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Thursday, May 7th, 2009
the flower of my dream
is red and gold and ocher
evaporating Last night I was at work, trying to craft the perfect search for news articles containing images of flower petals; that is to say, the search which would return every valid hit and no false positives. This was quite tricky but did not seem as impossible as it does to my waking eye. The closing image of the dream was a computer screen; columns of text surrounding a picture of a flower, deep red petals radiating outward from a yellow center. The petals were peeling slowly up off the screen and floating into the æther.
posted morning of May 7th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
I've been enjoying having vivid dreams lately. I still do not remember nearly as many or as much of them as I would like, but the experience of dreaming them is very entertaining. It is starting to seem like an obvious choice to re-read Burroughs' My Education: a Book of Dreams, which is a pasting together of thirty years of his dreams, with some conversational writing in between talking about dreams, sometimes noting the circumstances of a dream, never analyzing the content of the dream. I read this quickly when it came out 14 years ago but did not, perhaps, let it sink in enough. Opening it now and looking at some of the dream passages, I notice Burroughs is not making any kind of effort to persuade me of the reality of the dream; instead he is flatly asserting he had this dream, and leaving it up to me to put myself in the dreaming head so that I can experience it. I'm up in a room with a high ceiling and a door at one end. The room is full of light and has a feeling of being open and airy. I float up to the ceiling and bob along to the door and out. There is a porch or balcony over the room and now I am up under the porch about thirty feet off the ground. I move out from under the porch and pick up speed and direction. Very little descriptive language, just a straight narration of the events in the dream. This is seeming at first glance like exactly the right way to present dreams. The style and furnishing of the room, the sensation of floating, the colors in my field of vision are all for me to experience for my own part as I in effect have the dream I'm reading about.
posted evening of April 22nd, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
I dreamt last night, at first, that I had made my way to Santiago and had sought out a famous poet (I cannot remember who; he was also a professor of literature) with the idea that he was going to enlighten me about Chilean poetry. We were sitting in the (oddly very noisy) university library and I was asking him, in better Spanish than I speak but still hardly fluent, to show me which books I should read to learn about poetry in Chile -- as we walked up the staircase I specified, yelling to make myself heard over the din, that I was interested in the latter half of the twentieth century. He brought me to the shelf of books on the topic; there was very little there, maybe 20 dog-eared books, half of them in translation -- it seemed very strange to me. I picked up the heavy Oxford Companion to Chilean Verse and started leafing through it. In the second half of the dream I was debugging a web server I had written to render the work of Nicanor Parra. (Highly specialized, yes.) Sylvia and her friend Giulia came in and wanted to read the poems, also they wanted to play baseball -- I gave them the computer and while swinging their bats, they read three short poems about morning -- the poems were lovely, though they did not sound much like Parra; the only one I remember is: On my birthday I arose
And drank the subtle
Health of morning.
posted morning of April 21st, 2009: Respond
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Monday, April 13th, 2009
This one has some potential! Many strands of weirdness from my own life and from the books I'm reading come together to bring us last night's dream:
 A dwarf modelled on Gimli is in charge of the divine source-code control system, which is (bizarrely IMO) quite similar to ClearCase1. A fix is in place which will allow people to "survive floods" -- as I understand it, Noah's flood is the intended meaning here; there is also a quick image of an infant being baptized. But because of a miscommunication, the dwarf releases this patch to production2 reality with code from an improper branch; people start dying in floods right and left, and the dwarf is dying of shame, possibly suicidal. We leave the dwarf and follow a different coder, who is figuring out what went wrong -- turns out different meanings of "flood" were getting mixed up. The flood addressed by the patch was not one of water but a sensory flood -- the modified code allows people to see Dust, which is overloading their cerebral cortices and causing them to stop functioning. Some very pleasant dream-images around here, and I soon woke up.
 1 One advantage to a ClearCase-like system, it would allow for the designers to model an HDM sort of branching multiplicity of universes.
2 There was no mention in the dream of a test platform, but this is of course an interesting question -- could our reality be a test platform for new designs and bug fixes?
posted morning of April 13th, 2009: 4 responses
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Monday, February 16th, 2009
Drawn! links to a collection of children's dreams with illustration and narrative: El Monstruo de Colores no tiene Boca. (Thanks for sharing this, badger!)
posted evening of February 16th, 2009: 4 responses
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Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Strangeness -- last night I dreamt I was smoking up with Chris and Gary Gordon (blast from the past! With his floppy mohawk and everything! The only connection I know of between these two is Louisiana) on the second floor of a duplex apartment, which I believe belonged to me. I looked out the window at the street and saw a police car behaving strangely, driving jerkily in reverse; and somehow without meaning to, made eye contact with the driver. Rats! I heard him stopping down the street, I heard the sound of stalking feet, thought I'd better go down and see if I can get rid of them -- I went down without telling Chris and Gary, opened the door to the knocking cops, and was sort of glad-handing them, good to see they're in the neighborhood keeping watch, everything's fine around here... They went back to the kitchen with me and suggested we ought to sit down and have a beer. I agreed hesitantly but there was no brew in the fridge; instead I pulled out a bottle of water and poured glasses for all, spilling a lot of water on the table as I did -- while I was sponging it up, Chris and Gary came downstairs curious (Gary had a box of freeze-dried soup called "South Georgia Lemon Stew" which he asked me to prepare for his dinner, he was hungry and thought that would remind him of his childhood in Georgia), and meanwhile a lot of other people started showing up with questions and expectations. ...The closing image of the dream is Eva arriving at the door, in a white stretch SUV. I thought at the time that she was driving it, but reconstructing the scene I find that she was sitting in the front passenger seat.
 A second dream dealt somehow with Britain and the Falkland Islands, which had however been transplanted to continental Europe north of the Crimea -- this made very little sense to me and I kept pointing at a map with the appropriate regions shaded in and asking how come they would still be called islands when they were now inland. No memory of the context of this dream however.
posted morning of January 21st, 2009: Respond
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Monday, January 19th, 2009
I had my first-ever His Dark Materials-based dream last night! Can't remember it other than that it was extremely involved and plotted out in detail. I did not have a dæmon, most of the people I interacted with did, so I'm guessing I was a person from this world who had passed through into Lyra's world. (Note: Is Will's world "this world," the world of the reader? It certainly seems to be -- nothing about it seems unfamiliar, in the limited view of it we have gotten.) Many characters from the books were in the dream but interestingly they were all adult characters, where the main characters of the books are children. That reminded me of something I had been meaning to write about The Subtle Knife -- I don't remember this being the case as much in The Golden Compass* -- which is that there's just a ton of exposition. I haven't been keeping track exactly, but so far there have been at least three occasions of a character speaking for multiple pages, narrating the story-so-far to another character and, obviously, to the reader. Not sure what to make of this -- some of the narration is filling in needed plot points, some of it is confirming stuff I had already figured out from reading the book-so-far... I had a thought that maybe this was "because HDM is children's lit" -- that the intended audience won't have made all the connections, so Pullman is bringing them out explicitly. Maybe that's right, I don't know -- I'm finding it a bit of a distraction.
 * (Just remembered one instance of this in The Golden Compass -- it was integrated really nicely into the story there, where these feel a bit more patched-on.)
posted morning of January 19th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 10th, 2009
An anxiety dream last night about the code I am maintaining: a customer reported a bug, which on analysis proved to be a corruption in shared memory caused by the customer's input. When a year was specified in the date parameter, the corruption would occur -- if only month and day were specified, everything was ok. It was pretty mysterious how this would not have been discovered years ago as the section of code governing this parameter had not been modified in a long time; but the bug was pretty easy to track down and fix. Except, a little later I was talking to my boss and he thought I had told him the bug was not fixable and we would have to find a workaround. I was going crazy trying to figure out how to respond to this because I had forgotten where I had put the fix in and I had not commented it or kept any records...
 Later in the night, I dreamed I was examining and modifying the source code for my dreams. It was not clear how or whether I would be able to recompile and distribute the fixes to my consciousness.
posted morning of January 10th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, January second, 2009
A cartoon fairy tale last night in which I (in the form of a small toon animal) and two other such creatures were travelling down the river on a small raft, chased by a gang of foxes in a rowboat. Our raft was smaller and easier to portage than the rowboat, and we seemed to be continually on the cusp of a resolution with moral that it's better to be small, virtuous and resourceful than big, mean and wily; but somehow that never came, and we had to keep on running with the foxes on our tail.
posted morning of January second, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, December 28th, 2008
An interestingly cerebral dream last night: I was with Mike Lopes and one other guy, and was taking a pill that allowed me to forget the names (and functions) of objects in my field of vision. This was fun and entertaining, and led me to a realization that this was the inherent nature of surrealist art, separating objects from their names. That led to a long dialogue about whether surrealist fiction was possible, since naming objects is a sine qua non of language.
Another dream from later in the night was set in Denmark: The Danish authorities had issued an edict that any foreign national who broke wind while visiting Denmark would be asked to leave the country. I was in the customs office; I had a fart-arbitrage get-rich-quick scheme which involved importing beans and exporting blue cheese and was trying to get the necessary paperwork in order.
posted morning of December 28th, 2008: Respond
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