Dream Log: October 4, 2001

...I love you all, and I love E2, but I just can't afford to subscribe. Happy noding!

-- the last post of a very well-regarded noder

This was my nightmare: that, in order to keep E2 on the air, the management had to go to a subscription model like Salon or EverQuest. We lost some of our best noders to economics, but at least we didn't lose the site entirely. We had to burn the village in order to save it.

When I woke up, I did three things:

1. I thanked God that it was, so far, a dream.
2. I noded my dream.
3. I put twenty bucks in the donation box.

My other dream was that I was sorely tempted by Ms. Pac-Man machines in a light wood cabinet, whitewashed, for $99. I went further back into the collection and saw OutRun and Galaga, but alas, no Discs of Tron. But that wasn't the important dream of the night.

I'm buying something I don't precisely know yet. It's wrapped inside a grey paperbag. It costs me 50 FIM (~$8) and I pay with two 100 FIM notes. The salesman doesn't give any change but I don't even notice or I don't give about it. Still inside the store, I open the paperbag and there's a postcard I should send to Iwonka. (It's somehow obvious that I couldn't send the postcard to anybody else but Iwonka although there's no any address written or anything. It's just like any other postcard, a landscape of Uusikaupunki harbour pictured, but it's in its very essence that only Iwonka can receive it.)

A man in his forties enters the store and wants to buy a postcard too. In order to do that he needs my paperbag and I give it to him. He notices that there's some money inside and asks if I forgot to take them. I didn't notice any dough inside but gratefully I pocket the 50 FIM note the man hands over me. But as we examine the paperbag more carefully we find out that there's more money, all 50 FIM notes, we didn't notice at first. And they just keep coming out, like the paperbag was a cornucopia or something! I take at least several hundred marks out of the paperbag and eventually it really is empty. Now there are only few coins left and I pocket them too. Actually we are not that surprised by the function of the paperbag - it was just a happy incident but quite common one.

I had my first nightmare last night that correlated to the 9/11/01 tragedy. I've felt oddly removed from the whole tragedy, but I woke up crying this morning.

I was in my parents house, sitting in my old room watching television. I heard a horrible sound and I looked out the window and saw a jet pass by. Then I saw two more jets flying straight for the window. There was a bright flash, and then I was walking through a bunch of rubble. I saw my neice and nephew, who live next door, under a pile of cement...dead. All I could do was cry...and that's how I woke up.

Maybe this was a wake up call for me not to be so damn self-absorbed.

I make a wish and it takes me to a giant underground cavern beneath Manhattan. (Picture Futurama's "Old New York".) This wish-making teleportation thing has happened before in this dream, with similar results, and I suspect it's just changing the environment instead of actually moving me (beacuse even a genie would have to account for rotational kinetic energy). Climbing up some of the buildings to the ceiling of the cavern, I tore away at it and found that it was made of some foamy substance, colored in white and in solid colors, like a Monopoly board. This evidence contributes to the theory that I'm really just inside some really weird (yet quick) transforming room.

Anyway, this time there's a girl with me. I don't know who she is, but she keeps getting into trouble (Marle? No, she's not blonde.) She is having a conversation with a talking dog, and I just know it's trying to trick her into doing something unsavory. So I pick up some of the triangular bricks that are lying around, and start tossing them at the dog to get rid of it. (Heinlein: "Is hard to frighten scientists, their minds don't work that way. Have to get at them from other angles." After all, a talking dog must be a genius among dogs, like that talking gremlin.) He just keeps on talking after having half his face torn off by triangular bricks. The raw flesh underneath looks like cross-sections of flesh I've seen in previous dreams. Half a talking dog is even scarier than a whole one, so I wake up and walk around rather unsettled for the next few hours.