anything about that," I said. He let the bench back upright. The lights dimmed, and came back up on a play by one of the other organizations. Two people (Brad and Lisa, in RL of the FSF, but in the dream of some EFF-ish organization) were sleep in a house. They woke up and realized that they were hungry, so they went out looking for food. They came upon an unusual tree. It had yellow, grapefruit-like fruits on the lower limbs, similar orange fruits on the higher limbs, similar red fruits still higher, and at the top, cherry-like purple fruits. I knew that they were forbidden to eat of it, because it had mixed fruits on one tree. Lisa ate a yellow fruit, and offered it to Brad. He ate some too. They started talking about how maybe "filtering software" (NB: censorware) maybe wasn't such a bad idea after all. It was clear that this was a slippery slope -- as they ate fruits from higher on the tree, their disapproval of various forms of censorship would drop. Suddenly, a largish man charged in and decked Brad (this was clearly in the context of the play). Then there was an intermission. A friend introduced me to the largish man -- evidently, he was quite famous, and it was good that he was working with Brad and Lisa's organization. Then I woke up. April 17 2002 I dreamed that I was at somebody's beach house with a girl I really liked. I woke up, in a sleeping bag on the beige carpet, and remembered my dream. I started to tell it to the girl, but she kept getting distracted by other things. This was extremely frustrating -- I kept asking "Do you want to hear this?" I didn't want to force it on her, but I wanted her to care about my dreams. I was also somewhat distracted, because I was trying to find the fourth CD that I had burned of the XXXX (I forget what) of Catan, where XXXX was *not* any of the expected Settlers, Cities & Knights, etc. [Pop back out to RL for a minute -- these CDs were clearly the Hellsing CDs I burned for Tony. And I first played Settlers of Catan a few nights ago]. The dream within a dream was about the Last [American] Indian. Stylistically it was a lot like a movie, maybe a documentary with lots of re-enactments and no intervews. He had built a theme park, and it had been very popular, but now the Last Indian was tired of it, and it was being flooded. Somewhat like _The Sparrow_, my metadream skipped back to the beginning of the story -- the Last Indian was at his house in the middle of a like [think _Waterworld_]. Some rather unsavory relatives (I think an uncle and two cousins) showed up in a canoe, the Last Indian got on, and they paddled away. They picked up some tourists -- I think they were going to cheat them somehow, but at this point in explaining the metadream to the girl, I woke up from the real dream. Commentary: Did that make any sense? If not, please tell me and I'll fix it. I think it's my first dream within a dream since I was five, and the Scary Green Caterpillar dream, from which I woke up only to find the SGC RIGHT THERE! Then I woke up again. Wow, that was some creepy shit. Oh, and the caterpillar wasn't actually green, so I have no clue why it was called the Scary Green Caterpillar. It was actually based on a blanket I had, which was purple and red squares. April 27 2002 I was riding around with someone in a car. We were trying to find a place to park for this recreational center. Eventually, I got inside. There was an announcement over the intercom, looking for Clue players. I saw a room with rows of tables. There were people sitting behind the tables, with papers. I went in, and discovered that they were Scientologists. There were other people there talking to the Scientologists too. I started out playing it straight, but after a while, the dude next to me asked, "So, what about Xenu?", and I stared a chant, "Xenu! Xenu! Xenu!". Everyone but the Scientologists joined in. After the chanting died down, I asked the Scientologist I was talking to about Xenu, but he played dumb. Then I woke up. April 30 2002 Rebecca Neville and I were standing across the Ben Franklin Parkway from Friends Select School. There was a statue, which was similar to the statue of a man with an umbrella which in real life is at 17th & Locust, but the dream statue didn't have an umbrella. For some reason, Rebecca and I wanted to buy it. We didn't know who owned it, so we asked in the restaurant which it was in front of, and in the office building across the street. Nobody knew who owned it, but the secretary at the office suggested that if they owned it, they would be willing to sell it for a song. She recommended that we ask at the Art Museum or the Free Library to see who owned it, but she thought they would be closed. We walked outside, and I pointed out both to Rebecca (who, in RL, knows exactly where they are). For some reason I pointed to the Franklin Institute as the library. We decided that the art museum was more likely to know who owns the statue. We walked there, through the blazing heat. The lobby wasn't the real lobby of the art museum, but a large marble room (similar to May 18's dream), with four escalators filled with people running up and down. In the lobby, there was a stand selling "New York Style Ice Cream", which was basically frozen lemonade. I bought one, and it cost ten bucks (it had only cost the person before me $9). I looked at the clock as we walked towards the escalators and it was 4:30. Suddenly, two guards ran past us and used some kind of floating blue glowing ribbons to levitate the ice cream stand. The guards were kicking them out because they were too expensive. Rebecca and I were pretty pissed about the cost too, so we went along with the guards. There were a bunch of other angry people too, some of whom were caught up with the table by the blue ribbons. We dragged the table to the elevator. I was inside with one guard, trying to hold the door open, but we couldn't hold it, and it closes. We pushed the button for the next floor down, so we could turn the elevator around. When the door opened, the table and people were already there. Somehow, Rebecca had drilled through the floor with her magic powers, and brought the table with her. When we got done with the ice cream stand, we went back up to the lobby, but it was 5:00 (closing time), and everyone was leaving; the museum was closed. But we asked a departing curator, who stayed and looked up the statue -- it turned out to be owned by the German government. So, we gave up trying to buy it, because we knew it would be too expensive. Then I woke up. May 4, 2002 Two dreams: 1. I was in a building around where Borders is in Philadelphia (17th and Walnut). There was an escalator going up, but it wasn't an ordinary escalator. The steps were three times as high as an ordinary step, and somehow, they became benches sitting at tables as the escalator rose. I could never figure out the trick of how to be sitting on those benches, so I always had to hang from them, dropping off at the top as the benches went around a curve (like a ski lift). There was a woman with me at the top (she looked and seemed a bit like Marna Elliott, but was nobody specific). She wanted me to buy her a coffee at the cafe which was there. Specifically, she wanted "an espresso, black and strong and slimy". There were huge lines for the cafe, but eventually, I got to the front, and ordered the espresso. When it arrived, I realized I had lost my headphones, so I looked around for them. Under the counter was a backpack with some headphones sticking out. Since I figured mine must be close by, I took the headphones from the bag. I gave the woman her coffee, left the cafe, and walked downstairs (normal stairs, this time). 2. Inspired by: Hellsing, a bit of Anita Blake The characters in this were only related to me in the dream -- I don't have a nephew, and the brother in this story was not Dan. My mom in the dream was close to (and maybe the same as) the woman from the dream 1. Anyway, here it is: I was a child, locked in a wooden box underground, in stocks. My mom lifted up the top of the box, and started pouring in salad, shoveling it into my mouth. I didn't like it, but I had to eat or be drowned. She closed the box back up and went away. My point of view shifted. I was a tall, strong man with dark hair. There was a tall metal tower, like the kind used to hold electrical lines. It was sunset. I was swinging through the tower, when I noticed the top of the box under it. I went down and investigated, and found the child. It was my nephew. I realized that I had to get away from the boy before my brother (the boy's father) returned, so that he wouldn't know that I had learned of his secret. So, I started walking towards my brother's house, where I was staying. It was night time now, so his guard zombies were out. Fortunately, they were programmed stupidly, so they only moved towards me when they could see me; once I hid behind something, they stopped. I did shoot a few, but then I reallized that I didn't want to be noticed. When I shot them, they exploded like in Hellsing. I got to the house, and my nephew was there. There was also a zombie, but shooting it didn't kill it. I put five holes in its chest, in a pentagon, but it still came towards me. I tried to shoot it in the head, but my gun wouldn't fire. It reached me, and I somehow wrestled it down. I held it on the ground, cradled its head, and it relaxed. I brought my gun around and tried to shoot it again, but it was still jammed. I opened up the gun (it was pretty much Alucard's 'Jackal 13mm' from Hellsing, but I didn't notice "Jesus Christ Is In Heaven" written on the side). There were two or three bullets lined up tip-to-end (I think this would make no sense in a real gun). I took them out and put them back in. After a few tries, I managed to get it to work, and the zombie's head exploded. Yuck. May 10, 2002 I was in a Red Line train. I knew I was late for work, but not how late. I had my big green duffle bag with me. There was a little boy (who looked something like Jake Lloyd in SW Ep1) sitting across from me. There were only a few other seats filled on the train. He was practicing his French with me, but I don't speak any French, so I could only listen. I figured that I might as well practice my Spanish, so I looked pointedly at my wrist and asked, "Que hora es?" ("What time is it?", I think). The boy answered, "Two twenty". I suddenly realized how late I was, and said, "Oh shit!" Then I realized I was supposed to be practicing my Spanish, so I said, "Merde! Er, no, mierda! Ay Caramba!" Then I woke up and was only about 1/2 hour late for work. May 29. 2002 I walked down a long meeting hall, following Elliott. At the end of the hall was a fireplace, and I followed Elliott through a secret passage in the fireplace to a secret meeting of the Free Software Foundation. Everyone was dressed in black and Goth stuff. After the meeting, I walked out onto the Ben Franklin Parkway, and talked to a street vendor (of the sort which is only there on the 4th of July) near the Free Library. He told me that the FSF had been betrayed, and that I had to flee. So, I ran down the Parkway, with my father beside me, in the direction of the Art Museum. Someone saw us and shouted, so we turned onto a cross-street (on the other side of the street from the Free Library and the vendor), around 22nd. Then, I was still fleeing, but I was in a garden at Harvard (but not some real place, I just knew that I was at Harvard). Jono (anti-DMCA activist for the FSF) was beside me, and we were still fleeing. We made it through the hedge maze to a brick building. I wondered how we were going to get in without a keycard, but we just ran up the steps that ran up the side of the building, and the door opened wihtout a card. We took a glass elevator up to Tony's room, but somehow, we got separated in the elevator, and Jono left behind a bunch of candy wrappers. I got to Tony's room (which, in the dream, he shared with 6 HRSFAn), and waited for him to return. June 2, 2002 This whole dream took place at night. I was with some of my friends from Reed. Across the street, a man carrying an umbrella and a rifle stepped into a puddle of ink. I decided to go visit Tony. I walked for a while,but then I realized I was going the wrong way. The places in the dream were, as far as I know, not real places. I went to turn around (actually, to make a ~160 degree turn onto a side-street), and I saw Neil (a HRSFAn now living in Texas) in a car in the parking lot I was passing. There were a few other people in the car with him. I said hi to him and continued walking to Tony's. I reached the gun store on Mass. Ave (which doesn't exist in RL). The store was about ten meters high with big glass windows. There was a man dressed as Alucard from Hellsing. He was clearly an actor -- this was some sort of promotion for the gun store. He let me hold his guns. They were very, very heavy, so I fell backwards. Everyone in the crowd laughed at me. I got up and gave the guns back to Alucard. He asked me if I wanted to fire them, and I said, "no". Some other person from the crowd took them. He aimed them at the gun store, and asked the owner, "OK?". The owner nodded, so the guy fired them through the window of the gun store. This looked like fun to me, so I asked to have the gun back to fire it. I tried to cock it, but this was a very complex process, and required lots of strength (unlike in Hellsing). I finally got it cocked and aimed it at random into the store window, but it didn't fire. I checked, and the safety was still on. I took the safety off, and then saw a cop in the gun store window, aiming at me. Then I realized that it was just a larger-than-life poster of a cop, so I shot it. It fell. I returned the gun to the Alucard actor, and told him about my dream that the gun was in (see May 4, 2002). The gun store owner opened the store, then, and people started walking in. There were some golden retrievers in the store, nosing around a model of a keyboard with big foam-rubber keys. I asked the gun store owner if I could borrow a rifle, so I could stage a photo of the first scene in this dream. June 8, 2002 There was no extraneous noise in this dream, and the noise there was was not overly loud or shocking. I was in a dimly-lit bar owned by Elvis. He was arguing with a Mafia Don. It was something like http://www.demian5.com/036.html. Soon, someone started shooting, and all of a sudden, there was a major fight between Elvis supporters and Mafia types. Elvis won the fight, but was injured. A few days later, Elvis was practicing his target shooting. He held a rifle of old-fashioned design, with a long wooden stock and a total length of about a meter and a half. He was pointing it at a screen about the size of a big-screen TV, which he was sitting very close to. The screen was embedded in the wall and was framed by black curtains. It showed various targets, which Elvis shot at. Of course, even though his rifle appeared to be a real rifle, it only had an effect on the world inside the screen. He was not a very good shot. I was lounging in a bathtub next to him, and I got out to give it a try. I picked up a pistol. The screen was showing a fighter plane, rolling down a short runway and leaping into the air with a shudder of tensed wings. Elvis was shooting at it, and put some holes into it, but it didn't crash. It approached the roof of an apartment building that was still under construction, and fired what looked like Photon Torpedoes. One went into the side of the building, and a piece of the wall fell. The camera followed it down. "That's not fair," I thought, "I didn't fall off the roof then." But the camera returned to the roof, and the fighter fired some more Photon Torpedoes. Elvis and I stood on the roof firing at it (somewhere in the sequence, we were no longer bound by the screen, and were there). The sequence seemed to repeat a few times, and each time the camera followed the piece of the wall down, I was surprised anew at the unfairness of it all. Then I was on the roof of the building with Dan and his ex-girlfriend Lauren. I knew that my dad owned the building. I warned Dan and Lauren about the fighter plane. We argued for a while about the danger (Dan argued that the building had insurance, so we were safe; I argued that an unfinished building wouldn't have insurance), but eventually, I convinced them to come downstairs. We didn't know where the stairs down were, so we started walking along the perimeter of the building. We got to a giant machine used for chopping huge logs into smaller pieces. Logs two meters in diameter and seven or eight meters long were on a conveyor belt, entering the machine. At the other end, sections one or two meters long came out. Daniel and Lauren stopped to put stuff on the conveyor belt (including my old keychain, with freedom rings and my keycard). I walked to the other end of the machine, and searched through the logs and sawdust. I found my keys, unharmed. We kept walking. Lauren said, "Your Dad must have a lot of money." "Yeah," I replied. We reached an elegant marble bar, shaped like an eye. I was very hungry, so I started rummaging through its drawers for food. I found some Twizzlers and other junk food, and started munching on them. An arc of tall cabinets formed an eyebrow to the bar's eye. One after another, two uniformed construction workers opened the rightmost door in the cabinets, and stepped inside. We realized that these were the stairs down. After I finished my Twizzlers, we started down. We were on the 92nd floor, so we thought it would be a long way down. The staircase spiraled around a concrete column, ten meters in diameter. The floor numbering was very weird -- after one revolution around the column, we were at floor 64, then 32, then 16. I realized that it was going down by powers of two. When we got to floor 4, I thought we needed to somehow skip it, because we didn't want to end up in the basement (yes, I know the math makes no sense here). So, I walked through a doorway into a very pretty apartment. It had the same opulence as the bar, all marble, fine furniture, and a deck looking out over some treetops. Dan and Laura pulled me back from the apartment, saying, "This isn't the first floor." I pointed at the tops of the tress, saying, "No, but we're close." We continued down the staircase, and reached the lobby. The lobby was a huge marble room, with pools, fountains and plants everywhere under a high ceiling. A well-dressed man with the air of a waiter in a fancy restaurant pointed to the first pool, which had raised sides and appeared to be about a meter deep. On the surface of the pool floated a profusion of flowers, white and yellow and pink. A man lounged in the pool, his arms draped over the sides, his eyes closed. The "waiter" said, "This is a privacy pool. Whatever you do here will have no affect on the other people here. You could even pee in here." I nodded. "Although I don't know why you would want to," he added with a little sniff. Dan ran off to the next pool, jumped in, and said, "I win!" Lauren asked me why he had said that, and I replied, "Everything is a competition with him." I walked over to the pool he was in, and dived in. I did the breast-stroke across, and woke up when I reached the other side. June 19, 2002 I was at YAPC, listening to the keynote. While I was listening, I got all sorts of ideas for new talks to give (I don't remember what they were). When the talk was over, I realized I had only a half hour before I was to present on TRIZ, but my slides weren't done. I walked out into the lobby to use the computer there to finish them. It had a giant (5 m) screen, which was showing a screensaver in the style of an old-school demo. The words in the screensaver were lyrics to some poetic and melancholy song (I don't know if it's real or imagined, but I know I liked it). The computer was very hard to use, but I managed to do some work on the slides. I realized that I was late for my talk, so I ran to the room. There were four people there, looking around nervously. I introduced myself, and asked, "So, do you want to hear about TRIZ?" They did. So, I went to begin my talk, but there was no projection monitor. I told the people to wait while I went to get one. I searched through the halls of the university where YAPC was being held (In RL, I have never been to WUSTL, so this was all imagined). I went into classroom after classroom, and no one had one. Finally, someone came to get me, and said that they had found one. I started walking back to the room where I was to speak, but the room numbering wsa very confusing, so I got a little lost. Finally, I made it back to room 670 (which was right next to room 220). It wasn't the room I had left -- it was large and well-lit, and perhaps twenty people were waiting for me to talk. A woman told me that I was ten minutes and twenty-six seconds late. My laptop (the IBM which the FSF has lent me) sat on a podium, with the projection screen behind me. I couldn't use my laptop's screen and the projection screen at the same time, and to see the projection screen, I had to crane my head at an uncomfortable angle. Also, my slides were formatted all funny, and I couldn't seem to get to slide 0. Then I woke up. June 25, 2002, on a plane to YAPC I dreamed that I was on the plane, listening to music on my laptop, but for some reason plugging the headphones in didn't kill the speakers. So everyone was just looking at me funny, while I was grooving to A3 and hacking. July 17, 2002 I was in health class at my old high school (but it didn't look like my high school actually looked. It was much bigger and fancier. It looked something like various MIT buildings. The class was boring. The next day, we were going to have a party in health class, so I brought in a bunch of food (plastic shopping bags containing bags of chips, bottles of soda, etc. I was walking with a few of my friends from high school, including Jackie Mendel-Reyes. We walked in, and I realized that I didn't know where the classroom for health class was. I knew the number, but not the location. Someone walked up to me and grabbed my bags and put them in the trash. So I punched him in the nose. I realized that this was a bad idea, as my high school was a Quaker school, and did not tolerate violence. A teacher asked what had happened. "He hit me." "No I didn't. Wait, yes I did. He put my food in the trash, so I hit him." "OK, you can go about your business" So, I got my packages out of the trash. My friends thought this was a bad idea, but I pointed out that (a) they were in plastic bags and (b) even inside the bags, the food was in sealed containers. We went to the third floor, looking for the room (which had some number like MIT: 33-134 or something (I'm going to be spending basically all my time at MIT for the next few days, so that's probably where it came from)). We got split up, and I realized that the room was on the fourth floor. So, I went up the steps, and suddenly remembered exactly where the room was. But in the way was a bizarre carnival-ish ride. Apparently, it was the spring fair. The ride had two teachers (I think one was Deb Kost), hanging in harnesses, balancing some sort of bar which stretched between them. This had something to do with a swing, which arced out over the fourth floor balcony, to about where the teachers were hanging. I asked Deb Kost why a longer swing was not used, since it would give a better freefall. She claimed that it would have larger "static tension" (or some such physics-sounding garbage), and wouldn't give a better freefall. I told her that, based on my experience, she was wrong (I have been on a giant swing. It rocked). Then I woke up. July 24, 2002 I was at the top of a ski slope. I had been here in previous dreams. I started down one of the trails (a green circle), but realized that I had forgotten my skis and was just walking on my ski boots. I think my dad was there too. Later, I was in a Japanese restaurant with my dad. We were kneeling on opposite sides of a marble table. The restaurant was in a plane, flying above Boston. One of the waiters (a young asian man) really liked my LinuxWorld shirt (in RL, I don't own a LinuxWorld shirt). He wanted me to give it to him. My dad told him to bug off and go get his own, so he did. The plane was flying over Cambridge, nearing the Charles, and I thought for some reason that Logan was on the banks of the Charles, so we had to turn here. Somehow, I was flying the plane, and turning us, trying to avoid the random wires which stuck up from the skyscrapers (yes, I know Cambridge doesn't have an skyscrapers). Below us was an Internet Plane. I wondered if it was wired or wireless. My dad thought it was probably wired. I finally landed. On the banks of the Charles, near Laura's flat, was a flatbed truck with twenty or so grey rugs laying in it. The truck was next to a set of narrow concrete canals that flowed into the Charles. The rugs were waving a bit in the breeze. Wait, no, they were alive. I picked one up, and wore it around. I also gave one to my dad. Eventually, the ones we had picked up floated into the canal and became ducklings. More were lifting anxiously from the truckbed, wanting to be free as ducklings too. I put some in, but they kept wandering away. I didn't want to have more ducklings than I could control, so I left about ten in the truckbed. Two of the ducks started towards the Charles. I walked (the canals were shallow enough that the water only came up to my chest) after them. Just as they were about to be swept away by the river, I brought them back. As we walked and floated back towards safety, I realized that they had violated the GPL, section 2(e) (Of course, this section doesn't exist). I therefore had the right to scrape them against the concrete wall. But I didn't. July 27, 2002 I was going on some sort of field trip from college to Boston. About five of my friends (I don't know who at this point --just generic friends) and I didn't have a place to stay, until one of them offered to let us use her uncle's house. We got there, and stayed the night. I think the uncle was kind of crazy (he looked a lot like an older version of my Uncle Ed). The next morning, we went to the Red Line station at Alewife (but it looked like some of the NJT stations on the way from Trenton to New York). We tried to get on an outbound (in RL, Alewife is the last outbound stop) train to get to the "hidden" station, which was called something like FreeLand. It was packed, so we had to take the next one. When we got there, we split up. UncleFluffy, Alriddoch (both of Worldforge -- I haven't met either in person) and I went to the savannah area to hunt. It was a bright, sunny day. We all had weapons (not firearms -- mine was a spear). Alriddoch split away from UF and I. UF told me about how the National Park Service hunts poachers. Apparently, they're expert assassins, and can even kill CIA people when they try to hunt in national parks. He suggested that we hunt Alriddoch. I agreed, and we split off, ducking through the high yellow grasses. After a while of stalking, Alriddoch came out of a cluster of grass in front of me. I stabbed him in the stomach. On the edge of the savannah (which was, apparently a room or courtyard, rather than being truly outdoors) was a tall set of shelves, empty. I stuffed Alriddoch's body under the lowest shelf. I retrieved UF, and we decided to leave before the cops came. So, we went through the doorway next to the shelves. There was a wide staircase descending into a huge room. There were doors on the opposite and left sides of the room (also at the tops of staircases). I told UF that I knew the area outside fairly well, so either door should be fine. We crossed the room, and went up the stairs. The door opened into a stone room about ten meters wide by five meters deep. On the far side were columns. It looked like they opened to the outside, because we could see the countryside through them, but the sky was dark blue, as it is in the early evening, so we realized that it was just a painting. The room had no doors other than the one by which we entered, so we had to turn around and go out the left door. Then I woke up. (I bear no malice at all towards Alriddoch. He's a wonderful guy, and the Free Software community needs more people like him. So, I have no idea what's up with this dream) <-- I haven't submitted any dreams below here to Slow Wave yet --> August 2, 2002 I came home one day to find two women in my bedroom. They were packing all of my belongings into boxes. I asked them why, and they said that I was being kicked out. They told me two major things I had done wrong, and a bunch of minor ones. My dad was there, in his fedora and leather jacket, sitting on the stairs to the third floor. I tried to talk to one of the deans, an older man (um, deans of what? I don't know), who I was friendly with, but he brushed me off, and told me to write a letter to the two main deans (two older women, who could have been teachers at my high school, but were not). So, I sat down in the tiny cramped space outside my bedroom door and started writing. August 9, 2002 I had just gotten off of an airplane, and was waiting for my dad to pick me up. I reached for my book, which looked something like a trade paperback version of _Cryptonomicon_. When I opened it, I discovered that some words had been cut out, perhaps with a razor blade. In some sections, it was only a few words, but in others, there were only a few words left. My dad came up at this point, but I ignored him, because I was furious about my book! I went up to the attendant (who was in a glass booth like at a movie theater or T station), and started screaming at her. I chased her around the airport, demanding to know why this had happened. She said that it was for security reasons, and had been announced on the plane. I said that I must have been asleep, but it was still unacceptable. While I followed her around, yelling, she was hitting on this guy, who totally didn't care about her (the characters looked like Shiunji and Tomoe from the Sexy Losers comic). The attendant said, "What if you had been a terrorist? What then?" I shouted, "Then I would have blown up the fucking plane! Why would fucking up my book stop me? " I opened it up to show her. "What did you do, cut out everything but the fucking prepositions?!" She said, "Prepositions and conjunctions." The attendant was still following the guy around, and we went into a closed restaurant. She was paying no attention to me. The guy was trying to get away. I felt sorry for him. There were table all around us, with chairs stacked on them. In the corner, I saw a little girl laying on the floor, with a man nibbling on her toes. I pointed to them (to distact the attendant from her pursuit of the man) and said, "Look over there!" I threw a chair across the room to illustrate my point. August 15, 2002 Warning, this dream may make no sense to people who don't know how the FSF does license violations. I really do have a new Henkels chef's knife. It really is an awesome knife, but not as awesome as in the dream. A filk is a (usually humorous, usually SF-oriented) song created by replacing the lyrics of a real song). I know the automated bus bit came from reading _The Free Lunch_ until the wee hours last night). I was staking out a modern office building, investigating a GPL violation by Real Networks (in real life, as far as I know, Real Networks is not and has never been in violation). I think there was some famous computer scientist involved. But I couldn't gather enough evidence (after days of waiting outside), so I went to visit the person who reported it at his office. While I had been investigating, he had posted about it to Slashdot. Even though the post was by an Anonymous Coward, I knew it was him, because the text (down to the bold bits) was identical to what he had sent us. The reporter was some weird amalgamation of two recent reporters. He was pretending to be very busy, because he knew I would be angry at him for posting to Slashdot. But his co-worker winked at me, and I knew I could interrupt him. Then, I was on an autonomous bus, speeding through the night, with the reporter and some other guy. The bus had no seats, and in some places, the sides were open. The other guy was explaining how the approval process for this bus had one major requirement: That it be able to carry passengers. "The reason for this requirement," he said, " is so that you can hold a guy with a gold card down and get through security checkpoints." A gold card, in the weird futuristic dream world, was the mark of an extremely high security clearance (but, of course, it must not have had any identification requirements). He demonstrated by pushing my face against the floor of the bus, near one of the edges. The reporter said, "If somebody did that to me, I'd pull out this." He pulled out a glowing golden sword. "That would be fair, right?" ' I replied, "I wouldn't exactly call a Force Sword a fair weapon." (I don't recall the exact name of the weapon, but it was something Final Fantasy-esqe like that). I knew that it was an insanely powerful sword. "Want to find out?", he said, and brandished it at me. I dived across the floor of the bus at him, grappling with his hands, and bending him back over the edge of the bus until he dropped the Force Sword off the side. Then I let him up a bit. While all this fighting was going on, I was singing a song describing what was happening, a sort of filk of Nine Inch Nails' "Reptile". The other guy, who sat in a corner watching us, was quite impressed by this. He reached down to his waist again, and pulled out an ordinary katana. "Well, maybe this would be a bit more fair. We grappled some more, and I pulled out my new Henkels chef's knife. Then, his katana was bent over the blade of my chef's knife, ruined. I realized again (as, in RL, I have been realizing) how awesome my new chef's knife really was. I put my knee on his chest, and prepared to chop of his head with the knife, which I was pretty sure I could do in one stroke. As I raised the knife, I realized it was my katana that was bent. So, this must be his chef's knife... and my head that was about to roll! Then I woke up. Aug 25, 2002 My dad was driving my brother and I to a party being held by the army. I was invited because of some GPL compliance work I had done for the army (no, I haven't done any in RL). This was in Portland. We entered a somewhat industrial district, and I was sure we had taken a wrong turn. But then we saw a big billboard for "Powell's Channel 4", which was some network TV station run by the book store. We arrived just as the party was starting. The party was at a mansion, with a large porch with white columns and high-ceilinged rooms. Random army brass with medals on their dress uniform were milling around. There were drinks, soda and lemonade, but no iced tea. I suggested to my dad that he go out and get some. He was afraid that some of the people there would drink it, not realizing it had caffiene, and get sick. So, I told him I would make a sign for it. He left to go pick up the tea, and I went outside to the porch. On a chair by the door were sheets of construction paper, rolled up into little rolls. I was trying to figure out how I could cut letters out of construction paper to warn people that iced tea contains caffiene, and worrying about how terrible I've always been at arts and crafts, when I woke up. Aug 27, 2002 (during a daytime nap) Neat, my very own WTC dream. And only a year late. I was in the basement of a church in New York City with a man who was something like Aragorn. There was a black out, because a bombing raid was coming. The good guys scrambled the fighters, but still, the World Trade Center was hit. "Aragorn" and I emerged from the basement into the church full of weeping people. But then, another raid was launched, and we had to go back down. A bomb landed near the church, but it was a dud. We emerged again, and had to retreat again. This time was the last. The city was destroyed. I gingerly opened the door, and thrust out with my stick, hitting a skinny figure skulking in the doorway. The church's roof was blown off, and nobody was there. It was dusk. We walked into the city to kill the people responsible for this. "Aragorn" and I were walking through a snowy garden with a few other people. We turned a corner, and saw, from the back, my brother Dan. Ahead of him, also walking away from us, were an older man and an older woman. The three of them were all wearing red robes. They were priests of the enemy. My stick, which I had hit the skulking figure, was now something like a cross between a baseball bat and a morning star. It was all wood, but the top was connected by a short chain to the body of the weapon. I walked up behind Dan, and hit him on the head, hard, three times. It didn't seem to hurt him at all, and the other two priests didn't notice. He turned towards me I had forgotten that he was impossible to hurt! I started running away, and told my friends to split up; that I would divert him. I ducked behind a hedge, and grabbed him as he ran by. I wrestled him to the ground. He was clearly allowing me to do this (as in RL he was much stronger than me). He was secretly on our side. "Aragorn" and the other people returned to us, then. We decided to tie Dan up, and leave him in the snow for his friends to find. Another dream: I was on a island, shaped something like Spain. We were traveling from the south-west to the north-east. I had thought that we would just drive, but we ended up driving to the coast, and then taking a boat. I saw all this on a map that looked like http://www.novalis.org/images/drawings/dream-island.png (the little upside-down v shapes are mountains). The map in the dream looked much nicer -- something like an old Chinese watercolor. Sep 6, 2002 Note: In RL, I lost my key earlier in the night I had this dream, and was forced to crash on the FSF's floor. I was in a Chinese Restaurant with Cassia and Michael Klein (in RL, a family friend, about Dan's age, but in the dream, Cassia's younger brother). Cassia mentioned Kenzaburo Oe. I asked what American author she (yes, I know Oe is male, but I said "she" in the deram) was like, kind of like how Haruki Murakami is like Philip Dick (I meant to put a link to Gnod here, but it seems Gnod no longer associates the Murakami and Dick). Cassia and Michael agreed that Oe is like no other author, and I really should read him (yes, we couldn't agree on Oe's sex). We paid our bill. As we were walking home, Dev was there. He said that he had for years been forgetting to give me something. He handed me a frozen tupperware container, which I knew contained a delicious soup, but with turds added. In the soup was my key. Sep 11, 2002 I left my room, which was at the top of a tall tree. I walked down the fire escape (an ordinary black metal construction). A few levels down, a woman handed me a monkey, but it had cancer. I was also carrying some metal bowls, and re-arranging them as I walked. At the bottom was a kid playing an Italian version of Bubble-Bobble. For some reason, I needed to have tubes put into my nose so I could eat. But, while drinking through a straw didn't bother me, for some reason, I just couldn't handle having the straws put up my nose. I was perplexed. All my friends were doing it to show me how easy it was. (hm, maybe this dream would have made more sense if I'd written it down when I woke up). And another: I was at a 7-11 or some similar store with my aunt Ann, picking up some food for a party. It was a tiny store, with only two parking spaces. As we walked back to the car, two teens yelled at us for using one. We got a call on the cell phone, telling us that the party had been moved to Watertown. This was apparently much further away, which was a shame. We drove along a highway which looked a lot like the highway along the Oregon coast near Arch Cape (where some family has a beach hose). There were massive waves, and I thought about how difficult it would be to surf on them. The sky began to darken. On the small screen in the car, more and more extreme warnings were being broadcast. The graphics all showed flames and wind and darkness. Then, we were on a mountain road, driving very slowly in a huge line of cars. On one side of the road was a sheer abyss; on the other side were very small rowhouses, close enough to touch. We looked in the windows, and saw people milling about. Finally, the storm became too extreme to continue. We stopped the car, and entered one of the houses. We began to take the "ghost path" down the mountain. We walked down the stairs of the house. Somewhere, I had aquired armfuls of laundry. In the basement, there was a door, which the owners of the house opened for us. Past the door was another set of steps, which we walked down into another person's house. We went through many stacked houses in this fashion. We reached one house, where a woman told us how her mother, who lived in the basement, hated dinosaurs. Her son had all sorts of dinosaur toys, but when the woman would see one, she would destroy it. Her son tugged at her skirts and asked, "even the Little Death?" The Little Death, apparenly, was a carnivorous dinosaur smaller than a housecat. Then I woke up. September 12, 2002 I was watching a movie that was something like Contact, but with Neil Armstrong. But the whole thing was from the perspective of Armstrong. The camera showed a rope, attached to stairs like those in swimming pools. The stairs lead from an island into the ocean, and the rope had been cut. This had, for some reason, put Armstrong in danger. The scene flashed back to Armstrong before his historic journey. He was drawing cartoons of himself, falling into space. This was to try to figure out all of the problems he might have. His wife was watching this. Everyone filed into the Senate chambers for a hearing on Armstrong's journey. I remembered wondering that there were so many Black senators, since this was supposed to be the 1950's [yes, I know Apollo 11 wasn't 'till '69]. I wondered if the actors were supposed to represent specific senators, or just general senators. Most of the seats in the hall were empty. Behind the senators, on a high stage, was Senator Edwin H. Bukare (surname pronounced as though it were a Japanese word). He was conducting an orchestra. When the orchestra finished, Bukare fell backwards off the stage. But he wasn't hurt -- he was just doing it to be dramatic. He walked down the aisle, and hugged a large black woman, who was actually some sort of queen of Hawaii. Neil Armstrong was scandalized by this. The black woman sat down, and Bukare sat down some seats away. He was holding a boy of about six, with piercing green eyes, as though the child were a baby. Actually, the child was a monkey, but you couldn't tell that unless you looked really closely. He did look remarkably human. September 18, 2002 Someone was making stuffed rabbits. I was a reporter, interviewing him about them. They made you feel happy. Why? Because they contained cocaine and the like. But I had to say they merely contained caffiene, for legal reasons. Also, they were being distributed in violation of the GPL. September 23, 2002 Rebecca and I were in my apartment (which looked a lot like Dan's apartment, except more cyberpunk -- dimly lit, black metal and wires). We were discussing why she slept with Kean (no, she didn't do this in RL, AFAIK). It was some kind of rebellion, apparently. Her mom came, and took her away, and I sat down to surf the net. I discovered that there was a pornographic amusement park opening, so I decided to go the next day. When I entered the park, there were rows of bleachers in a 90 degree arc. I joined the rows of men sitting in them. A park employee came out to address us all through a megaphone. He asked, "any gay people here?" Everyone yelled, "No!", or "I'm not a faggot!" The park employee said, "well, if anyone is interested in looking at naked guys, come back tomorrow -- it's guy day!" He then sent us off down a wide concrete corridor, with boxes piled high on shelves. It looked something like the part of Ikea where you pick up your DRITTSEKK wall unit. I realized I was starving. I passed a hot dog stand, but I didn't want my mouth to taste like hot dog all day, so I went on. In an alcove surrounded by shelves with cardboard boxes was a small shop. There were some cylinders of chocolate ice cream. That was what I really wanted for breakfast, but they were melted. Along the back wall of the shop were plastic bins. One of them had Red Hots, so I filled a small plastic container and took it up to the counter. Then I went back and saw another container, with uncooked shrimp. I asked the shop owner if I could use his range (which was right across from the check-out counter) to cook the shrimp. I asked David Garlock (who had appeared some time during this) if he wanted some. When I got back to the shrimp bin, an old man had already taken out a shrimp and chopped it finely. He asked me how many I wanted chopped. Then I woke up. September 25, 2002 In the early evening, I knocked on the door of a small house in the suburbs. The hosts invited me in. I was here for a sex party. I had never been to a sex party before, so I didn't know what to expect. Also, I was very nervous because I had forgotten to brush my teeth and I was afraid my breath stank. There were people milling about, conversing. The rule was that everyone got to ask me two questions. The first person asked me some simple question, and then, "describe the last day of the world." I said something like, "um, hm, huh. Oh! Have you read _The Book Of The New Sun_? It's like that. The sun is huge and blood red, filling half the sky. The last man on earth stands by a river, looking at the sky. Around him, ruins slowly crumble." A tall man walked over from another room. He leans on the back of a chair, and introduces himself as s_miler or something from Worldforge (it wasn't some specific, real person, but it was supposed to be). He handed me some backup tapes. The host asked me if I wanted to put my stuff (the backup tapes and some other stuff I was carrying) into the closet. I did. I knelt at the bank of a rivulet running through a desert. On the other bank, a nude woman knelt with her back to me. Her auburn hair flowed across her back like a cape. The afternoon sun baked the hills around us. I knew that the woman was meditating, and that I wasn't to distrurb her. Then some of the other people from the sex party showed up behind me, and the woman stood up. She had about twenty of silver emblems spread in front of her. She turned to face us, then turned back and walked away from the rivulet. We were each supposed to take one of the emblems. I crossed the rivulet and tried to choose. one There were some crosses, which I knew didn't represent my beliefs. The swasticas didn't either. Aha, an ordinary fork! I took that. As the group followed the woman into the ghost town, I tried to bend the tines of the fork, but it was already bent and I didn't have a pair of pliers. Oct 2, 2002 Dan was floating down the Missouri river, right where it joined the Mississippi. I was watching him on a news camera. I knew that he was thinking the same things I had thought when I had floated down that part of the river. And then I, too, was being carried by the running water. Dan wasn't there. I was holding the laptop I'm borrowing from the FSF above the water, but it was heavy, and my arms were getting tired, and I wished for something to rest it on. Along the sides of the river were (east) Indian men on platforms, selling things. The platforms hung out over the river a bit. One of the platforms as empty, so I took it to rest the laptop on. Then it was time to land, at Harvard (well, in theory, although it wasn't an actual place at Harvard). Someone who had been floating was with me got out first, and started running down the steps -- we were on the fourth floor of a house. I started running down too, and went out the door at the bottom. There were two people I didn't know, looking at me funny, so I assumed I had gone the wrong way. I went back into the house, which was now my father's house, and in the kitchen were Tony, Kartik, Cassia, and two other people. One of them really did look a lot like a woman, but was in fact a man. He was going to have that fixed soon, tho. But in the mean time, he just had to start humping his girlfriend. So, the girlfriend was kneeling in the corner between the table and the cabinet next to the oven, and he was behind her. They were both fully clothed, but it looked just like they were having sex. After about seven or eight hard thrusts, I had to tell them to knock it off, because people's parents were coming for parents' visiting week. Oct 5, 2002 I had written an article about Scientology which had been published in a major newspaper. I was on a cell phone with my brother -- except, my brother looked like Jason from HRSFA. He was leading a group of Scientologists to dinner. I was walking ahead to the restaurant to make reservations. I asked Jason how many people to make a reservation for, and he told me ten thousand. I walked down a corrider lined with restaurants. I was looking for number 2429. I passed 2423, 2426, and then 992, 991, 990. The corridor ended. I walked upstairs in 2426, to try to find 2429. A female vampire confronted me, and I backed away, throwing stuff at her. I walked through a few doors into an infirmary. I was laying on the table in the infirmary, and a woman was stirring paprika into milk. I drank it. Something negative was gone, but I still needed to get rid of the positive effects of the vampire. I kept filtering out the paprika, which was making it hard to get rid of the positive effects. Then the brother-Jason person walked in. 3:32p Oct 6, 2002 I was taking a helicopter from Washington to Boston (or to New York, or something like that). It cost $1.50. Dan from HRSFA was there with me. We landed, and I went into the dorm at Harvard. This was through a hidden burled panel in the back of a large, empty room. Cassia, Tony, Kartik, and Nate were there, and we were arguing about what game to play. Nate, Tony, and Kartik wanted to play Catan, and I wanted to play Zendo. This next part may have been another dream the same night: I was outside, during the day at Harvard yard, and there were bugs all over the ground. They had wings like bees, but they were crawling; it was their yearly migration. I kept stepping on them, but they got between my sock and sandal. My dad was there, and he was stuffing them into his mouth. The bugs in his mouth had wings like moths, but very fragile. Pieces of wing came out of his mouth, and fluttered to the ground. The bugs were called "Sex." Oct 11, 2002 I was in Showcase comics. But it looked like one of the comic stores I had visited in Victoria. On top of one of the glass cases was a trade paperback book wrapped in plastic. It was supposed to be a book of black magic spells. I opened the plastic. The entire second half of the book was "yellow pages" of advertisements! Apparently, the author didn't mind. The other half wasn't any good either -- instead of actual spells, it had descriptions of spells. Then I had to go to the bathroom. It was upstairs, and it was somewhat under construction. It was very, very familiar. Oct 14, 2002 A man who looked like Clark's father in Smallville came into the FSF's offices. He sat down where Gary sits, across from me. He showed me a web page, which gave evidence that various people in the Free Software community were gay. Ben Galliart, who has reported several GPL violations, was among them (I don't know anything about Ben's sexual preferences in RL). It hadn't been publicized widely yet. He told me that he could surpress Ben's name in all this, if I just agreed to sign an NDA. I looked at the document, and it was in connection with some GPL compliance work I was doing. I didn't want to sign the NDA, but I knew that Ben would stop reporting GPL violations if he was outed. Oct 19, 2002 I was in a sewer, pursued by a monster. I came up through a man-hole cover (from its design, I could tell I was near MIT). I locked it behind me, trapping the monster. I went into a restaurant, where I met RMS, Eben, and my father. The restaurant was also a train. I was at Montgomery Ave near Lower Merion High school. I started to walk home with Dan, his girlfriend (that is, a random woman playing that role, not some specific girlfriend) and some random friends of his. I wanted to walk faster, but Dan's friends were slowing me down. The sky overhead darkened. I realized that I was going the wrong way, and it was starting to rain. I turned back, but the way back was different from the way I had come. Where I had gone up one flight of stairs outdoors, I had to go down three in a warehouse. The road was slick with water, and I skied along it, going extremely fast. But I kept having to wait for Dan and his friends. Nov 3, 2002 Dad was driving me to Flying Cloud. We were at the last turn, and I thought we were lost, because it didn't look familiar. It turned out that we were going the right way, but Flying Cloud had changed. For one, you could drive right up to the central clearing on a perfectly fine dirt road. I told my dad that I was going to look around. Behind a shelter stood Arctic Arrow (at the time I was at FC, he was the head honcho). I said hi to him. He had grown older, so I wasn't sure it was him, but he remembered me after a few minutes. I asked him what tipi I was in, but he told me that tipis had been discontinued. Instead, they were using [some word I don't recall]. I knew that these were big red puffy things, in which four people slept with their feet together and their heads radiating out, so that the whole thing was like a circle of blanket circumscribing a plus sign of people. In my vision of these things, they weren't in any way covered. I was told that I had bunk 204 (or was it 504?). When I got to the actual place where people slept, it was much larger than just a four-person structure. It was a raised wooden platform, covered with a tent. In the center was a cone, with places to sleep all around the cone. I couodln't remember if my number was 204 or 504. As I walked around the structure, I saw about thirty young men and women (in RL, FC is only for boys). Then I was nearly done cooking some curry and some barbequed beans over a small fire. I poured the food into plastic bags. I realized that I could actually cook here, which made me happy. Then I went outside, and dinner was being served. Daniel, a friend from Harvard, was waiting in line for food. He asked me what I had meant by a comment I had posted on the web about him a few weeks ago (in the dream, of course). I explained that I meant that he was dedicated to some project, but not gung-ho about it, not enthusiastic. He didn't understand, but I couldn't explain it any better. Nov 18, 2002 I was late for an appointment. Dan and I left my apt, in Cambridge but the street was all curved, and I couldn't remember which way it was to the bus stop. It was bright and sunny, and a bit more suburban-looking than my street is in RL. We started walking towards Kendall (which is the correct direction in RL), but nothing looked right, and anyway, we had probably missed the bus, so we turned around and started walking the other way. Along the side of the road was a CD, but it was scratched, so I put it back. There were more CDs, and eventually a whole yard sale. My brother bought about ten CDs, minidisks, and nintendo cartridges for a buck. We walked up St. George's Road (in Ardmore, PA, where I lived from when I was 2 until my parents divorced when I was 7), into Suburban Square. I was still baffled about where I was. I knew that below me was the Ardmore train station (in RL, it's elevated, and not real near Suburban Square), but I didn't know how to get there, and I also didn't know that it was there. I tried to explain this to Dan, but couldn't seem to get it across. I could even look off the edge of the bridge onto the tracks, but I didn't know how to get down there. Then I was down, and I watched a train leave, so full that people were left clinging to the back of it. I was sad that I'd missed the train, because I was late to my doctor's appointment. I got on the next train, and made it to the doctor. The doctor was a bit like Lisa (of the FSF), but blonde. She was a pediatrician. She took some fat out of me with a syringe and wanted to inject it into my butt. And she wouldn't tell me why. I whined and asked why she was treating me like a child, and she pointed out that she was a pediatrician. Dan and Matt Gabriel knocked on the door and came in. I told them to leave, and when they didn't, I shouted at them to get the fuck out. Outside the window, people were playing football. Though the sky was dark, I could see everything. Snow started to fall, and the football players looked up in wonder. The Lisa-doctor finally told me that I the shot was to keep the tarantulas and black widows away. I asked if that was a big problem, and she gave some fuzzy answer. I wasn't afraid, but then I visualized all those spiders. I was about to let her do it, when I woke up. Nov 24, 2002 Nearby, there was a long dry riverbed, but it was quite quick to travel from one end to the other, under an ancient carved arch, and immediately down a waterfall. The waters tumbled into a fountain in a courtyard, and in the fountain stood two giant statures, something like a back-to-back Argonath crossed with the Dave McKean's art from the 9-11 tribute comic. Everything was rock -- there was no vegetation, but it didn't look barren. The water was coruscating blue, playfully dancing from the tops of the statutes. Nearby was another fountain with a smaller but similar set of statutes. Tony was there too. Back in the day, I told Tony, the first fountain somehow powered the second, but now it was all electric. The dry riverbed and arch was actually further on, not behind me as it had been. But to get to it, we had to climb some rocks. I wanted to show Tony, but after getting about five feet up, I realized how tired we both were. I wanted to go on, but Tony decided to save it for another day. There was an Indian religious belief that the dead were digging a tunnel to somewhere like paradise, and they had just now finished. They had been digging for around 5,800 years. I was despondent, because Dev had decided to die to join them. At dinner, I couldn't eat anything, because I was so sad, even though the food that Dev's family was preparing looked delicious. Dev's determination to die was like Cassie's from the Buffy episode "Help" (7.04). Jan 31, 2003 My company, which did some sort of wireless, was in court for something called "wire thronging". We hadn't done it, but the opposing side (another wireless company) wasn't very smart. For instance, their engineers kept saying "control-a" and "control-b" when they meany alpha and beta. I thought that they were idiots for not knowing the fundamental somethingorothers of physics. We lost the court case, and to show that they didn't hold a grudge, the other company invited me to go hiking at their expense in the Himalayas. They owned a mountain there. Their mountain loomed in the distance -- the only mountain for miles. It was grey, haystack-shaped, and snow-covered. I walked down a hill, towards the mountain, into a sparse forest. There were a few leaves on the ground, on top of the snow, but there was a track clear of leaves (but not of snow) through the trees. Then I was on the third leg of my journey. The first was up the mountain and down again, the second was somewhere else, and the third was back up the mountain by a different route. I was following a trail of footprints in the hard-packed snow. Whoever left the prints was very hardcore -- the prints were clearly bare feet. He or she had also shown me many of the wrong turns -- often the footprints would go up a hill, and then right back down the same side, which would let me skip ahead. I walked around a small hill with a few trees on top, and then tripped and lay back against the hillside. I decided I was dehydrated and picked up some snow to eat. It had a few ants in it, but that was OK, everyone eats a few ants now and again. I munched on the snow, and picked up another handful, which had more ants. I looked down, and there were ants everywhere. I decided to go fill my canteen elsewhere. I walked away from the hill, and put my canteen down. On the tip of my little toe was what looked like a blood blister. I squeezed it. A bug came out, about the diameter of a ballpoint pen. It looked like this: a
brown circular bug I squeezed more, and a few more came out. Then I went to pick up my canteen, and found that hundreds of the same sort of bugs had made their way in. I shook them out, and the looked down, and discovered that one had crawled back into my toe. I went to squeeze it out, and it was a big one, the size of a quarter. I have no idea how something the size of a quarter was inside my little toe: a photo of
my toe next to a quarter.  The quarter is thrice as big as my little
toe I got it out, and it disgorged about twenty of the smaller ones. Then there was another big one in there. I had it about three quarters of the way out, and my grip weakened, so it started crawling back. I squeezed harder, and all seventeen of its eyes exploded (note: they didn't have eyes before this). It was gross. March 26, 2003 In RL, none of this is in any way geographically accurate. It was about ten o'clock in the morning, and we were going to have breakfast at the Catholic church near Ann and Catherine's house. It was through a maze of twisty passages between five-to-seven story gray apartment blocks. The streets were steeply sloped. At the church, most of Catherine's family sat around a table with paper plates in front of them. There were other tables and people too. Our table was full, but we were still waiting for Margaret's branch of the family. I especially missed Andi and Emily. I offered to go and get them. I'm a bit confused about the chronology here, but at some point, it was night, and we were leaving the church. Jack Valenti was there with his assistant (who was someone sort of like Hillary Rosen, but old and ugly). I asked if he knew how to get back to his car, and he said no, so I offered to lead him. The whole way there, we argued (him, bombastically and ineffectually, I sarcastically and ineffectually). When we got to the lot, his car was gone. He guessed it had been towed. Also at night, I went over to "Quincy" (a house at Harvard) which was layed out something like the real-life Mather house. It's a place I had been to, and been lost in, before, perhaps in previous dreams. There's an anime club there, which David Garlock told me was better than the other clubs. I joined, and we went into a big theater with steep-sloping seat banks. At some point during the showing, a cylindrical space capsule flies above the screen, coming down (the theater, I guess, doesn't have a roof). It's very, very sad. Rockets come up to meet it, because I guess we did have some space defense system all along. It's beautiful, the blue missile contrails and red explosions, against the clouds, on the big screen inside the theater that's not at all open to the sky and I have to tell all my friends to see this movie when it comes out, because the preview looks really cool. May 23, 2003 There was a very deep swimming pool under the school, covered in some sort of film. The teacher sent an older man down to investigate. I had his viewpoint as he climbed down the ladder into the water. The ladder kept going down, into the murky blue water. The man had a rope around his waist to haul him up in case of emergency. About thirty feet down, he (we) saw a red tick the size of a basketball on the ladder below him, and started climbing quickly up. He made it out in time. I was about eight years old. Somehow, a worm-like thing, the size of a spindle of 100 CDs, had taken control of my father (not my actual father -- just some guy I knew was my father). It was the parent of the giant tick. We were sitting at home, a small house by the boardwalk. It started snowing, very large flakes under a grey sky. People were bundled up, fleeing along the boardwalk. The teacher stopped at our window (which was level with the boardwalk) to suggest that we leave. But the worm-thing thought that we should wait it out. As we watched more people fleeing, it changed its mind. My father and I had a hard time rousing the fat kid on the couch. He wasn't just fat, he was clearly diseased in some way -- perhaps he was incubating more of the worm things. He said he would catch up. Later, as we took a side bridge over the Charles, we found the fat kid's teddy bear. I guess he tried, and died. Because the side bridge wasn't crowded, we actually made it back to the school at the same time as the teacher. The school's lobby was all stone, with columns, like the Franlin Institute. We went down to the pool. It had been frozen, and thousands of pennies were piled on the ice (which was about thirty feet below the top of the pool). I tossed a capsule containing the worm and the tick into the pool, but the ice was suddenly thin, and they escaped under the water. From that distance, the worm could no longer control my father. March 23, 2004 I think I was Gimli, in the beginning of the dream. Gandalf, Frodo, and I were deep underground, in some kind of Limbo. It was like the scene in the Odyssey where Odyseus visits Tireseus in Hades. We were visting Gollum and Bilbo. But Gollum wasn't quite the same cute Gollum as in the movies. He was more human, more like an old man, and more evil-looking. Gandalf and Frodo were off talking to Bilbo. Gollum was sitting in a chair. I was myself at this point. Then, somehow, I was sprawled across Gollum's lap. My shirt was off, and Gollum reached one finger down to my chest and traced around my nipple. It was incredibly erotic, and my body was trembling. My body wanted this, but my mind was scared and repulsed, and I wanted to be anywhere but there. I tried to call out for Gandalf, but I couldn't move, couldn't scream. Then I woke up. June 1, 2004 My brother crouched at the end of a long sycamore branch, then flipped acrobatically down from it. I asked him how he got up there in the first place, and he pointed to a black iron fence near the tree trunk. [some stuff I forget -- something to do with an educational company accidentally selling a Warcraft II soundtrack] Sun was releasing a new license, and I had to look over it very quickly. For some reason, this was terrifying to me. I got to about point 3 (on the first of 5 or so pages). I went over to the fence, and climbed it. It looked like this: I crouched between the spikes (which were apparently approved by some humane society), but I couldn't stand up. In real life, I could have easily stood up (although the branch was too big to easily get my arms around and climb up on), but in the dream, I was too scared. Then I woke up. July 15, 2004 I had signed up for a community college to get my CS degree. I looked at the course catalog, a tiny brochure, trying to find some course I was even a little bit interested in. Finally, I found one. I was dragging around my wheeled duffel bag. I went to the first course, and was assigned a task that had something to do with arranging three or four words so that they crossed at certain points, but I couldn't understand the words or the task, because the instructor's accent was so thick. The next class, we had to write haikus. There were no other constraints -- just write a haiku. But I couldn't do it -- I kept trying to use words like Philadelphia, which made the rest of my text not fit. I even tried hyphenating. July 17, 2004 While visiting China, I was standing in one of seven or so lines in a grassy field. Each line led to a desk. At the desk, I was asked to pick any five items from a list. Apparently, these items were from Costco. On one side of the list were normal every day items. On the back were Catan replacement pieces in small lots ("three knights and a road"). I realized that my Catan set was missing some pieces, so I got replacements. I quickly used up my five items, before realizing that I had wanted some of the useful items, like food. I had to run, because I wanted to sleep with both Mark Spencer and Emily Morgan, sequentially, without either finding out about the other. And I was due to leave the next morning. I planned to sleep with Mark first, then shower, ditch Mark, and find Emily. As I was working out the scheduling in my mind, I walked back up to the hotel, which on the exterior was like the former refugee camp I stayed at in Croatia, and on the interior was like the dorms in France. Then I woke up, before I had a chance to sleep with anyone. Aug 3, 2004 I was waiting at the back of the Quest Diagnostics parking lot, across from the church. It was late evening. A large man stepped out of the darkness. He pulled out a knife and stabbed me. I woke up with a small scream, and realized that I had slept for less than five minutes. September 15, 2004 I was visiting Greater Nick (in Hawaii?). We were going to meet Roger Dingledine. Greater said that he hoped that I didn't expect him to pay for Roger's hotel room. I said that I didn't. Greater and I walked across a lawn, towards some brick buildings. It looked like a university. We met someone who I initially thought was Roger with dyed hair, but turned out to be someone else. This happened a few times, and I actually knew some of the other people: Jesse Vincent and Natan. Soon, we had collected a whole group of black-clad, black- or -purple-haired people, and we went off to a covered walkway. There was another team there, and I learned that we were in a "hacking" contest. The goal was to retrieve as much data as possible from specific computers, either by physically accessing the drives, or by finding them on the network and breaking in. This was the third round -- in the first, our team had won, the second, the other team had (gigabyte totals were displayed). I took a photo, but my flash was on, and this triggered both sides to begin "shooting" each other (I assume this was some sort of in-game weapon which scored points, rather than hurting people). The referee stopped the combat, and told me not to take any more photos. Then, he pointed to a slightly raised circular platform, and said, "the servers you are looking for are under that. Go." I considered trying to navigate around the university to find which room was underneath, but decided to leave that to locals (I'm not sure there were any locals). The other team had already started pulling up bricks from one side of the platform, so I started on another side. Soon, I found some wires, which led me to a big IDE hard drive. There was no IDE cable attached to the hard drive, but there was a power cable. I discussed with teammates whether to try to hook it up from here, using this power hook-up, or to unplug it and carry it back to our lab. Either could destroy the data. We decided to remove it and take it back. Then I woke up. Nov 12, 2004 David Garlock, Nick Nussbaum, and I decided to go hiking at a place I had heard of near Davis Square. We looked up the address in Mapquest, and started walking. It was down a highway, past a bar. There were stairs going down, perhaps six flights, under a bridge. At the bottom was a river going through a canyon, which looked somewhere between Arizona and China. I kept trying to take a photo of the river, which was somewhow both placid and whitewater, but it didn't work. There were tons of people in the canyon, milling about. Also, wolves and bears, and other wild animals kept coming by, and I kept trying to take photos of them, but they were just too wild. David and I walked on, leaving Nick behind. The people thinned out, and there were caves. I saw the girl who had been taunting all the animals and leading them through the crowds. I told her that she shouldn't do that, because it was dangerous. She defended her right to do it, and her parents backed her up. Finally, I walked away in disgust. David and I walked along and found some narrow, cave-like canyons containing power-ups (plastic pouches of liquid). David seemed to be finding a lot more than I was. We were soon separated, and then I heard Gimli (who was Nick) calling for help. I found him and showed him the way out. David found a power-up which combined his sword and armor. When I saw a crystal-clear lake, sparkling in the sun, I though that we ought to hold the Wyld Hunt here, if only it weren't so crowded.