I was in my elementary school cafeteria talking to a friend from middle school/high school. For some reason he was singing African folk songs, which was weird, but he is a music major so I guess it's not completely strange. Everyone else in the room was mimicking what he said. I didn't find this strange in the dream, it seemed almost like a joke, but thinking about it now it was kind of bizarre. I'm also not sure why people from my high school were in my elementary school as they are in different school districts.

I was the frustrated franchisee of Krusty Pizza, trying to get a loan. The loan arranger asked me, "But how can you pay us back on time if you can't even get a pizza to us within 40 minutes?"

I woke with a wicked idea for a satire of our main vendor -- a website that would always insist you lacked the correct fractional version of Netscape (4.319) to view the site properly, but would let you configure a PAC with all the toppings you wanted, including e-mail support, phone support, compatibility with WebTV, etc. (all at hefty additional charges, of course). You could see that "Source Code" was a possible topping, but the site would never let you choose it. When you were finally done with the order, it would say "Okay, your PAC pizza will arrive in... oh, probably next fall, but we're not making any promises."

Too bad I'd get sued silly -- they probably have more lawyers than programmers.

For some reason, my company was transferring me to Saudi Arabia. I remember there were people there that were building me an apartment. It looked crappy and old. It was made of old yellow rock, and had 6 rooms - three on each side, stacked on top of one another. I didn't want to live there. It was in the desert.

The foreman (or whatever he was) had given me specific instructions.

"You must not tip the workers. When they're done, let them bow to you. Don't give them any money, just stand there and smile."

I remember wanting to argue, because they were doing this hard work, and I wanted to tip them. The foreman would not let me. I had cash in my hand, too.

In the end, I did what I was told. I stood there, smiling, while all the workers bowed to me. Inside, it made me sick.

Time Shift

I dreamt about waking up from the dream above. I went into the living room at my parents' house (although I don't live there anymore), and told my Mom "My company is transferring me to Saudi Arabia."

The rest of the night is a blur.

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• The mayor of Whoville was distraught when Garrison Keillor started kissing me between my breasts. I wasn't happy about it either. I pretended to be asleep.

• made with seven different kinds of apple!

• Fox Mulder told everyne who called that he couldn't be bothered, he was working on a Very important project, which turned out to be a cart to pull behind his bike. It was important for the case.

• He'd flown his assistant to Marietta though he knew he wouldn't be there to consult with him, he'd be in jail by then. We all laughed about it.

• As Russian immigrants we needed somewhere to stay. All the places looked at us and said he could stay but I couldn't. We ended up living under a Christmas tree in a parking lot. As soon as he left, I went out to look for work. The drugstore man did not like my broken English and threw me back out onto the street.

• Even the kids knew that surf movie didn't make any damn sense.

I was leader of a three-man rescue group that dove to a sunken submarine to see if there were any survivors.. Its rear end had a hole on its bottom, but otherwise intact hull kept an airpocket inside it, so when we got in from the hole, we could take off our scubagears while looking around. The lights were dim, but they revealed the stainless interior of the submarine, with water in corner of every tilted room. We still used our flashlights, and suddenly I noticed a woman in swimsuit walking in the room ahead of us. She should have noticed us, but she acted like she hadnt, so I decided to follow her. When we got to the room she headed in, she was lying dead in the yellowish liquid at the corner of the room. It was mysterious, but because we were here only to rescue the survivors, we could only assume that the liquid was extremely hazardous. I told that we should spread out, and headed forward towards the front end of the submarine. When I got to a kitchen, I found a ragged woman, who noticed me and appeared to be still sane. She told that since they had sunken, small swarm of insects came in, and attempted to dig into people's skins like parasites. They were gotten rid of, but during the time they waited for the rescue, another, slightly larger swarm had come in, managing to kill some of people in the sub, and drive some of them crazy with paranoia. I leaned against a desk, but yelled as I noticed a fingernail sized cockroach on my hand. It hadnt dug in yet, but fortunately the woman in the room gave me a binocular holdster filled with water, and told that soap water kills them and even gets them out from the wounds, so I sunk my hand in there and the cockroach was left floating dead on the surface. She told that these insects were from new species, from the depths of the sea, and according to her calculations the attacking swarm sizes grew constantly and withing few weeks there would be billions of them. Suddenly one of our group ran into the kitchen, screaming in horror and showing his bug-covered hands. I quickly gave the soap water to him, and after keeping his hands in there for a while, he sighed in relief and pulled his hands up through the reef of dead bugs floating on it. I asked the woman where would be the safest spot to go, and after short ironical thinking she said "At the New York or New Orleans, those places will take longer to become overrun by these things". I asked my teammate about the third man, but he told that he was most likely left under the flow of insects from a swarm that he had just gotten away from. I noticed one bug running towards us across the room, but I smashed it with a dishwashing brush. I soon noticed movement as horde of insects came through the doorway, and we ran away. I led us to the showers and asked others to get soup and any containers, filling them with soap water as quickly as I could. We splashed the water on the swarm, killing many of them. I grabbed a shower and spred the soap area wider, but I woke up..

We were at a high school, not mine. This one had some indoor hallways and such. For some reason Rolo had just finished a big promo campaign there -- I guess high school kids are a big target market for Rolos. Anyway, everybody had plenty of Rolos, and it was kind of a running joke. Later I found a few Rolo-branded cigarette lighters taped under a step in a half-flight of stairs in the hallway. I didn't have much use for it, except to melt rolos. When I tried that, they changed from chocolatey brown to swirly pastel colors, kinda like how those sour gummi worms look.

Later we were back here, at my house at school, and Jeana and I were making out in the hallway. We ducked into my room and headed for the bed, but when she jumped onto the bed we discovered tehre was already someon in there. Embarassed, we ran straight out of the room.

Later still, I was at home with my family. On TV there was something about an alien landing, and my dad (who seemed a lot like Homer Simpson in the dream) just laughed, denying it. I went out to the garage to get something but as soon as I opened the door I saw the alien standing at the foot of the driveway. He was a big green man, with tentacly fingers and a big oblong head (which was mostly forehead). He wore a whitish semi-reflective suit with a generic-looking picture of Saturn on it. He looked very much (as much as I can remember) like the alien hologram Dr. Wiley used at the end of Mega Man 2.

I didn't get to look at him very long -- he immediately started some sort of brainwashing process. A little floating question mark appeared simultaneously by his and the victim's (in this case my) head. He didn't get very far, because I got freaked out and closed the door and it stopped. He needed eye contact to do it, it seemed. While he was doing it, I remember my vision changed to kinda like an effect they use in Batman and other cartoons when someone gets drugged or knocked dizzy. I could see the alien in the center of my field of vision, along with 6 duplicate images spinning around it.

After closing the door, I was panting hard and had a huge headache. I went back into the living room where my family still sat and watched TV. I told them about my recent encounter. Dad still didn't believe me, but Mom got very excited. She jumped up out of her seat and wanted to go see the alien. I begged and pleaded for her to not go, fearing he would try to take over her brain, too, but she really wanted to see it. I tried to block the front door, but it did no good, the alien appeared in the window and Mom looked over at him. A little question mark appeared by her head, and I practically dove at her pushing her back to the living room. There I hurriedly closed all the windows and shades, warning that soon everyone on the block would be brainwashed by the alien and that our ounly hope was to stay inside and not look out any windows.

Dad still thought the whole thing was bunk, and kept opening the blinds to get more light inside. Outside I could see other neighborhood kids wandering around wide-eyed like zombies with little question marks floating beside their heads. I thought to myself, "this looks like it could be the end, but I'm not going down without a fight," or some such thing.

This morning I dreamed that my twin sister was a black preacher.

Everything else about her seems normal, she even resembles me still, but with very dark skin and some prominent African features. I am insanely jealous - she looks good.

I am sitting in the front row of what seems to be your ordinary suburban Baptist church - all white, conservative, attractive, successful and repressed as hell. I am between an elderly woman and a family busy yelling at their son. My sister approaches and says in half-family/half-clergy voice, "It is so good to see you here this morning! It's been so long since I've done any preaching, it's nice to get back behind the pulpit again." And at those words, and the realization that my sister is preaching, the old lady next to me nearly faints. A woman preaching? And a black woman at that!

My sister makes her way up to the front of the church. Noticing that something is different the entire congregation is on the edge of their pews. And then my sister begins to preach. And I mean preach! It was as if she had been hit by a lightning bolt. She's preaching about hell, Satan, Jesus, and "casting down imaginations, bringing every thought to the obedience of Christ". Talking about rivers that spring forth and of spiritual gifts and I think she lost them when she started invoking the Holy Ghost. The congregation is completely enraptured. Sure, some of them quietly exit out the back door but the ones that remain are no longer sitting quietly as they had been taught. They are not highlighting their Bibles and taking notes in the margins like college students. The children begin dancing in the aisles and even the church pianist is getting into it.

As the sermon ends, even the crotchety old lady beside me is able to muster up an "Amen, sister!" I look at her and smile.

"No," I say, "That's my sister."

I was at a carnival playing some sort of toss-game where the object was to knock down the stuffed animal you wanted to win with these tiny balsa wood balls. I had won a small blue stuffed bear with a bow-tie and a silver belly, but I was trying to win the larger bear so that I could give it to Aaron. A strange, middle-aged, balding man and his son (creepy kid -- looked like one of those blond stare-monsters from Village of the Damned) started to make fun of my throwing form and my aim.

I began to get annoyed and gave the game attendant another dollar (in quarters) so that I could get another handful of the balsa wood balls. He was telling the kid why I wouldn't win anything and I turned and started pelting him with the balls. I hit him right in the head three or four times, but he didn't say anything like "ow", just kept making fun of my throwing style, so I turned around, took my small blue bear and left.

I remember the middle because it was so disturbing...

A long, rolling, multi-layered house along a lush Southern river. I am fishing, or about to fish, off of one of the decks. My father convinces me to accompany him to the last part of the house, a screened-in porch filled with fishing and boating gear. He (who now is still my dad, but in that dream way that someone can look and act differently than in real life) tries to rape me. He takes off his pants and I am horrified by his impossibly thick, pulsing penis. I run around the room, trying to escape him. I pick up fishing poles and oars and beat him with them to fend him off. I start to feel like a domanatrix and become aroused by the fact that I'm beating my father and preventing him from raping me. Someone, I think my mother, comes into the room and demands to know whats going on. I point my finger at my cowering dream-dad and explain defensively that I had to beat him because he was trying to rape me.

That's all I remember, but I still feel very icky and uneasy because of this dream. Sometimes my psyche really worries and upsets me.

I was visiting a girl who I don't know, but seemed to know at the time. I was not quite myself either, I had a nearly shoulder length, dark brown, bob and looked somewhat Italian or Greek. The reason I was there was to check out this new place that she had rented in the City (San Francisco) that she was very excited about. Two other people I didn't recognize were there too. I remember being completely in awe of how huge this place was. It was basically the first floor of a house, and other people had apartments on the second and third floors. The ceilings were very tall (somewhere around 14 feet) and everything was painted that nasty, not quite white, color that places are always painted before people move in. There were 3 huge rooms in this place, plus the kitchen and restroom. This was the part that surprised me the most because most places in the City are, by no means, big. The three rooms were completely empty, excapt for a few bedroom furnishings in one of the rooms where she was going to have her bedroom. I remember wandering around for a bit, and being amazed to discover that there was a huge basement below as well. For some reason, the girl I was visiting yelled at me for going down there, as if it was off limits. I remember thinking it would be easy for someone to break in through the basement, but can't remember why.

Everyone was hanging around by the patio that came off of the kitchen (it had sliding glass doors that opened to a little backyard). We were all complimenting the girl with the new apartment on the good choice and such. All of the sudden, this guy from upstairs showed up. For some reason I thought he was someone I had known for a very long time, and the other girls knew him as well. He had long brown hair that was a little curly, he was wearing all black, and he was looking pissed. He was really angry at one of the other two girls. She was short, thin, and had medium length, blonde hair. I can't remember what the issue was, but he started to get in a very physical fight with her. He was hitting her and yelling! At first, she was hitting back, but then she started to become more terrified. Of course, I was completely shocked because none of this made any sense. The girl that I was visiting (a plump redhead) and I started to try and get this guy off of the blonde girl. He was a lot stronger than I had suspected, and it took all three of us to get him off of her. I remember being so mad that even after we had him pinned down, I kept hitting and kicking him repeatedly. We beat him pretty badly. The last girl, who had been watching all of this in shock was just standing there. She also had red hair, but was a good deal thinner, and her hair was very short. I remember yelling at her, as we were holding the guy down, to call the cops.

When the cops showed up finally, they had a whole paddy-wagon with them. It was a huge paddy-wagon, almost the size of a semi-truck trailor. They had a bunch of other guys in there that had been picked up. Apparantly, they were the closest to where we were, when the call came through. We all looked pretty bad when they came in, and we explained that the long haired guy had started to attack the blonde girl, and that we had to fight to get him off of her. They believed us with very little questioning, which seemed strange to me. They grabbed him, and carried him off. For some reason, I had taken charge of this entire operation, and was standing outside talking to one of the cops, who I knew, about how strange the situation was. I went around the back to look in the trailor, and remembered feeling very sick to my stomach, when I did not see the long haired guy in the back of the truck with the other guys. I thought I could have been wrong (there were a lot of guys in there and it was getting dark so it was hard to see everyone). Regardless, I mentioned this to the cop, that I had been talking to. The other cops were getting ready to go away, and in all of the confusion, I don't think he heard me. I had a sudden gut feeling, so I got down on my stomach and started crawling under the truck.

I got half way down the side of the truck, when I saw him (the long haired guy) crawling under the truck from the other direction, so he was coming right at me. My whole body froze for a second. I could see the shock in his eyes. Something in me snapped at that moment, and I felt horrible for him. He looked like hell, and I wondered if I had not made some kind of mistake. I kept crawling over there and when we met in the middle, I grabed his face and said, "I love you." I had tears running down my face, and we kissed briefly. I had him follow me, and we crawled back around the back of the truck, and over to the other side, which was away from the building. The truck started to pull away, and we were able to roll into some bushes. From there, I knew we could run away down the street once everything calmed down a little bit.

After this I woke up. I don't usually remember dreams unless they are really strange. This one was. What was even stranger, was that after piecing back bits of the dream together in my head, I realized that the guy in the dream was a guy that I have been seeing for the last couple weeks.

I was in my house but it looked bigger, like a mansion. I peeked into my grandmother's room. Her bed was on the other side of her room and there was this 20 inch stick figure next to her holding a knife. I quickly ran into the bathroom and closed the door. I tried turning on the light but the power was out for some reason I was so scared. I tried running to my parent's room, but a big black object was at the foot of the stairs. Then suddenly the stairs turned spiral and the object was a bear statue at the bottom of the stairs. I do not know why I was so afraid of it but I was. I tried screaming but I could not. I tried running to my parent's room but I seemed frozen.

As I slowly woke up the bear statue turned into my stereo and bookshelf and thats what it probably was. I have had this dream more than once and I still can't seem to figure out the meaning.

The streets were crowded with beautiful people, rushing about in some old 50s film. We were in Spain, a narrow street of shops lining them, and bundles of people trying to stay out of the way of the passing bicycles. My sister Barbara was there, she'd brought me there because she knew the way. "I'm going back home now," she told me, and I was almost frantic. "You're going to leave me? All I have is a quarter." But she left me then, and I was alone on these streets. I no longer panicked, though, and was happy to be free.

I made my way into a nearby shop which ended up being a Burger King. Wait, I don't even like Burger King, I thought. So I left then and entered another store, which was McDonalds. Searching for the bathroom I found a sign above a door crowded with people surrounding it. The door swung open and masses of people sat at tables. This was no bathroom. "The bathroom is actually over there," a man told me, pointing towards what I knew couldn't possibly be a bathroom. He explained that they put the sign up there to trick people, but you actually have to ask the cashier for a bathroom key.

I'm driving now in a dark green van with my younger sister, my mother and my father. We stop at this place in the middle of a field of tall plants resembling corn and eat our lunch. When we're finished we cover it all up in hopes my sister Barbara won't find us. We know she's not far behind, hunting us down. We're driving again, my dad in the driver's seat, on a very narrow road without any railings on the side. It's held in mid-air and we'd fall to our horrible deaths if aren't careful. My dad keeps driving on the very edge to frighten me, and I start screaming at him, but he doesn't stop.

I tell them to drop me off at the next city, I can't handle this. They leave me there and drive away. I'm frightened again, the city full of people who don't understand me, and I have nowhere to go. There's a hotel but there aren't any rooms, there's a shop but it's closed, and the only way to get out of there is back onto the horrible road hanging in mid-air. I hide in the shadows until the van pulls up and my family has returned. I'm happy to see them.

I dreamt that I was in a meeting, and I was looking at my to do list. My list was already two pages long and I had no idea how I would possibly finish all of the tasks on the list. The company president kept turning to me and telling me to take care of this new item or that new item which was raised at this meeting.

I kept adding to my list... listing another new item... then another...

I began to feel overwhelmed, unappreciated, taken advantage of and taken for granted.

Oh sorry... that wasn't a dream.

Shit my life sucks.

I was sitting at my computer right after I woke up in the morning. All of a sudden, I heard the front door to my apartment being smashed open. I remember two loud bangs which in retrospect seems really strange because my door is pretty poorly constructed and locked. Quickly, I dived under my bed in just enough time, because I suddenly saw 6 boot-clad feet from my viewpoint. One of these three intruders bent down over my CD and floppy disk box. While he was ruffling through my software, I could see one of those blue rain coats with the bright yellow FBI on the back. He had a steriotypical MK-5 gun slung over his shoulder. At this point I could also hear typing on one of my keyboards. All of a sudden the agent going through my disks jumped up. I could see a CD in his hand. Light bounced off of the CD and blinded me for a second. When I regained my vision, I couldn't see anyone any more. I waited five minutes or so, got up and checked my front door. It was broken down and an old lady who lives next door was peaking in. I ignored her and went to my computers. The only thing that was different was that my Windows 98 computer was turned off. I turned it back on and to my dismay I got the dreaded "No OS loaded" error. Booting from a boot disk, I found that my windows directory had been deleted. My mp3s, DVD ripping software, etc. was still there. For some reason, I didn't mind that my apartment was open to the world and that I could hear people conversing outside about what had happened. I went to get my Windows CD and *suprise*, it was gone. The Linux FBI??? The last thing I remember was laughing like crazy and I woke up because I was laughing out loud. Quite honestly, this was probably the coolest dream I have ever had.

I was a Russian writer who was in a contract with a publishing house for writing a novel. The novel was going to be about eight friends who were trying to find the meaning of life, each finding a different answer. I was meeting regularly with a consultant from the publisher to discuss my notes. As of late, he had started to get impatient, since I never brought any text written in full to the meetings, only notes, keywords, and plot diagrams.

"You can't expect much more assistance from us, unless we can see some actual results soon," he said. "But these are actual results!" I complained, pointing at the high pile of handwritten papers on the desk. "Once a storyline has been thought out and diagrammed beforehand, the mere production of text is purely routine!"

The consultant replied that I was grossly underestimating the efforth needed to produce full text. "All those millions of typewriter keys have to be pushed somehow. They're not going to push themselves."

I was a writer, traveling in the American South. I made the acquaintance of a rich, aristocratic family. The younger son in this family was also a writer, and he was showing me his latest book, fresh from the printers. He held the pages for me to see as he read aloud. We were seated side by side on a bench in a courtyard. The very first page of this book talked of how he had discovered his "voice" as a writer, that part inside of himself, and this page was describing that voice, as if it were someone else inside him, his other self. He never called it his feminine side, but in the midst of this Whitman-like catalog of names for this voice, he called it "my Ninar" (in the dream it was my real last name). I was surprised and completely turned on by seeing my name there, especially since we knew nothing of each other before that moment. We began kissing warm, passionate kisses, and soon we became lovers, much to the chagrin of his family.

OS Final

• The night before my Operating Systems final exam, I dream I am taking the test but it is much more theoretical than I expected. The topics are much more similar to my advanced algorithm analysis class: greedy algorithms, adversary problems, decision algorithms, amortized analysis, etc. I stress out because it's been a couple of years since I've studied that stuff.