Dream Log: February 5, 2001

bits and pieces I must have dreamed last night:

(must have because I remember them as really having happened, but realize that they can't have.)

- a friend has sent me a private message in reply to one I sent him. it is a list of 70-odd sentence fragments, ranging from scraps of recipes for potatoes to a canonical list of possible misspellings of my names, to inquiries about how many guitars are left in the family room at his haus now that he's gone. I miss you, he says. (because now he is living in alberta for some reason, and won't return even for holidays until he's 41, he figures). I remember counting up the variations on my name and applying them to the fragments of potato recipes and serving the resulting dish at dinner with his family. We have a toast to him, lost in Lethbridge forever. ohh, that's sad.

- my boy is having a nap on top of the short dividing walls between my bedroom and the living room area. he seems cozy despite being very precariously balanced. I shrug and go to bed, hoping that if he rolls over he falls on the side with the bed.

- toby and suzie are the same cat.

I was on the tube and there was to be a private Christmas party just for our street, which G. was organizing. But there was a gang of toughs from another street in the same carriage as me, and they were talking about going. They moved off making threatening noises about G.; I presumed she could take care of herself but I worried anyway.

But I found I was on the wrong line, or had taken a wrong turning. We went through a station called Demeter, I and thought for a moment I had never seen it before, and wondered whether it was named in honour of our noder.

At the end of one line the station became a big room in which there were retro 1950s silver robots. I realized I had to change lines, so I went back a few stations, got off, and looked at the tube map. I had to get to a station at the bottom of the loop called Friday (or Frisky, perhaps), and interchange there. But I only had a single ticket and couldn't use it to continue.

So I decided it wasn't too far to walk, as it was just over a bridge outside the station, and south of the Thames. It was night, about 10 o'clock, and I usually don't mind walking long distances at that time, but at this point I noticed I was barefoot. I thought back where I could have left my shoes, and after a bit of thought deduced that it was impossible I could have been travelling through London all this time without shoes, without noticing it: therefore I must be dreaming. So if I woke up I would be all right, or if by effort of will I could turn this into a lucid dream I could just rewrite the dream so that I was wearing shoes again. (I didn't fancy walking barefoot, even when I knew it was a dream.)

So I tried, but without success, and eventually I had waited so long I realized I wasn't going to wake up because I was already really awake. This was a nuisance.

I got a meal in a foil tray, and it looked nice, but there was melted cheese adhering to the sides of the tray, so I really needed a fork to eat it. I went into the station, but they had the wrong kind of cutlery in the nearer parts, so I went further in and got my fork.

Here I met S., the most attractive person I know, and in the course of talk she explained the new tax system to me, with a tape and projections in her bedroom in the station. Because I needed this for work I decided I should borrow her tape.

She measured my arm and expressed amused surprise at its dimension. I really really wanted her to measure my leg because I was wearing nothing below but a loose scrap of cloth.

After I'd woken up, I was lying in bed waiting for the alarm clock to go off, and looking at Everything2. I found a good write-up (possibly by Muke or Anacreon) and wanted to vote for it, but didn't have any votes, from which I deduced that it was not yet six o'clock: or possibly I had to log off and log back in before I saw my fresh allocation.

I think it was in the dream, though I won't swear to it, that I worked out that if I was looking at my computer screen while awake and in bed then I actually wasn't.

Some sort of space station, with lots of blinking lights and shiny metal surfaces. I was walking past a dock with several car-sized spaceships, and I happened to bump into a shiny red one. Its driver, a man of small stature with very noteworthy hair, got out and started accusing me of theft and destruction of property and the police came and arrested me. End of story.

So I'm hanging out with some friends at this space station, minding my own business, when suddenly I notice this girl I have a crush on. I go up to her and I'm working on asking her out when suddenly a man of small stature and very noteworthy hair appears out of nowhere and starts yelling theft and destruction of property and the police come and arrest me.

This approaching the girl thing repeats itself over and over again. I know there is some rule to it all, but I can't manage to put that knowledge into action. The rule was something like "you have to be very direct in asking her out," or maybe, "you have to be very indirect in asking her out." I never managed to figure it out.