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.