Dream Log: September 23, 2002

I am riding along a shady street on a little girl's bicycle. It has a banana seat and streamers coming out of the handle grips. I am feeling supremely happy. I come to an intersection and a man approaches me.

"You dropped this back there", he says as he holds out his closed fist to me.

"What is it?", I ask.

"Your belly-button."

"How do you know its mine?"

"Everyone knows its yours."

So I lift up my shirt and look at my stomach. My belly-button IS missing. I take it from the man and push it back into my tummy. As soon as I do this, the man's eyes turn into headlights. They blink on and off at me. He starts to walk away but runs smack into a tree.

I ride off to see if I can find his eyes since he found my navel for me.

This dream was based in the Cold War, exept that the opposing sides were CCCP and England. The Soviet Union and England both tried to show each other how wealthy they were, so they even agreed to fund each others research for trans-atlantic travel, though it may have been because they'd get to spy the projects because of that. Anyway, I was only working in the lead of soviet scientists, and I had became close friends with a british scientist, who was working on a new kind of helicopter. It looked like a huge bolt with two triangular wings on top of it, and I laughed at his ridiculous idea. When I proudly presented my idea of a jet engine, which looked like a bolt with some nuts on it, he laughed too and said that my idea belonged to scifi instead of real scientific world. When the time of tests came, the helicopter didnt stay long enough in the air, as I had expected, but my friend wanted to see my invention in action before believing his defeat. I hadnt yet built a plane around the engine, but in the test firing the engine seemed to work fine. Unfortunately I dont remember anything for the rest of the cold war..

Much later, I had returned to Finland and watched through some old videos about the war. I learned that Soviet Union had gotten few Patriot missile launchers and an american gunboat, but lost a battle as America retrieved them. In the combat though, the gunboat was lost somewhere in the islands near Polands coast. I thought that having such boat would be cool, so I and my friends headed out to look for it. Only clue of its position we had was an old transparency with the course of a ship which the gunboat was escorting, and we had some trouble finding old soviet-time maps those would fit to the course. When we got a map, we found out where the ship had been destroyed, and headed for the nearest islands to see if the gunboat would have wrecked on some of the islands. I dont remember how I found out the place where we had to dig, but for our suprise the gunboat had been under the sand for all these years. What was more suprising was that the crew of the boat was still alive, thanks to power armors with built-in life-support. It seemed that they had become dependant of their armors, like cyborgs with their mechanical parts, but I dont remember anything else.

I was in a huge bookstore that I've explored in several dreams. It has several floors and many sections, and places to sit down and read. The shelves are black and the carpets are red. In previous dreams I've been looking for people in the bookshop, but in this dream I'm looking for a book about sex. I can't remember why I want to find the book except that I know it has pictures in it and I want to see them (I think this might be a younger me in the dream).

While I'm looking for this book I realize that there is somebody following me, and I remember that I am involved in a mystery of some kind. A man was killed and I was supposed to find out why, or how it happened. I was with a group of young people who were investigating the mystery, when a man had driven up to a gas station nearby with a young boy in his car. I knew that there was something wrong about the man, but I didn't act on my intuition straight away, maybe because I was afraid of accusing someone in the wrong. Then I remembered one of the "rules" of intuition, or at least one of the rules of dreams, and I realized that if I had this feeling, it was because I had seen ahead in the plot and knew that something was going to happen. I chased down the road after the car, but it was pulling out of sight. I felt terrible - I knew that the man in the car was going to rape and then kill the young boy. All this had happened a short while before I entered the bookshop.

I left the bookshop wondering what was going to happen next. I felt that the plot was rushing to a conclusion but I didn't know what was coming next. I stood beside two men who were talking about a historical novel based on real events, in which a man was killed by a group of English soldiers. He had been shot over a hundred times, but he kept running. SUddenly I could see it happening as if I was a movie camera following the man's face. He was wearing a red uniform with black boots, and a silver wig which was almost falling off his head. He was guilty of a terrible crime, and he was being chased on foot along a road in open countryside by soldiers on horses. They would shoot him, and reload, and shoot again, and with every shot he staggered or fell, and then get up again. His blood covered the grass and the gravel for hundreds of yards. The soldiers were fascinated and appalled. The man was dying, and he must have known that, but he refused to give up. Finally he could only walk slowly, his eyes far back in his head, and a soldier got off his horse and walked up behind the man. He put the muzzle of his rifle against the man's back and fired, and the man fell forwards and everything went black. I woke up.

Allow me to preface this: I have now spent the better part of seventeen days awake, toiling without relief in front of the sterile CRT glow of AliasWavefront StudioTools to meet the deadlines of my ID studio. What little sleep I have managed to catch has usually been too brief to warrant any sustained period of R.E.M.. On top of that, the few fleeting dreams that didn't pass completely and instantly out of short-term memory seem to have been overrun with Alias-related minutia... I feel that my subconscious has been supremely violated! But I digress... and on to the dream description proper we proceed:

So I'm sitting there, hard at work (and this is my dream I'm describing), trying my damnedest to successfully join these two non-coincident curves at this normal looking CV; Alias keeps telling me that I simply can not accomplish this. I keep looking around this situation in my perspective point of view, and I can not understand just how it came to be that this CV is not shared by said curves. Anyway... I keep trying to get this shite to work, and I start to realize that my work is fucking disintegrating with every move of the mouse, right before my eyes! Insomnia-driven desperation (this is still the dream, mind you) gripping my heart like a boa constrictor, I vainly attempt to reinforce this fragile pile of ones and zeroes (now rapidly crumbling) that is all I've got to show for over two weeks of my life sacrificed at the altar of voluntary slavery. I can't quite recall a visual memory of how, exactly, the crumbling of these data structure appeared in the dream; but the abstract notion of huge amounts of lost work made it across the void perfectly clear.

This (imaginary) loss upset me so deeply that I instantly awoke, and quite pissed off. It's 4:17 a.m., and already I'm rushing to studio (just in case, right?).My life, of late, absolutely sucks.