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Sunday, February 20th, 2005
Been a while since I did one of these... In my dream last night, there was a small fad amongst the educated bloggers, to come up with words with a high number and variety of shades of meaning, and then to write a snarky post exploiting the variance... I think this stemmed from the debate between Katherine and Rilkefan at Obsidian Wings, over whether the Bush administration's lies merit the term "lies" or not. Anyways, I was reading a post on one of the language mavens' blogs, introducing a new twist -- his idea was to pick a word with many shades of meaning, and write rhyming definitions for all of those meanings. (He cheated a bit by ending all of his definitions with a participle, naturally they all rhymed.) He also used some interesting invented words in the definitions but I am not sure whether this was part of the game or part of the dream-reality. Meanwhile Tom Tomorrow was writing a narrative comic strip about his being given a mansion by the widow of a wealthy industrialist -- the mansion was in the town of Tomorrow, California, in the Sierra foothills. I entered into the strip's reality and added a storyline in which my mother was ballooning in the foothills and landed by the Tomorrow mansion. Scooby-doo-esque adventures ensued (with a bit of a darker edge) but I don't remember any of the details.
posted morning of February 20th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, April 6th, 2004
In this dream I simultaneously am watching a movie (or something like a movie) and am a character, or several characters, in it. The dream-cinematography is shot from a God's-eye point of view, looking down from on high, with quick cuts to shots from the point of view of the characters. We see a village on the banks of the Colorado River -- middle-class American suburbia of the late 20th Century. One night everyone goes to sleep... When I wake up, groggy, I can't quite tell what it is that seems different -- everything's changed somehow. Everyone in town feels the same way but no-one can quite remember where we are or what we're supposed to be doing. For instance it seems like there is supposed to be a lot of water somewhere; everything's so dry. A professor at the local college works out that we have all been asleep for a billion years, and slept through major geological change; the river that was once there has been covered over by hundreds of feet of sedimentary accretion. (The physical town, instead of being buried, has somehow floated on top of the sediment, and has not deteriorated.) My house, it turns out, is directly above the old river and will have to be destroyed in order to dig down to the river bed -- I feel some resentment and "why me?" My wife is running a load of laundry (the machines are located, oddly enough, on the third floor) and I notice a bulge running across the floor -- still groggy I wonder idly if this is something to do with the geological changes; suddenly shocked into awareness I realize that the drainpipe is clogged and our plumbing is going to burst from the strain on it. Will I be too late to fix things? This is the cliff-hanger ending.
posted morning of April 6th, 2004: Respond
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Monday, April 5th, 2004
Fitful sleep last night with scattered images. I was at work when everybody left the building to participate in a funeral procession for a friend of one of the traders. It was huge, masses of people marching through the streets; one of the people I was with yelled to one of the others that he thought our group was creating too much of a stir in the procession which it had been late to join -- the response was "But he was a Tiger!" -- I took this to mean that he had been from Detroit or had gone to school there -- this was accepted as valid reasoning. The march seemed to have no destination; we were walking down a freeway which I identified as CA rte. 99 in the foothills of the coast range -- I decided that I would walk as far as the peak of the next hill and then turn back. By the time I got there the rest of the procession had melted away and it was evening, I was looking back over the long vista of the Central Valley. I was at Hoboken and noticed my train had a baggage car in front of the engine, quite unusual as (a) the trains are usually just passenger cars and (b) the baggage car was open shelves. I was carrying Sylvia's Clifford doll and Hello Kitty doll plus some suitcases and decided to leave the stuffed animals in the baggage car. Then walked down to where I was going to sit and put my suitcases down there. I then thought to ask the conductor whether I would be able to get at the baggage car when the train stopped in South Orange; could not find a conductor so I walked up to the engine and asked the engineer, who shook his head mournfully. So I picked up the stuffed animals and was walking back to my seat when I noticed a cop following me. I started running -- at this moment the train pulled out of the station and I jumped toward it, holding on to a rod projecting from the side -- the cop did likewise and we had an exciting chase scene but I can't really remember much of it. I was looking in the window of a new general store and noticed a box of old tools for sale -- the (quite fat) owner was standing near me and I asked if the store was opening soon; he said not for another month at least but if I wanted to go in and look around that would be alright. So I went in -- the store was quite full of people for one that was not yet open -- I saw a really nice old set of weights but decided it was too bulky and I was too far from home, to spend any time actually debating whether to buy it or not. I found the tool box and looked through it -- not much there except an interesting brace and bit. There was some pretty weird looking machinery behind it but again, too much effort involved in transporting it for me to spend any time on it. I asked the owner if I could buy that brace -- a lot of the people in this store were making transactions so I think his saying it was not yet open was purely pro forma -- and he said it was 50¢. Then I got involved with trying to get it shipped to me, can't figure out why I would have needed this, and trying to find a box of the right size.
posted morning of April 5th, 2004: Respond
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Saturday, April third, 2004
We were visiting the Bay Area and dropped in unannounced on my Uncle John and Aunt Jane -- it turned out to be a kind of bad time for a visit as stuff was pretty hectic there -- Jane's daughter Heather (who was only 5 or so in the dream world) was screaming because she did not want to go to bed, and John was on his way out the door going to a conference of some kind. I felt kind of embarrassed that our main reason for coming was to get John's opinion on the plausibility of a plot device we had seen in a science fiction movie (I can't remember what, something to do with rockets) and was trying to make small talk, which was not really working. Sylvia also started wailing. John made a date with us for the following Friday afternoon, and we headed back to where we were staying.
posted morning of April third, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, March 30th, 2004
I ran into Maurice while walking down Eighth or Ninth Avenue in midtown -- I was taken aback as he is one of the last people I would expect to run into on the streets of New York; he has been sojourning in Perth for a few years now. I asked "Are you Maurice McGinley?" and he replied with a congenial grin, "I'm Patrick Conley!" (No idea.) He wasn't saying much as I walked east with him -- on Seventh Avenue was an abandoned construction site, where he was now living. I watched as with each step he took into his grotto, his veneer of a functioning member of society came away; when he reached the bottom his clothing was in tatters and leprous scabs around his waste were oozing pus. I was gripped by dread as I tried to resolve myself to follow him but before I could act, I woke up.
posted afternoon of March 30th, 2004: Respond
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Wednesday, March 17th, 2004
Last night (in the context of a longer dream which I cannot remember), I went to visit Robert Volokh, a former co-conspirator who had stopped blogging after fighting with Juan ("and other non-Volokhs", was the text of the dream, but I am not sure quite what this meant) over the excessively moderate nature of his posts... Robert had summoned to his abode a cabal of widely-read liberal bloggers -- I'm not sure quite why I was there, maybe in my role as taker of minutes or maybe I was tagging along with somebody else. I can't really remember who all was there but at least one Timberite, and probably Atrios. The gist of the matter was that Robert had written an Important Post on his rarely-updated personal blog and was requesting that people link to it. He was quite a mystical figure and seemed to be held in deep reverence by the assembled party. There was no actual ring-kissing but people did seem quite honored to be granted this audience.
posted morning of March 17th, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, December 30th, 2003
My brother had a gig working as a clown at a party. I believe the location was a university campus or library, not sure. I was in his dressing room and was not sure whether to wish him good luck or say "break a leg!" so I settled for the universally-recognized thumbs up. Went in to the party and the only other person in attendance was Ophelia Benson, whom I knew at a glance. We were asked to write down a favorite quote and pass it up to the front of the room with our name on the same paper. Ophelia started, and passed me a stack of paper to use and pass along. (The room was starting to fill up.) All I could think of was "'Tis prithee to be wise" and I was about to write that down when I started thinking, that doesn't mean anything -- did anyone actually say that? I thought maybe I was misquoting and started hunting around for what word I could be misremembering as "prithee" -- "pissy"? "Shitty"? Well I locked onto "'Tis shitty to be wise" and could think of nothing else -- meanwhile I was missing my brother's act, I wasn't passing along the stack of paper (it consisted of old newsprint and Ophelia's notes, which were in red ballpoint), people were getting impatient.
posted afternoon of December 30th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, December 28th, 2003
A weird montage of images in my head. I was talking to Jim, asking him which Hudson River crossing he thought would be best to use when I drive north tomorrow; he did not have much to say on the subject so I included Carl in the conversation. Carl thought GWB was the way to go before 8 in the morning. We decided to fly over the route in his plane. (This part of the dream memory is extremely vague -- there needs to be some transition to the next image.) Now we are sitting in Carl's plane looking at the freeway system, looks like a very big map. And now somehow, we are eating in a restaurant in NYC, a very expensive restaurant where everything is going wrong. Transition to a restaurant-kitchen setting of a sitcom, where the chef (very fat Andrew, who was in my class at Natural Gourmet) is not able to control the kitchen staff and relies instead on the maitre d'hote, a short, thin black man who is overly fond of liverwurst, to keep things going. The maitre d' is on vacation (in Vienna, looking for the perfect liverwurst) and things are falling apart. Sylvia told me the nature of her dream when she woke up this morning -- "There was a dinosaur movie called, called 'Dinosaur Planet'. It had a scary part and parts that were not scary" -- but would give no more detail.
posted morning of December 28th, 2003: Respond
➳ More posts about Sylvia
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Wednesday, December 17th, 2003
Been a while since I did one of these... Last night Nathaniel and I had tickets to hear Dolly Parton at a small venue in the city. When we arrived, Nathaniel crawled in through the most immediately available entrance, a hole in the wall above the back door (which was locked). I was too bulky for this means of ingress so I walked around to the front door. When we gave our tickets to the man at the front counter, we had to spend what seemed like an inordinately long time proving our identities by means of photo ID's; the first one I showed him was too blurry, the second was poorly posed; then I showed him a photo of myself and Sylvia but with no ID attached to it -- this he deemed sufficient. Nathaniel went right in to the concert but I lingered in the anteroom, where there was a bar, a florist and a restaurant of some kind, sushi IIRC. I bought a bouquet of roses -- I was not sure what for but eventually decided they were to give to Dolly. Some guys from my office were sitting at the bar, talking about the show, which you could see through an open doorway. (NB this does not jive with a detail from the second part of the dream; I take no responsibility for such dissonances.) I noticed that in addition to songs, they were performing anti-drug commercials which had recently been on TV starring Dolly's sister. The guys from my office were discussing these commercials, making lists of which ones they had seen already. At the intermission Nathaniel came out to talk to me, quite disheveled and enthusiastic. We went inside together and I told him I had bought flowers for Ms. Parton, and asked whether it would be appropriate to give them to her. I noticed she was sitting talking to some people in the audience, which seemed unusual. Nathaniel thought it might be proper to give her the flowers after the show. Then the second set started; I saw that what I had thought was a stage, was actually a bar -- Dolly and the band were sitting behind it as if they were customers and the audience were a collective bartender. There was a rilly cool visual effect when Dolly sneezed and all the lights went down instantaneously; in the pitch darkness, the point where your eye was drawn by the sneeze was illuminated with the logo of the company sponsoring the concert. (No, I don't remember what the company was.) The lights went back up and they started singing a song which sounded kind of like a number from "The Pajama Game"... Around this time I woke up.
posted morning of December 17th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, September 30th, 2003
Home Improvement day at the theater Tonight I was watching a movie and decided to bring along to the theater, the table I was working on -- it was nearly done and I did not want to lose the time of working on it. People curiously were not annoyed by my sawing, planing and sanding, or anyway no-one said anything -- there was quite a bit of vocal annoyance directed toward the woman sitting more towards the front of the theater, who was laying some floor tiles. When the movie was over I saw Gary and Suzie leaving the theater. They came over and said hi, and admired the table. Gary wanted advice about what style of legs to use for a table he was building; stifling an impulse to say "cabriole", I said it was hard to say without knowing what the table looked like and what context it would be in.
posted morning of September 30th, 2003: Respond
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