Dream Log: February 6, 2001

Three go mad on the moon

Factgirl & Achan - I love you guys so much for giving me one helluva dream! I haven't had this much fun in ages!

Me, Factgirl and Achan were on the surface on the moon. We were having a lot of fun running around and generally acting like monkeys. Achan was in his forrest green boy scout / park ranger uniform. After much running around and screaming of heads we got bored, so Achan showed us a really cool trick: How to cause an eclipse.

You had to take a basin of water and pass the packaging box of a Lotus Notes software package across it. The reflection of the packaging would then cause the eclipse. Naturally me and Factgirl took this one step too far. We took our yellow basin of water and shone a flash torch across it. I think we must've blinded the entire population of the Earth. Hey, at the time it was bloody hillarious!

Content with the knowledge that we'd prolly blinded every man, woman and child on the Earth, Factgirl and myself took a moment to marvel at the beatiful red orb that was the planet Mars. As we rocked back and forth on our pre-school chairs with our feet up on the school desks Factgirl started to talk about what she looks for in a guy and how she disliked something about certain types of kissers. She rested her head against my shoulder and I let out a big sigh. We were so happy we had our own park ranger: Achan!

FIN.

I just had the wierdest fucking dream imaginable. Terrorists were demanding I surrender my baby food. The only space in the entire dream was a long hallway, with a small square room at the end of it, with shelves of baby food inside. A short man ran down the hallway after me, with long muddled hair and a red eye. He also had one of those really fake mettalic claws you can put over your finger. He kept poking my back with it and yelling, "Surrender your baby food!". It hurt because I have a sunburn on my back.

My alarm wakes me at 7:45am. I turn it off and plop back into bed for 15 more minutes of rest before I have to get up and shower.

Here begins the dream...

I get up from bed, and hurridly get dreased to head down to the corner Circle K for a Big Gulp or something else. When I get there, nothing seems appealing, and I remember I've got to get to school. So, I strip down and run through the car wash.

Now I'm soaking wet, and naked. But I'm dripping dry so It, as they say, Is All Good. I am planning to run back home and get my things to go back to school when I notice a dirt road that seems to run parallel to the paved one I was going to take. I take the path less beaten.

So, I'm running down a dirt roat, naked. Actually, it's a grass road -- a long stretch of grass between two fenced off sections. But, it's long and narrow, so I think of it as a road. I see another naked wet guy, who apparantly had the same idea I did. I pass him by, running home.

Ahead of naked-guy, I pass some big dumb looking animals on the left. They remind me of cows. I pay them no mind.

Soon I come to two clothed, walking girls. I pass them by. As a joke, to make light of my nakedness as if I'm some animal rights extremist who suddenly found out all his clothes were leather (oops), I yell out as I pass, "Don't eat meat, it kills!"

After running a bit further, I'm suddenly on the inside of the fence that was previously to my left. Not only that, I'm a goat. But hey, I still need to get home, get my stuff, and get to school. I keep running.

Out of nowhere comes one of the big dumb animals I had seen. Only, it's got teeth, as well as big sharp horns.

Now things get wierd. My dream has a narrator, who sounds strangely like Jeff Corwin. He's talking about how most goats would know this really neat technique to avoid being eaten at this point. But this goat, the one pictured here running from the big dumb teethy sharp-horned thing, doesn't know that. He's out of touch with nature. His fate is looking grim.

Just as the big dumb -- strike that, scary -- animal pins me to the fence I wake up.

I am browsing the aisles in a drugstore, perhaps in Wells, Nevada or maybe in Provincetown. I notice a tall, slender, boyish person in a peasant blouse. Looking around there are other, willowy figures in light, summery blouses and baby tees, as well as a fairly large concentration of gay boys, thus the sense this might be Provincetown (though it looks a lot like Wells).

I look through a collection of art prints by Chinese emigrés, painted in a kitschy style reminiscent of decorative prints from the late '50s or early '60s. Farmyard scenes presented in a "motel art sale" style, but rendered in Chinese watercolor style, with brushwork and repeated elements that clearly echo Chinese art motifs.

One of the clerks offers me one of the slightly damaged prints for (almost) free, until her manager interferes. They have an argument and I slink away to look at the cute guys and girls. At least one of them begins to flirt as the worker bees continue their dispute.

I think I've had this dream before...

There's some sort of school trip to some kind of museum, a modern museum with a load of industrial exhibits outside. I'm my normal age (18) and perhaps in charge, somewhat. We go inside, and I see a open door I go through to see this running engine. I talk with the man tending it, and am interrupted by a pair of children fighting. We break it up, and the children pour salt into the sugar (or was it toffees?) and it turns red. He berates the children...

The scene changes, we are in the same place, and we are ushered into a small room. There are large blunt spikes in the floor made out of temporary fencing posts... Most people have already found spaces, and I am forced to sit in the central rectangle with the man in charge. He hands people some bits of rope, telling them to untie them and then re-tie them. I expect to get the same, but get two thin pieces of wood with hazard stripes painted onto them. I accidently break one (it has the consistency of plasterboard) and hide the fact while he tells me to make a I and a S with them. I realise that by putting them together like this:

           ##################
           #                #
#############################
#                # 
################## 

it'll make a S, and looking at them narrow on they'll look like an I. But I wake up as I've thought too much - that always happens, just before the telephone rings from Crucial to say they can't accept my debit card. And it's not even 8:30 yet.

My alarm clock was babbling NPR at me--was there a report on Paris this morning that affected my dreaming? I don't know: I was asleep at the time!

I was in Paris, but instead of being laid out along the Champs Elysees, the city was set up in a weird Feng Shui diagram. The Eiffel Tower was at the center of a traffic circle, like the major monuments in Washington, D.C., and the Arc de Triomphe was straddling the northmost of the five arms. Now that I think about it, the traffic circle was really a big pentagram. Instead of the western ideal of four-fold square symmetry, this city was laid out in a fractal five-fingered star.

Anyhow, the Arc de Triomphe was lined up with the one in New York even though it was pointed north, so that the line that passed through both of them perpendicularly indicated a ley line. At the points of the circle, there were about two blocks' worth of long avenue leading up to the second tier (That's just how I thought of it, probably not its real name--I was on the phone with tech support last night, and got passed up to the second tier...). Each avenue ended in a four or five block diameter traffic circle, ringed with small residential apartments, no taller than two or three stories. Plenty of lawn, and all the houses on the outside of the traffic circle faced out; all the ones on the inside faced in, overlooking a giant circular hedge maze, at the center of which were cafes, commercial buildings like modern (but at the same time, ancient-looking) malls. The hedge maze also had statuary all throughout, as well as topiary, arranged to fit the five-fold symmetry. The houses at the five major points of the second tier circles were more prestigious looking.

Looking outward, one could see that the intervening space of the city was filled to the horizon with reproductions of this geometry on a smaller scale--clusters of five city blocks that wrapped into tight pentagons with a park and a fountain (and five garden paths) in the courtyard. The last thing I remember was looking up at the Eiffel Tower from a cafe, seeing it towering over the hedges and houses, and seeing a blue, pulsing river of energy pouring from it through the Arc de Triomphe, and thinking, "my, isn't Paris beautiful?" I guess I just plain forgot about the Seine. Then again, I've never been to Paris; maybe it's easy to forget.

Going down the elevator into the very bottom level of hell, fire and pain everywhere about, and I am ready to do battle with the final level 9 boss, establishing myself as the first person to ever finish the game. I pay my respects to the spirits on the elevator and walk around the corner into the first room, explaining to my girl how I had just been here, how I had discovered the exact angle the light saber needed swung to obliterate the foul demon right before everything reset. Some butler demons let me into the arena, and the mindbending final battle ensues.

The boss was Ghaleon, and I was Mario, or some equally preposterous combination. And his weak spot was in his exceptionally bitmapped foot. But before the battle could reach its conclusion, I had to go and wake up.

"I just dreamed up the solution to level 9 of Mario Fighting," I tell my girl as I wake up to find that she had arranged and shared our bed. She is moderately impressed, and we begin playing the aforementioned game. The final battle was making progress, I was leaping towards Ghaleon with my light saber flailing wildly when Jeska says, "Don't use that sword! It gets in the way of the picture I'm taking." She was taking a picture. I decided to demonstrate that it did not in fact get in the way by leaping towards Ghaleon with my light saber flailing wildly when I wake up for real.