mjh's blog

If Nevada Barr wrote my dreams …

I had a very detailed dream this morning. Chuck (a friend I play volleyball with) and I were walking in a landscape like Tapia Canyon, a fairly common New Mexico landscape of steep brown canyon walls and minimal vegetation. At one point, a trail went off to the right, away from edge of an arroyo we were walking along. I said either route would work for us, so we kept waking along the arroyo, which got deeper quickly. Across the now-canyon, we saw men in waist-high dry grass holding rifles straight-up in the air. There were more and more men as I looked at them. They weren’t shooting, they were gesturing desperately, as if to a helicopter or plane overhead. Closer to the canyon edge but still on the other side, several people, including a woman in a red jacket, seemed to be running, but they were actually being swept toward the canyon edge by water we could not see, or rapidly eroding soil. I looked back to see the red jacket swept downstream in a muddy torrent at the far bottom of the canyon. Chuck and I reached a wall blocking our path; the rock was scored in vertical lines, as if from road construction. I said we have to get up from the canyon edge quickly and scrambled up. I turned to offer Chuck my hand. You can’t pull me up, he said. I’ll help you climb, I told him. Chuck scaled the wall and we both collapsed, breathing heavily, hoping for a moment’s rest. I realized we were on some hard surface, like a floor or a gym basketball court. Water was running shallowly but swiftly over this surface. I also became aware that there was ceiling above us, half our height. I realized this space could fill with floodwaters or we could be swept back out, over the wall. We’ve got to move, I said to Chuck. I found a gap, an absurdly sharp corner far too narrow to squeeze around. I woke up suddenly.

“When I was at UVa, we made our own ink by chewing berries and spitting into an inkpot we carried at all times. Thus the expression: ‘drunk as an inkpot’.”

I said that in a dream this morning.

I dreamed I was gardening when a brilliant blue bird landed nearby. It picked its way through the plants until it hopped up on my hand. I thought, ‘wait til I tell Merri I saw a Blue Warbler.’

http://www.edgewiseblog.com/mjh/category/dreams/

Runaway Car (a dream)

I was driving a car, possibly a convertible, at night, with Merri. We were crossing a big bridge when the car spun 180 degrees and I was driving backward. I had a moment of fear that the car would go off either side of the bridge. Mer said something and I responded that I was just trying to slow down without spinning again (foot off the gas and brake). We crested the bridge and picked up speed. I continued to hold the wheel steady, moving it just enough to keep in the lane. I can’t recall if I was looking in the rearview mirrors or over my shoulder. I yelled, “Lew, pull the emergency brake.” (Apparently both Lew and the emergency brake were in the backseat.) Lew didn’t hear me (maybe he wasn’t there), so Mer reached over the back of her seat and pulled the brake. It didn’t seem to have any immediate effect. We were driving downhill on an urban street reminiscent of Georgetown but without any traffic or pedestrians. We entered an intersection and suddenly the brake took effect and the car turned 90 degrees, but then moved forward on the next street. From an elevated distance, I could see the car was now on fire. Fortunately, the street we were now on was full of firefighters and fire trucks. The car stopped. I got out and staggered past a firefighter and said something to him (thank you?). I fell to my knees on the sidewalk, my face in my hands as I sobbed heavily.

Indoor Downpour (a dream)

I had a dream in the middle of the night. I was suggesting to Mer that she needed an audit report that would display in columns rec #, name, previous data, new data, and who made the change. I think I saw the report. I don’t know if it was for Probate Court or Abogada Press or something else. We were in my office. I crossed the room for some reason and returned. In the NW corner of the room, milk crates were stacked. At the top, was a plant. Water started dripping, as if the plant had been over-watered. Suddenly, more water gushed from the ceiling itself. As we started to panic, water poured down like rain from the entire ceiling – a downpour indoors. (My observer-self wondered if recent construction nearby had damaged the roof, although there hasn’t been any recent construction nearby.) We ran to the hallway and I said, “Call Joe and Sally.” (My observer-self thought it was unfair to bring the 80-year-old neighbors into the mess.) There was a phone hanging on the wall in the hallway, where there is none in reality. I woke up, marveling at the vividness of the report, the rain, and the phantom phone.

Another Dream Keyboard

In the dream, I was visiting a lab. Someone held up a printout. In the header, there were three sets of numbers (possibly one or more dates), flush left, centered, flush right. Each date appeared in blue and underlined, like an unvisted link. Each number was followed by a space and a lowercase-m. The lab workers speculated about this problem. I said, “bring up the page and let’s look at it.” Somebody brought the page up on a small wall-mounted screen; everyone stared rather blankly at it. I said, “look at the source.” The keyboard operator hesitated. “Press Ctrl+F4.” Simultaneously, the guy next to me said, “Press Shift plus (something) (something).” “Or that,” I said. This guy may have been Lem from Better Off Ted. (A delightful corporate-science comedy. Cancelled.) As the others wandered off, I stepped up to the screen. The keyboard jutted from the wall. It was about the size of a netbook keyboard, although uniquely wide. There were not very many keys. A large area was taken up by some formulas – it looked like a tiny whiteboard on the keyboard. I couldn’t find a PgDn key, so I used the down arrow to move through the code. “Hmmm,” I said, surprised, “It’s a literal.” (An actual ‘m’ appeared in the source code.) Speaking to someone across the room, I said, “I can show you how to fix this.” She seemed unenthusiastic. Another person (Leonard from The Big Bang) offered, “You could use Room _____ upstairs, I guess.” “No, I can show you here, now. It won’t take 5 minutes. Fifteen at the most.” I woke up.

That last matter is the application of the Three Times Rule that developed years ago. Whenever I quoted to a client how long a computer-related project would take, Merri joked, “times 3.” Well, “joked.” It always took longer than quoted / expected.

This is the second keyboard dream I’ve had recently (no real surprise, although the nature of the keyboards has been). Moreover, this is the third recent dream that could be job-stress related. Considering that I haven’t worked in two months and don’t plan to work for another four, it seems odd timing. Perhaps I’m deep into decompression or my subconscious wants to remind me I’m not missing anything. Except a paycheck. There’ll be more, won’t there? (Simpson’s reference.)

Press 3-5

In the dream, I entered a large room for a meeting. I approached a podium to check in. A woman said, “Press 3 – 5.” I looked at the top of the podium, which featured a large joystick on the left and three buttons at the bottom: [345] [3] [345]. The guy in front of me stared dumbly at the controls. I pushed him aside, but also stared without comprehension at the maddeningly dream-like interface. A guy (that guy?) said, “There’s the [5] button,” pointing to an area above the others, mixed in with buttons of various types, none of which had characters I remember.

At that point, I *felt* the involvement of a part of my mind that wasn’t caught up in the dream. That part speculated this was a test. I imagined – I did not see in the dream, but imagined about the dream – that there was a small screen, one line tall, a few characters wide and that whoever could perform the instructions despite this absurdly adverse setup would be selected. (For what?)

Later, awake, and telling the dream to Merri, I wondered if the guy I pushed out of the way was me. Not just in the sense of “you are everyone you meet in a dream.” Impatient with my own failing, I pushed myself out of the way. But I think the voice that identified the [5] was not the external narrator who hijacked the dream.