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.