gwax's rumblings

As I’ve noted a few times before, when I remember my dreams, they tend to be quite vivid, if not lucid. My dream of Saturday night was no different and it was odd enough that I still recall it and want to mention it.

<dream>I found myself sitting in an eatery of sorts, enjoying breakfast, an omelet if I recall correctly. Part way through my meal, I noticed a fluffy thing in my mouth, pulled it out and figured it must have been a hair. After finishing my meal, my waitress came over apologizing profusely about something. Normally, a waitress apologizing as emphatically as she was without specifying why would probably frighten me but I wasn’t very perturbed this time around. After calmly inquiring into what the problem was, I was informed that a whole live duckling had accidentally made its way into my food. The waitress continued apologizing and asked what she could do to make it up to me. I still wasn’t terribly perturbed by the affair so I said that I’d take the cost of my meal as recompense and be done with the matter. It took a little bit of convincing the waitress that I really didn’t mind very much and the cost of my meal was sufficient but then I went along my way. Shortly thereafter, I coughed and a whole bunch of soft, underdeveloped, duckling feathers came out. Some nearby children laughed at me but I shrugged it off. Then, I coughed again and out popped a whole live duckling. Now, let me tell you, coughing up a live duckling is a very bizarre experience.</dream>

Ok kiddies, random bizarro dream time:

<dream>I spent an awful lot of time riding around on my magic scooter. I remember being in Cambridge mostly, riding from place to place, visiting with various friends and having a jolly good time. The portion that I recall most vividly was riding along the Fresh Pond Parkway from Memorial Drive to Route 2. I remember stopping at the light where the Fresh Pond Parkway crosses Huron Avenue and passing a truck to be the first one to the halfway point of the intersection. Of course, the details really aren’t very important, the point is I had a scooter and I was having a jolly good time riding around on it.

Now, my scooter was in no way an ordinary scooter, it was a magical scooter (possibly in a Clarke’s third law sense). To explain how the scooter was special, I want you to start by thinking about a generic scooter, like a Vespa or such, that’s pretty much how my magic scooter worked. Now, despite working a lot like any other scooter, my magic scooter was more like a pair of shoes than an ordinary scooter; basically, I just had to stand with my feet in a line, one in front of the other, sit down a bit, grasp imaginary handle bars and go. My scooter was magic in so far as it wasn’t even there.</dream>

I know it’s not all that interesting a story but think about it from the conceptual level; how awesome would it be to have a scooter built into your shoes. I wonder if someone could manufacture such an interface; boots with pop out wheels and tiny motors with wireless connections to special control gloves.

I first learned of the White Elephanoceros’ existence when I saw him appear from nowhere, brutally slaughter someone and then disappear like a ghost in the fog. After witnessing his terrible might, I sought out information regarding the White Elephanoceros and was able to ascertain only that he had a hit list he was working through. Learning of the White Elephanoceros’ hit list and further managing to ferret out that a friend of mine was on the list, I set out to end the White Elephanoceros’ rampage of death. From what I had witnessed, it appeared that the White Elephanoceros was very much corporeal but also very ninjalike in methodology; obviously, I needed a very large elephant gun. Knowing I must be prepared for the hunt at all times, I kept my gun with me at all times.

Of course, few people know of the existence of the White Elephanoceros, so I rapidly attracted unwanted attention carrying an elephant gun around with me and was eventually accosted by an officer of the law. The officer said something very much akin to, “What the Hell are you doing wandering around with a huge rifle like that for?” Making the safe assumption that this officer knew nothing of the White Elephanoceros, I carefully explained that one of my firends was in grave danger and I needed to protect him from a very large white elephant (on first inspection you cannot tell that it is an elephanoceros so I simplified the description). Surprisingly, the officer responded by telling me that if I looked closer, I would have noticed that it has the hindquarters and hide of a rhinoceros. I explained that I had neglected to refer to it as an elephanoceros because I did not expect him to follow my meaning and inquired as to how he knew of its existence. The man explained that in his time with the police he had encountered many cases of the White Elephanoceros’ violence, becoming a bit of an expert on the matter and invited me to discuss the matter in greater detail. Following the precept “know thy enemy”, I took the man up on his offer.

Hearing the officer of the law’s explanation of the White Elephanoceros created more questions than it answered. The most interesting matter was that the White Elephanoceros was an agent of his own direction and had not been hired to work through his hit list. The hit list was the central enigma to the workings of the White Elephanoceros; by killing the individuals on his list, the White Elephanoceros was engineering the future in a very specific manner. The specific origins of the list were not entirely clear, but the leading theory was that it had been sent to the White Elephanoceros from a possible future in order to either prevent or cause that future from coming about. A slightly less popular theory proposed that advanced predictions had been run to generate the list (a la Foundation Series). There were, of course, other lesser theories but the common theme was that the White Elephanoceros was carrying out targetted killings to manipulate the future. The discussion then turned to the matter of the ethics of interfering with the White Elephanoceros; if he was enacting the planned will of a superior system, my interference would inevitably cause more harm than good. If the White Elephanoceros was an agent for preventing the apocalypse, killing him would be the doom of us all. The discussion was quite lengthy and ended with disagreement between myself and the officer. The officer believed took the fate approach, figuring it unreasonable to alter the proper course of events, whereas I don’t see the ends justifying the means. Being a reasonable man, the officer said that inspite our disagreement, my actions were mine to make and he wished me the best of luck in whatever I decided to do.

I will continue to hunt the White Elephanoceros because I consider him a malignant force that must be stopped. And you, should heed this warning, he is out there and he can appear without warning; you may be on his list.

Side note: It occurs to me that the White Elephanoceros can, to some extent, be considered an allegory for the Divine Plan.

I had a really neat dream last night, though what I remember is mostly from the period of time during which I was pressing snooze this morning. In short, it was a flying dream, but it’s the details of how I was flying and the context that are most interesting. As a preface, I should note that I have been playing R-Type Final a whole lot lately and I’m quite certain that it had a heavy influence on my dreams; R-Type Final is a side-scrolling space shooter for the PS2 and one of the finest such games I have ever played.

Anyway, to the dream itself: I was some sort of flying craft with a great deal of maneuverability flying around in some city; It was some kind of a small jet fighter/spaceship thing. Now, when I say that I was this ship, I mean just that, I perceived things as a ship and could react as a ship; the best I can do to describe it is to use Shadowrun terms and say that it was exactly how I would expect vehicle rigging to feel; if that doesn’t help, suffice it to say that I was the ship, not a pilot. I remember that it felt very odd at the beginning of the dream to be a ship and it took me a little while to get the hang of my engines and control systems; I did not appear to use lift and flight surfaces for control, it was more of a vectored thrust sort of thing but, even then, my engines were of a sort that is far beyond our current technology level. After I managed to get the hang of my new found motive capacities, senses and such, I had a splendid time flying around the city. There turned out to be a surprising number of other such ships and we just sort of played around in the city.

This was, hands down, one of the best dreams that I have ever had. I think, if I were given the choice between continuing life as I am or being the flying craft that I was last night, I would choose the flying craft at least 99 times in 100. It was such an incredible sensation to move myself around by whatever means I happened to be using and sensing the world with whatever means I was using to sense the world. I see three ways to proceed from here: take up lucid dreaming, develop the technology necessary for vehicle rigging or wait and get reincarnated as a flying thing like that in my dream.

Yesterday was going pretty well up until I decided to go to sleep; good day at work, helped Dave G-L paint for a while, invited to dinner at the Galvin’s, Cha-cha and swing at the MBL Club, a few beers with some of my chummers at the Kidd; all in all a pretty good day. So then, as I was saying, it all went downhill pretty darned fast thereafter. I got home around 12:30a and went promptly to sleep.

I woke up around 4a for no seemingly good reason, went back to sleep and then here is where the fun begins, and by that I mean exactly the opposite. Over the course of the next 4 hours (since 8a is when I like to get up for work) I went through veritable weeks of dream time, all of which were incredibly vivid and of a Jurassic Park kind of nature. The worst moments were those of being stalked through an office building by a number of malicious velociraptors, watching the slaughter of dozens of people around me, and the best moments were not a whole lot better. These were the sorts of dreams that one finds to be hard to distinguish from reality, like when you’re worried about a test, take it in a dream and wake up relieved to have taken it only to later realize that it was just a dream. It was that sort of realism that leaves you unsure of things for a bit, except in that it was no test but, instead, large predatory reptiles out for my blood. I took up so much dream time and it was so vivid that, when I finally got out of bed in the morning, I was quite shaken and just a little jumpy.

Now, nearly two hours later, some of the horrors remain in my head and I am still a bit shaken and jumpy. I’m half expecting to hear screaming and then discover dinosaurs stalking around the MBL, where I work. This is, of course, not aided by being slightly out of it because of the sleep the horrors deprived me of in the first place.

It’s a real pity that dreams fade from memory as quickly as they do, for it often leads to the loss of some very interesting dreams. This is the case for a dream that I had last night; having since showered and made my way to an Internet connection, much is gone. I’ll give you what I can.

<dream>

I noticed a bit of rust on my bike and set out to find a shop where I could get the necessary materials to clear the rust and seal over the wound. While I was in the bike store I remembered that I had some old rental videos at my house that I needed to return, but I could not remember what video store I had rented them from. At this point, I realized that the bike store was, in fact, also a video store, specifically the one that I owed videos to. I became incredibly irritated with myself because I had come to this store and not brought the videos with me. I was chatting with the clerk about various things, he was a friendly, kind of large, guy and things were pretty cool. He did recognize me for the guy who owed a lot of overdue charges and I was a little unsettled because I didn’t really care about returning the videos, but it didn’t much matter. The clerk and I were still shooting the shit and I noticed that this wasn’t so much a bike shop as a video rental store and a toy store all in one.

All of the sudden, the room got darker and all of the walls fell away to reveal that what had been the store was really just a front for a huge catedral like building with the store as a little metal frame in the center. I didn’t really know what was going on, except for that I seemed to have stumbled upon a strange gothic cult, which the shop clerk seemed to be the leader of. It was a very large cult, and the cathedral seemed to have stadium seating around the central metal frame (kind of like a cube with metal edges and no sides). Some people started moving towards the cube, which contained myself and a few other people that had been in the store. Then, the cult-leader/clerk shouted out “Recess” and the lights went out, everything was pitch black.

In the pitch blackness I could feel people moving into the cube and starting to fill it up, like a rave almost, but no sound and no lights. I could feel people bumping into me and one person started to get rather close to me, so I exercised my personal space and put my arm between myself and the other person. The response I received was, “Fine, see if I do that again.” The response came from a girl, I could tell by the voice and the physical form, and I suddenly knew that this girl was special and I absolutely had to get on her good side. The lights came back (recess must have been over), I could see this mystery girl in front of me and I knew that she was, not only special, but that I had always loved her, since long before I had ever met her, this woman was a divine being. I talked with her for a little while and I felt as though I had reached the Greek eudaimonia, true happiness. We then parted ways with the assumption that we would meet again at the next cult meeting the following week. I then proceeded outside, where I found my brother and we went to retrieve the car that I was borrowing from my mother.

My brother’s appearance seems to have been a brief cameo as he was no longer there after I had retrieved the car and begun driving. I remember an interesting rotary that seemed to be on the sidewalk, but I know that I was allowed to use it with my car and then there’s a bunch of stuff that I’ve forgotten, which is followed by my being chased by the police. The police chase led me into Concord, where I decided to duck into a massive Islamic library (still in my car). I was driving around in this gigantic library (must have had ceilings that went up 50 feet and there were about 10 feet between each book stack) and I found myself completely lost, which, for those that know me, is not a state I often find myself in. Eventually, I started to walk around, without my car and I happened on this room that was of unfathomable beauty. There was a person in this room, presumably a librarian or holy-person of some sort, whom I asked for help getting out of the library. Help was offered in the form of an offer to be let out somewhere in Europe to which I responded, “What?! I entered this library in Concord!” It then turned out that this library attendant could let me off in Concord as he was going by that way. It appears that there is only one giant Islamic library in the world and it can be entered from what appear to be all of the other Islamic library building in the world (I really can not stress how very big this place was and with all sorts of magical links and shortcuts). I noticed spectacular piece of cloth and asked the attendant what it was, only to receive the respone that since I had touched it, it would have to be destroyed. I tried to argue against its destruction on the grounds that it was one of the most beautiful things to have every graced the universe, but the attendant steadfastly maintained that since I had touched it, it would have to be destroyed. Henceforth, I touched nothing and somewhere along the way to the exit, I woke up.

</dream>

It seems as though in starting from the beginning and just writing as things went, I have remembered a lot of what I forgot. Keen.

<dream>Last night was a long string of odd dreams. They were all strung together to make one big, even stranger, dream. I can only remember a few of the specific subdreams so that’s what you’ll get.

Making nails for MITOC. I was with a bunch of other people and we were all learning to make nails from found iron as a part of some MIT Outing Club activity. The process was fairly simple: find some pieces of soft iron and start hammering them together until they formed one big block. Then you hammer the block of iron until you get a big sheet which you cut the nails out of. I was having some really good luck because I found a few nice pieces of iron in the dirt where we were working. After a little while it turned out that a few of the pieces of iron that I found were actually plastic so I got rid of those and got back to work.

Somewhere along the way the cutting nails bit turned into me being a blacksmith in the early dark ages but since I’m a Materials Science major by day I knew all sorts of things about steel and metal that the rest of the blacksmiths did not know and I was teaching them all these things about smelting and alloying and annealing.

Then there were a few other sequences that I forget

Eventually there was another transition, but this time it went from blacksmithing to scuba diving in the Arctic. I don’t remember much of the transition except that it involved looking at a diving mask and reading the instructions for changing masks in freezing water. So I’m up scuba diving with these two other guys and there are icebergs around. Then one of the other guys discovered this broken outboard motor floating in the water which I thought was really neat at the time. Then I discovered some ice throne carved into the side of one of the icebergs and decided that I needed to put the outboard motor on the throne.

Then, all of the sudden, I was a Ninja Turtle and I had retrieved some magic talisman from that iceberg, which gave me all of these special powers. I distinctly remember being in Shredder’s palace or base or whatever and taunting him with all the special powers that I had and he was trying to trick me and get the talisman away. I remember a particular instant where he lunged at me and I dodged and he ended up in the koi pond. When he fell in the koi pond I realized that I wasn’t actually a Ninja Turtle, just an actor in a suit playing a Ninja Turtle, so I used the carefully hidden stones in the koi pond to make it look like I was walking on water (talisman magic) and went out to make fun of him. Then he stole the talisman, and some other stuff happened.

When I went inside to get the talisman back, I stopped at a little newstand and borrowed a pen to write something down in my notebook.

A few sequences later, I discovered that I was taking a break from tending to my fish tank. I then got back to working on my fish tank. There are a lot of small details that I remember about this part, but suffice it to say that it was a much larger tank than my real one and I was in the process of constructing a castle in one of the corners for my fish.</dream>

When you’re asleep or half-asleep, your mind doesn’t quite work right. For instance, I had my alarm clock set for 2p today and when it went off, I decided to answer it. By answer, I mean grabbing my alarm clock, pressing snooze, holding it to my ear and saying “Hello”. It must have been a wrong number because I think they hung up on me. I kept receiving calls on my alarm clock once every nine minutes until I figured out what was going on.

I bought a Snapple lemonade and a slice of pizza from Chicago’s for lunch a little bit ago. Now, let me tell you, that lemonade was everything that I had dreamed about, quite honestly.

<dream>I’m at some zoo with a bunch of people from my high school. Now, mind you, these are not my friends from high school or anything, just a bunch of the other people. So we do the whole zoo thing and on the way out I realize that I’m really thirsty so I make a bee line for the little refreshments stand at the entrance to the zoo. I notice a few people stopping at water fountains as I pass them. In my hurry I manage to make it to the entrance before everyone else. Noticing that they have a mini Dunkin’ Donuts I order me a nice fruit flavored Coolata and wait while it’s prepared. It turns out that the machine is broken and at this point the lead I got on everyone is lost and they’re all back at the bus waiting for me. Aggravated as I am, I’m still thirsty so I order a large lemonade, which is $2.32. I pay for the lemonade with two ones, a quarter, a nickel and two pennies. Now the damned lady won’t serve me my lemonade, she just makes me wait and wait and wait. Everyone is probably getting pissed because I’m making them wait and for the love of God, why won’t she just serve me my lemonade. Then I woke up.</dream>

So I got up, took a shower and then realized that I really did want a fucking Coolata. The problem of course was that I didn’t really want to bother walking to Dunkin’ Donuts up in Central Square so I decided to just go to soda fridge and get me a Minute Maid Fruit Soda. Then, soda fridge was out of Fruit Sodas. At this point, I was more than just a little aggravated, I was really fucking pissed off. Finally, I went to munchies and bought some citrus flavored Sobe drink, which managed to serve as a mediocre alternative.

So that’s my morning thus far, and quite frankly, I am really aggravated right now.