Surrealism

I was at the entrance to the tunnel again. It was a sewer grating, like the one that Jean Valjean came out of when he was carrying the body of Marius Pontmercy. But the inside was a good deal less wet. In fact, it didn't look much like a sewer system at all; it looked like the nicely decorated underground tunnels with stained glass windows and everything that the beast had in that old Beauty and the Beast t.v. show. The tunnels were built like a maze, but I'd been through them once before so I knew my way around.

Right inside the entrance, I found my bicycle. It was missing one wheel, and was sort of folded up like an insect and lying down. At first I was surprized to see it there, because I knew I had it outside, but then I realized that the one I had outside was just a copy, transfered by hitting control-C and then control-V (only it might have been apple-C then apple-V if I was using a Mac). The wheel on the copy was real, though, because for some reason I moved that using control-X. At any rate, now I had my real bike back, sans wheel, and I could take it up to the surface because nothing was chasing me this time.

I carried the bike, which stayed conveniently folded up, through the tunnels, and made it to the exit uneventfully. At the end were a set of stairs, which turned out to be the stairs at the back exit of Der Sportsman, the local sporting goods store. The area for working on bicycles had been enlarged and moved out near the front. When I put the bike down on the floor, it unfolded so I could wheel it (on just the back wheel) out to the front. The other wheel was already out there, but the copy bicycle had of course deteriorated by this time. An employee offered to put the wheel back on for me, and turned the bike upside down to put it on the machine.

While it was on there, he noticed that I had a website linked to the bike, and mentioned that he could access the hard copy form of that website while the bike was hooked up to his machine. The URL was to the forum where I keep in touch with friends from college. We've been having some website issues lately, so I said that would be great if he could activate the hard copy; maybe I could get that fixed as well.

The hard copy of the forum got activated outside in front of the shop; it was mostly made of big steel pipes, with traffic lights attached in places. It was two stories high. In hard copy form, it was easy to see what the problem was: On some of the pipes, there were steel rims sticking out that needed to be hammered down. Fortunately, Cal, who works in the maintenance department at my old college, was there. He knew how to fix these things, and climbed up there with a big hammer. While he was hammering away, Matt, who also visits the site, stopped by. I explained to him that Cal was fixing our website problems for us, and he was very impressed.

Voice in the Darkness

I was lying in bed, and heard a voice coming from the left side of the room. Based on what it was saying, it was supposed to be Sauron talking to Gandalf. There were two problems with this. For one thing, I wasn't Gandalf; I was me. For another, the speaker was not Sauron; it was Smaug. I knew it was Smaug because I recognized the voice. I couldn't figure out why Smaug was impersonating Sauron, but I was really hoping he wouldn't figure out that I wasn't Gandalf. I thought the best thing to do was to just keep quiet and listen. I can't remember the details of what he was saying, but I do remember that he kept calling Gandalf "Mit," which was a nickname -- short for "Mithrandir," his Elvish name.

Action Kitty

I'm not sure whether I was back in California or back in Idaho, because the town I was in had elements and people from both. I was attending a weekly Bible study with students I knew from California, which was being hosted at Toby's house. It's been a while since I've been in contact with Toby. Anyway, he had this new cat, which was named Action Kitty. This didn't seem strange at the time, but Action Kitty was capable of saying her own name. It came out like a meow, but the syllables were distinct and you could definitely understand what she was saying. She would walk up to you and say "Action Kitty!" when she wanted to play, which was about once every ten minutes. Unfortunately, Action Kitty had some sort of degenerative disease similar to leprosy and was only expected to live for a few more weeks. Most people weren't aware of this because her thick fur hid most of the symptoms. Toby said something about her slowing down a lot. I was incredulous about this, and he said I should have seen how active she was before she got sick.

I, Jedi

I was a Jedi, or possibly a Padawan, living in the United States and trying to learn the ways of the Force. The town I was in had no Jedi temple, so the local group met at a Mormon church. The particular talent I was trying to develop had to do with using the Force to understand very detailed and complicated physics problems. For instance, this talent might enable one to throw a pair of dice so that they landed on double 6 -- not because they were moved that way by the Force, but because the Force revealed exactly the right movement to make in throwing them. There was a particular Jedi Master who specialized in this kind of thing, and I kept trying to become his apprentice, but he insisted that it was something that couldn't be taught.

Urban Warfare

This is what I get for letting Ridureyu show me stuff from his sidescrolling fighting game just before going to sleep. I was part of a small (maybe 20-30 soldiers) military group trapped in an area overrun by the enemy and waiting to be extracted. The area was in a residential neighborhood in an American town. We were holed up inside a small house, and the enemy had us surrounded. We could see them out there, and were just waiting to be attacked. There were certain ones that we knew to be suicide bombers, and they could set off the bombs with mental commands. For these, instead of normal weapons, we were equipped with poison dart blowguns. The poison was powerful enough to shut down mental capacity instantly so they couldn't make the bomb go off.

One of these bombers was Nina Meiers from 24. When the action started, I saw a guy outside hit her with the poison dart, but it didn't do anything. She shot him, ran inside, got close to a bunch of our soldiers, and blew them (and herself) up. Shortly after this, reports from other soldiers on our side indicated that all the female suicide bombers were immune to the poison. This was bad news for me, because right when this report came in (we got it via some sort of telepathy) I was aiming my blow gun at another female bomber right then. The dart had no effect of course, and then she shot me. I reached up a hand to block the bullet, while thinking how stupid this was, but the bullet actually only hit my hand. It hit the ball joint at the base of my right pointer finger. It hurt really bad and I fell down, but I was still thinking that I would have expected getting shot to hurt more than that. The bomber, standing over me, said, "It's lucky for you, really. You'll just get put on the wounded list and dragged off the battlefield." Then she walked off.

Next thing I knew, someone from our side was standing over me, and telling me that I could go to the field hospital if I wanted, but pointing out that a shot to the hand wasn't really fatal, and I could still shoot with my left hand. He also pointed out that a guy named Jason who I know from college had been shot the day before and had kept fighting. Right about here I woke up.

Capture the Flag

I was playing an outdoor game with a bunch of people I knew from TMC and Pocatello. It had originally been Capture the Flags, but had been modified so that there was just one big flag, with one team guarding it and the other team trying to get to it. The terrain consisted of a small bowl-shaped valley with steep hills all around it, such that the tops of the hills on two sides were inaccessible for some reason. The offensive team would start out on one ridge, and the defensive wherever they wanted aside from that ridge (e.g., on the opposite ridge or down in the valley itself. The flag (a white rag on a long stick) was always somewhere on the opposite ridge. The jail had been eliminated; if a player from the attacking team got tagged, they were out for the rest of that game. For the attacking team to win, it was simply necessary for one of them to touch the flag. For the defending team to win, they just had to tag all the attackers. With these modifications the games went very fast, which I think was the idea. The defenders usually won.

When we were choosing the teams between games, this was done inside a building, in a room with a bunch of folding chairs. I don't remember there being any transition between the playing area and that room; the scene would just shift in the dream. There would be two team captains, but the method used to pick the teams was a bit unusual. They would start out taking turns claiming players, until each had filled up half their team. Then, to divide up the other half of the players, the "divider/chooser" method was employed. One captain would divide the remaining players into two groups (with the requirement that they be equal in size) then the other player would pick which group he or she wanted.

For some reason I ended up on the defensive team in every game. In the last round before I woke up, I very nearly got to the flag. Part of the way around the opposite ridge, there was a thick barrier of sagebrush. The flag had been placed behind this. I was running along one side of the sagebrush, looking for an opening, and someone on the other team was running along the other side, trying to block me. I caught glimpse of the flag and ran straight up towards it, through a narrow opening between bushes, but got tagged as soon as I gained the summit, within a foot of touching the flag pole.

Computer Game

I was playing a computer game. It was a two-dimensional scrolling game. The movement was very similar to Super Mario World, but other aspects were a lot like the original Metroid, neither of which I have played in years. The character could shoot various weapons. The default one that never ran out shot little white bullets. Others used energy, and once the energy ran down they wouldn't work until it recharged. One of those was a solid white beam, and another was a wavy thing similar to one of the Metroid weapons. One unique thing about this game is that two players could play at the same time; someone else was playing with me on a networked computer. We were both in the same level, but we didn't have to be on the same screen. The design of the level was a lot like Mario -- platforms and plants and things you could climb on. But the enemies were like ones in Metroid; you had to shoot them multiple times. Sometimes they left glowing items that you would absorb, like in Metroid. From the starting screen in this level you could go left, right or down. The other guy went down and I went right. Three screens over, there was an area with two different mini-boss creatures that both left powerups. That area had several platforms of different heights that you would jump between. If you jumped all the way down to the bottom, there were leafy plants you could climb on to go down, and after defeating both bosses you could also go to the right.

Secret Agent

This one was also from the second half of February, 2005.

The dream started out with me wandering around at some kind of county fair in Russia. I knew that I was on some kind of secret mission, but I couldn't remember what it was. Then a Russian police officer stopped me and asked me my name. I told him my real name because I couldn't remember if I was using a psuedonym. He asked me to pronounce it again, then asked if I was a foreigner. I told him no, and he arrested me. I was kept in a holding cell for several hours, then some guards came in and started questioning me. When I wouldn't talk, they decided to try more forceful means of persuasion. This is where it gets weird. They tied me up, and were going to lower me into a vat of dill pickle juice and leave me there for a couple of days. I was thinking that it didn't really matter what they did to me -- I wouldn't be able to answer any of their questions because I couldn't remember anything. I woke up while they were still tying the ropes.

Temporal Paradoxes and Divorce Laws

I have a headache that won't go away, and in spite of this, I'm trying to read links on a website I've stumbled across through a Google search. I don't remember what the search was, but Google must have some impressive searching ability, because this site is actually hosted in an alternate universe. The only issue in surfing it is that the links take a little longer to load.

The site is about a conference that was held on temporal paradoxes and alternate universes, specifically as they relate to families and divorce. Well, technically the date of the conference was future, but due to the nature of this conference detailed reports about it in the past tense were available weeks before it took place. The conference was/will be hosted by a family that had seen more than its share of these issues. The family consists of an ex-husband, ex-wife and their son (who will/did graduate from high school just before the conference). The couple was divorced when their son was three or four. All three members of the family were highly sensitive and accident prone with regard to the sort of magic that causes temporal phenomena.

The first link I looked at was about a workshop on the legal ramifications of divorce, when the laws, despite legislative efforts to the contrary, spanned various universes and timelines. One problem was that the couple would sometimes end up legally divorced in a timeline where they were supposed to be married. Another was that if they managed to fix this in that timeline, they might end up legally married in a timeline where they were supposed to be divorced, or even had never met one another. This had insanely complicated consequences with regard to taxation, child support, and custody. In one timeline the father, who had never met his ex-wife, was jailed for failure to pay child support for the child who had never even been conceived. In another, an attempt to fix some of these problems with some kind of blanket legislation resulted in the child being legally exempt from laws about mandatory school attendance. In that timeline, the mother didn't think he needed to go to school if it wasn't required, the father thought this was ridiculous, and the boy figured he had a perfect excuse for playing hookey. There was also at least one timeline in which the son somehow managed to exist, despite the fact that his parents had never met, AND were legally divorced with dual custody. To complicate matters further, they had never met him either before his eighteenth birthday.

One thing that seemed to happen to these people a lot was that they would shift between timelines, merging, swapping or meeting up with copies of themselves from disparate timelines. There were several copies of each at the conference, some lecturing in the workshops and some attending them. There were other people in attendence who had experienced, were experiencing, or were going to experience similar problems, but this family held the world (er, multiverse?) record for experiencing the greatest number of them. One warning they gave was that the problems would only get worse if you didn't take steps to minimize them, but that doing so had the potential to make them worse.

Mapping Homework Onto a Dreamspace

This one is from the last half of February 2005:

I had this dream after I stayed up late doing representation theory homework. The homework involved a function mapping a group onto a vector space, and it was particularly important where the identity element got sent. So in the dream, I was working on this huge campus which was a vector space, and I had the job of taking the identity element around to all the basis vectors it had to get mapped to. If a group is called G, then we usually write its identity as a 1 with a subscript G. In the dream, the identity was this huge 1 with a subscript on it, and I had to wheel it around on a forklift.

Freezing Snow

This is from January 19th, 2005:

All I saw in the dream was snow falling. As it hit blades of grass and other plants, they instantly froze. I was aware of the presence of the mind of a woman; I couldn't see her, I just knew that she was watching the snow fall as well. She was also seeing it in a dream, but it was really happening not far from the cabin where she was sleeping. It was a sinister snow, being caused by an evil spirit. It was going to freeze everything and make all the roads impassible, trapping the woman and those who were with her in the cabin. She knew all of this, and she also knew that she would not remember the dream when she woke up.

Borg Swimming Pool

This one is dated December 16, 2004:

Most of the dream took place on Deep Space Nine. But the only actual Star Trek character I saw was 7 of 9. She had apparantly been stationed on DS9 after Voyager got back home. Hmm, 7 of 9 on DS9. I hadn't thought about that before. Anyway, she was apparantly serving as some sort of ambassador to the Borg Collective.

Speaking of which, there was a large Borg structure attached to the outside of DS9. Large enough that it was probably 60% of the volume of the station -- and it didn't have all the open space that DS9 has. In shape, it was sort of like a huge rectangular box with rounded surfaces and edges.

The Borg structure was connected to DS9 by a single docking port. If you went through the airlocks, you could get into a single room in the Borg Structure. The rest of it was completely locked up and inaccessible. No communication, resistance to scanners, etc. It was known that there were drones inside, but no one knew what they were doing.

In the room that you could get to, there was a swimming pool. That's right, a swimming pool. But it was a Borg swimming pool. The water had nanoprobes in it, and when you swam in it, it had rejuvinating health effects. It was a service the Collective was providing in order to improve public relations with the Federation, or something like that. There was an old man who swam in it a lot. I recognized him, but I don't remember if he was from Star Trek or someone I know in real life.

Along with Seven of Nine, there were two Borg Drones on the station. They had all the implants and everything, but they were not, and apparantly never had been, connected to the Collective. One of them was male and the other was female. The female had a number designation and the male had a name, but I don't remember either.

We heard some important news: A cube was coming from the Delta Quadrant. When it arrived, the structure was going to open up communication with them. Seven of Nine was going to play some kind of part in this, but I don't know what. Anyway, there was a scene where she and the other drones were standing in front of the airlock and talking about what it would be like when they could hear the voices of all the drones in their heads. The male drone looked completely normal, but the female drone had hair -- and she had curlers in her hair. She talked about how wonderful it would be to get in touch with the "serenity of the collective".

The other scene I remember happened on a planet -- probably Bajor, since it was close to DS9. I was in a house with some people. There was a knock at the door. Someone answered it, and it was my roommate Jeremy. He came in and sat down. A couple of minutes later, there was another knock at the door. Someone answered it, and it was Jeremy again. I looked back, and he was still sitting down in the house. Two copies of him. They were wearing identical outfits, except the colors were different. We all were wondering what was going on, but when the second Jeremy saw the first one in the house, he panicked and ran outside. I ran after him, and then I woke up.

Surrealistic Multimedia

This one is from October 14th, 2004:

I didn't directly participate in this dream, but watched it like a movie and read it like a book simultaneously. I saw images, heard narration, and read text all at once. The movie was narrated by a little kid, and had the feel of the movie To Kill a Mockingbird.

The boy doing the narration was very small, maybe between 5 and 7. He lived on some kind of estate, not really a farm but there were a lot of animals. The impression was that the family he lived with was not his, but that he was an orphan. There was a younger girl who was not his sister and was also an orphan. The general feeling was that orphans were common due to war or disease or something.

The kid had gone into town, and met a new friend -- an older girl. He had curly hair and she kept wanting to put ribbons in it, which he put up with because he had a mild crush on her. He lost track of the time, then suddenly realized he needed to go attend to something back at the house; what he was attending to was surrealistic and I forgot it within minutes of waking up. It had something to do with animals.

He rode back quickly and was tending to the animals, but something didn't feel right. The music grew tense, and the animals were spooked. The text of the book said, 'death was in the air'. The kid grew frightened and started to ride on the road back toward town for some reason, but it was a different road than he had taken before. He met the father of the family almost immediately. The father's name was 'I', but this was highlighted in orange in the book to distinguish his name from the pronoun. He said, 'I came back as quickly as I could, but your horse was faster than mine.' Then the camera turned, and you saw another horse ride up. On it was the younger girl, but she was dead.

Grammar Corrected Haiku

This was a political dream. The structure of the United States government was significantly altered so that in a presidential election, two parties always got elected. Of course, those two parties were invariably the two prominent ones with which we are familiar. During the four-year period, only one of the two presidents would be in power at any given time. But they would switch whenever approval ratings of the current administration, as determined by opinion polls, fell below a certain percentage. Now these opinion polls were controlled by The Media, which had become unified and organized to the point that it was indeed The Media with capital letters. The Media actually wielded more power than the government, because they could oust any politician at will (apparently the other branches of government had been restructured as well). Popular belief was that the opinion polls accurately reflected popular opinion, and those who knew better didn't dare speak up because The Media was too powerful.

Now the dream itself was mostly an animated political cartoon, which ran on Cartoon Network. The animation consisted of cutout drawings of various politicians which were moved around on two-dimensional backgrounds, along with talk bubbles. There were voice actors reading the lines, but the talk bubbles were still there. This cartoon would give a rundown of recent political events, altered somewhat to make them funny. In this particular episode, all the dialogue was in Haiku, but then the Haiku was altered according to the grammar corrections suggested by Microsoft Word.

Okay, so for some reason the two presidents in power were George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. At the beginning of the cartoon, Bush had just regained control of the White House, and as the plot unfolded you found out he had a problem. There were a lot of homeless people in Washington D.C. Also, Bush owned several properties in Washington D.C. He actually had "deeds" for these properties which looked like Monopoly deeds. They were really random plots of land; one of them was about two feet square and had the pole to a traffic light in it. Bush had discovered that by turning the deeds upside-down, he could mortgage them for half their value, just like in Monopoly. He had done this on a couple of occasions, and used the money to help homeless people. The Media liked this because it made for a good story, and kept pressuring him to do it some more. He wanted to, but he didn't want lots of publicity because it was supposed to be a private act of charity. So he made a deal with The Media: He would mortgage several properties (including the traffic light one) and give the money to the homeless, only on the condition that they promised not to report on it. The Media agreed.

The next part of the dream shifted, and instead of it being a cartoon it was real life, and I was playing the role of the president's son. He had mortgaged the traffic light property and bought a bag of food with it, and I was waiting at a gas station to deliver the food to a homeless guy. For some reason this homeless guy drove to the gas station in an old beat-up Ford pickup. He took the bag of food, thanked me, and drove away. There was another man in the otherwise empty gas station, who I assumed was an employee. I turned out he was actually a reporter for The Media. They had promised not to do a story, but the press secretary forgot to get that in writing. They were upset with the president for not wanting them to do a story, so they spun the act of charity as a cheap ploy to make himself look good, and caused his poll numbers to plummet.

Cut back to the cartoon. The presidential limo (which the president was driving with the first lady in the passenger seat) is on its way into the White House. It pulls up to the front gate just before midnight. (Administration shifts always took place at midnight, when the new day updated.) Bill and Hillary were camped out just outside the gate, since shifts happened so often that it wasn't practical to move anywhere else. The secret service agent in the back seat rolled down his window and said a couple of grammar-corrected Haikus making fun of the Clintons. Then in the final scene, the day updated and the Clintons both made the victory sign because they were back in power.