Dream Log: February 16, 2001

I'm in a car with someone else. I'm in this car because someone else besides the person driving did something to me.

Violent.

We drive into an abandoned area of beachfront property that looks like a cross between a collation of warehouses and a prison. The car stops.

lurking.

There are people all around me, skittering on the catwalks, hiding in the palm trees.

i don't see them

The car begins to drive away, with us inside. I am happy to go. Then a stinging sensation hits the side of my neck.

this is bad.

I feel unlucky. I should be feeling paranoid. When I get home, a Half-Life gun turret pops down from the front foyer of my house and begins shooting at me. Then my house blows up. I gain assistance from a neighbor who gives me a sleeping space in the garage of her 30-story girderframe skyscraper, located directly under a chronospatial claudication.

Star Wars reruns...

Later that night, I ascend to the top of the tower with my father. As we reach the top, we begin to descend into a mechanical canyon sparkling with lights.

Dream #1:
In this dream, for some reason, I own a Geo Metro. A friend of mine had been in an accident recently, so he took his car to the body shop. I go to pick him up. I park my Geo in the parking lot and walk past several shady-looking characters to get inside the body shop.

There's a small bare "airlock"-type room just inside the door, with another door leading into the actual shop. For some reason, I take my pants off in this room and carry them with me into the shop. My friend is there, but then he's not, and so I decide to go home. I walk back out, re-donning my pants on the way.

As I step outside, I see the shady-looking characters surrounding my car. They hit it with a stick several times. Then one of them gets a big rock, jumps up on the hood, and drops the rock on top of the car, making a big dent in the roof and shattering all the glass.

I run toward them yelling. The one on the ground, the fat one, runs off, while the one on the car, the skinny one, jumps down and hides behind the car. I chase the fat one, jump on his back, grab him around the neck and start ramming my fist into his nose. He starts to cry, then promises he'll pay for all the damage.

I walk back into the shop, taking off my pants on the way, and tell the mechanic I'd like to have my car fixed. He says they're booked solid, but he can work me in at 1am on January 1. That's fine with me, so I leave, after getting the keys to a loaner car and re-donning my pants.

The loaner-car is some big powerful truck thing with no roof. As I walk toward it, I see several more punks attempting to vandalize it. Another chase ensues, and again I jump on a punk's back and begin pounding him in the nose. This time, the mechanic emerges from the store, yells at the punks, then tosses me the keys (didn't I already have them?) to the truck. I drive off. Dream ends.

Dream #2:
My job, for some reason, seems to be carting some kind of small golf-cart-like thing back and forth between two rooms in a large garage. One room is bare (this is where I start), and the other room contains my boss, a motorboat, and my boss's enormous collection of Popular Mechanics magazines.

I'm carting along, and suddenly Madonna walks in the door. She says she's hiding, and asks if she can hide in my cart. Not one to spoil the fun, I say "Sure," so she hops in. Suddenly, curtains appear around the cart, hiding us from view. She tells me it is vitally important that she get inside the motorboat in the other room.

So I take her to the motorboat. While my boss is looking the other way, she lifts the tarp covering the boat and jumps inside. I go back to the bare room. A little while later, I go back and pick her up. We repeat this several times. Finally, one time as I'm picking her up, my boss begins to walk toward the boat while she's in it. He starts to remove the tarp.

I distract him by asking if he has a particular issue of Popular Mechanics that I'm interested in. Happy to share his hobby, he finds the issue (while Madonna sneaks out of the boat and into the cart) and lets me borrow it. I drive Madonna back to the bare room.

Suddenly, I'm driving her down the bumpy dirt path outside my grandparents' house in Texas. She's naked and giggling. We get to the end of the path, which is at the rear of the house, and I hear someone coming from behind us, on the path. We jump out of the cart, but she can't walk for some reason, so I'm carrying her and trying to cover up her naked parts in case someone sees us. We get inside a bedroom, I suddenly turn into Terry Jones from Monty Python, and then I wake up.

This dream was such a beautiful synthesis of ideas...

I discover that if you take the two-piano version of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, send it as it's being played to a computer, and somehow execute it, it turns out to be a ingeniously obfuscated algorithm for playing chess. The notes played by each pianist determine the moves made by each side. I spend a while pondering the notes and how they affect the game, and come to the conclusion that Gershwin was the most brilliant hacker of all time.

So suddenly I'm in my piano teacher's studio, with the two pianos back to back and a chess board floating above them. I begin to play the Rhapsody with (or maybe against) her. As we play, the pieces begin to move. My piano teacher can't play chess, but she can sure play Rhapsody in Blue. I begin to hit wrong notes, and my pieces make tactical errors correspondingly, while hers make powerful moves that get her ahead. I play more determinedly and manage to keep my pieces in a good position, but as the piece enters one of its false finales it becomes clear that she will win. The famous seventh chord at the end of the piece is the move that makes checkmate. The chord still echoes in my mind as I wake up.

people soup

I dreamt I was in ideath's kitchen, watching over her and a few generic stock dream characters who were her friends. (Or maybe I wasn't actually there, but was talking to ideath after the event had happened, but through the magical powers of the dream was able to watch it? Perhaps.) They were very solemnly consuming a soup, of the brightest damned orange color I've ever seen in a food. This soup, they told me, was made out of equinoctial, ideath's housemate. She had (for reasons unknown to me) requested that this soup be made and that her friends eat it. They told me that they had to sign a certain legal contract confirming that she wanted to be eaten so they wouldn't get in legal trouble and be charged with murder or cannibalism. It appeared that they accepted equinoctial's death wish without question. They continued eating the soup, which it was said was unusual but quite tasty. An aura of sadness pervaded the room.

Well, me and a bunch of other people were wearing bearskins and shark teeth. Not in Indian like fashion, more like the druid from the Diablo 2 Expansion Set. We were a tiny army. Another army, an all girl army, started running toward us from across the yellow field (it was the color of grass after a dog pees on it). Someone in my army through a frisby at them, and they started to retreat. I ran forward, picked up the frisby and threw it at them again, but I missed by a long shot.

Then me and my friend were in line at a sort of food stand in Japan, and I kept bothering my friend, who insisted on getting an egg roll milkshake. I thought that was gross. I couldn't read the menu, so I pointed to what the guy next to me had, and they gave it to me.

Then I woke up.

I can't remember who the girl was but she was eating some kind of smoked fish. I was on a inflatable bed idlying clining onto the edge of the boat or jetty.

I was very happy causes the fishes were coming to me to investigate. I could feel their little snouts prodding and poking the floating bed.

Then the girl threw the remnants of the fish into the sea. I became scared because the sharks would come soon.