Okay, I'm almost embarrassed to admit to this dream, but here goes.

I find myself the President of The United States of America . I remember three scenes:

  1. I was in my bedroom (presumably in the oval office). There were these drawers containing lots and lots of neatly folded whites. This was truly a wonderful thing for a bachelor's bachelor. What's even better, there was someone (I don't remember who, handing me the cloths.
  2. I was giving some type of press conference or speech to members of the media. I'm pretty sure it was a Q&A session. But I decided to give a little initial talk. I was nervous but did fine. Afterwards, we were all seated around a large table on a stage in an auditorium. However, there were these columns or something blocking my view of the audience. Anyhow, during this meeting, there were various arguments. I remember one person pointing towards a TV set. I got angry and demanded the TV be turned off.
  3. I was having lunch at some very nice place. I was near a window-type opening into another part of the restaurant. There on the other side was a girl I knew from high school. I was very surprised. We talked and flirted, and I distinctly remembered thinking "Hey, I'm the president. Can I ask her out?"

Another disturbing dream. Third night in a row. That must be a record. Three disturbing dreams in a row. Only if I could attend UBC that many days in a row, I would be a genius by now.

The last thing I remember before falling asleep is glaring at the back of my eyelids. It almost seemed like I could see the liquids that coated my eyeballs swirling around in there. Slowly, I descend into the disturbing calmness of my subconscious.

Like any other dreams, I don't remember the beginning. I remember playing basketball with a lady friend of mine. I didn't want to play seriously so we played 21. Lovely game. I beat her to the ground. I tried to lose. I didn't look when I was shooting. I threw it towards the street but she kept on counting them as points.

She turns her back on me. I grab her hand, but she swings back and slaps me. She leaves no mark, other than a hairline slice across my face. She asks me to beg, but I turn back. I lean to my side, placing my hand on my wound. She's there, apologizing, and giving me a kiss on my cheek.

I try to walk away, putting on my rollerblades. But they can't fit. I ask her if she has some oil to use to see if I can slide my feet in. She rages again, this time, more violently.

I roll to the side, as she jumps on me. She attacks me, and I don't want to hurt her. I don't lay a hand on her but a mark is left across her face. I didn't hit her. At least that is what I knew was to be true. Then she tells me that I don't love her anymore. That was a shock. We were just friends. We were friends from school. Then she cries on me and tells me that she loves me. She gets up, inspecting the grass stain on her left knee on her jeans. She leans over me, kisses my forehead. She leaves. I run towards her but every step closer her slices my body like I run through blades. I keep running. And running. and running. It hurts more and more but after a while, I just keep trying harder. I fall on the ground in pain. I shrug aside the pain across my face.

She stood there. Beside me. She tells me that I've quit on her. That it will never be the same. That I've let her down. Then a bright flash. I'm in the grass. Laying there, in the park where I've met her for the first time. I look up at the sky, and I'm bleeding. Hmm. Ironic. The happiest time in my life is when there is solitude and when I'm bleeding. I close my eyes. Then I wake. Clutching my sheets, I reek. I've sweat all night. One good thing. I lost two pounds.

Last night, I dreamed that Norm Abram and Francis Ford Coppola were brothers, growing up together on a remote ranch somewhere in the US. I was watching a black and white film of their childhood, complete with a narrating voice-over.

First the setting: the high country desert, like where we used to go camping when I was a kid. On the valley floor, the sagebrush and Mormon tea create a knee-high haze. The film can't convey the fragrance, but I know it well enough to imagine it as I watch: sharp, spicy, resinous, with a tang of dust underneath it all. In the distance, I can see the hills rise up, separating this valley from the next (and the next, and the next...somehow I know this landscape goes on and on in a classic basin and range pattern). The hills are dark grey in the film, either from piñon pines or darker stone. I can't tell which; they're too far away.

The valley floor isn't perfectly flat - it undulates. There's a road running straight away from the camera, visible only in segments, hidden on the downslopes facing away from us. It's not the typical desert road, two tire tracks with stunted sagebrush between them; this one is a proper dirt road, graded and cleared of plants. Coming toward us, over the nearest rise, is the wreck of a Conestoga wagon. The desert has aged it, drying the wood and pitting it with decades of sandstorms. The hoops over the box body are rusted and bent, and only the last rags of greyed fabric cling to them.

One boy pulls the wagon by the yoke, and the other rides on the front of the box. They're nine or ten years old, no more, and look so similar that it's impossible to tell the elder from the younger, the filmmaker from the woodworker. Both are dressed in homespun clothes, rough-woven, rumpled. The textures are vivid and sharp in black and white. Despite the desert heat, neither has taken his shirt off, or seems to be sweating in the least.

"One day the boys found a wagon in the desert, and decided to go west like the pioneers. They travelled ten miles that day before walking back home. They left the wagon behind, just a little closer to the destination it was built for."

I sit forward in my seat, trying to identify that voice...

The next scene in the film follows Francis Ford Coppola as he rides a large tricycle along the same road, away from the camera this time. He's older, but the trike is scaled for an adult, and doesn't seem juvenile at all. Norm is not in view.

The tricycle has one flaw: the front wheel doesn't rotate freely on its axis. As Francis rides up the hill away from us, the wheel sticks once or twice, needing extra pedaling to keep it moving. The camera moves forward to follow the trike over the rise. Francis clearly thinks the speed he'll pick up on the downslope will free the wheel, make it move more smoothly.

It doesn't. Halfway down, the wheel freezes up completely. The entire tricycle flips, throwing Francis over the handlebars and face-first into the dirt. He lies there unmoving as the camera comes closer, past the still-spinning wheels of the upside-down tricycle. The boy's head and shoulders fill the image, hair tousled and dusty, shirt disarranged, the entire form too terribly still.

"Their parents rushed him to the hospital. Since he was going to be famous when he grew up, they were anxious that he wasn't too badly hurt. He spent days in the ward, with his mom and dad beside him every minute."

Now I recognize the voice, with its flat Boston accent. Norm Abram has been narrating this documentary. The film is in color now, showing him in the New Yankee Workshop. But instead of wooden furniture, he's working on a motorcycle. The camera zooms in on his hands, tightening a nut to hold some piece of flexible rubber over an engine part.

I woke up wondering if Norm Abram had used his mechanical skills to sabotage Francis Ford Coppola's tricycle when they were boys together, out of jealousy that Coppola would be so much more famous when they grew up.

Dreamatis Personae:

A: Asian girl looking for love, modeled after Ailinh.
B: A's beau. He's just this guy, you know.
C: A cybernetic girl, perpetually getting into trouble.
D: The ship doctor. Possibly the narrator.

The Transformers ship crash landed on Earth in the age of dinosaurs, right? So they had to be prepared to work in an environment full of dinosaurs, but by the time they left the ship, all they found were automobiles and cities everywhere, so that was the environment they eventually adapted to. I have no idea how Beast Wars fits into this. At any rate, there was a lot going on in that ship over the aeons: not just a bunch of nanomachines slowly repairing while they exponentially reproduce, but serious work for intelligent beings figuring out what needed to be done. (Maybe a good way to get nanomachines into your system would be to inhale a perfluorocarbon solution containing them.)

So that's where we come in: trying to get the ship in order before setting the nanomachines to work. Of course there was much personal drama, or this wouldn't make for good viewing. Allow me to elaborate: C and B were in heated discussion over some technical matter, when B just lost it, pulled out his laser sword and sliced C right in half, just under her heart and shoulders. She was wriggling her stumps of arms and bleeding a bit, but nothing a cyborg couldn't handle.

At the moment I woke up, D was in the lab dressing C's wounds (her body had simply been abandoned), and A was in her quarters on the ship, distraught as anything, because at that time B was descending a ladder from the ship to investigate the wreckage below (á la Sphere)

I woke up screaming.

I had a full nights sleep, but the last thing I remember is a Predator's face hissing in mine. This was HIGHLY disturbing.

The face of the Predator (as in the type Arnie killed in the movie of the same name) was unmasked and had the 4 fangs opened up and threatening.

i guess that'll teach me to sit all weekend and read 4 Alien Vs. Predator books in one hit. *smirk*

I suppose it's a consequence of drifting off to sleep on the couch while Laurel checks (or rather attempts to check)her messages. The constant staccato of the mouse builds a sonic framework in which my dream takes shape. Clicks of hands in time -- what time? Is it time? In hours I know it's my turn to check messages. I ask her again, when you're done, may I go? One line in this house, we are not cyber enough. We are not geeks.

We do, however, have a linux box and now a monitor as big as a large tv screen. Some of Laurel's noder friends have sent a picture which she's downloaded onto her desktop. The picture is remarkable for two attributes. The first is the overwhelming veneer of green. The picture virtually vibrates green. The second is that as I watch the scene, I am inside it. Technoreality. What will they think of next? I sit and contemplate the vista.

The hills roll in verdant waves and in the foreground there is a white stone bench like the one they placed on the hill above Kline Commons. Have I sat at that bench and digested these hills? Several pines stand sentry duty on the hillsides and there is a clean circle of wood in the center of the image. The molasses circle from Twin Peaks becomes a composite with a fire circle in some Vermont campground. I know this place. I know it well. I've been here before, though the noders sent it from Washington D.C -- not a former stomping ground.

Being inside the image manifests itself as a funcion of orientation. I can rotate within my vantage point as observer of the image. I can turn and view the vista not only from the perspective from which the photograph was taken, the "front" view as it were, but from behind as well.

As I attempt to posit my memory of this landscape onto the matrix of my past, I realize that there is a text box on the screen and Laurel has set a function so that the text is read aloud by a soothing male voice. It is as though I am in a historical museum and I have those narrative headphones clenched to my ears. Virtual tour guide. The voice of history. And this voice is telling me that we are at a site called "the graves of the children." The conical shapes growing out of the ground (narrow truncated birches) suddenly have meaning -- this is a garden for the young ones. I can hear their singing. Sounds congeal - staccato of mouse, voice of narrator, lilting death. I am lulled.

To my right the sideview mirror of a car is in my range of view. Suddenly, in the mirror I see a hand moving into the frame. I know this landscape is not populated. This is when I understand that the reflection of what is behind me is not what is behind me in the picture, but that an intruder has entered the Funhouse. I turn around, shaking off the eerie green song, wrenching myself into the landscape of my house, and am immediately possessed by the understanding that someone is after Laurel. He is a small man in grey with a misshapen face and he is coming towards me with a can opener -- the double bladed sort used to puncture large cans of juice at functions. Does he intend to release my pressure?. I laugh at this man, small in stature and wielding household objects. Wrenching the can opener from his grasp, I flout his potential authority. Which is when he pulls the gun.

Big and cartoonlike, the gun showers me with bullets. It is a dream; I duck. However, I do fear for my life. Just at the moment which would be the apex of any action sequence in any blockbuster film, a butter knife flies through the air and splits the small man's scalp. ideath to the rescue. The man falls but we are not fools in this dreamscape. Laurel hits the phone to dial 911 but she hasn't wrenched the gun away from her victim and I know, I know he is coming back to life.

And, of course, he wriggles. I straddle the man and begin the strangulation process. As I feel his breathing adjust itself to match the staccato patterns of mouse clicking, as the pressure eases against my palms, I sigh in frustration. Now I'm the one who has committed the actual murder, and how am I going to feel about that?

The dream reverses itself and I am telling Laurel the details. Three more times I dream the sequence of events that brings me to the computer screen. When she finally shakes me to consciousness, Laurel tells me that I've been whimpering.

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