Extremes: Nightmare, then Wet Dream

            Nightmare

 

            Ds spirit came back to steal L away from Mom and Dad. It started while we were all gathered in the living room. L was playing on the floor, suddenly, the cat door flew open. There are no more cats, so the door has been closed with the slider insert for awhile now. The main slider then opened.

            Mom started to say something about cat ghosts, but then L recognized her daddy.

            "Don't be a bad daddy!" she yelled, then tried to crawl to Mom.

            Before she could reach Mom, Moms Rocker flew backwards and dumped her against the wall. Mom was out cold. I was on the floor with L and found myself surrounded by cold air. I could feel the anger in the cold, but it was not focused on me or even L, it was just generic anger. Dad was frozen in place.

            "You could help her rather than frightening her." I stated, trying not to get angry myself.

            L stood upright and shouted in surprise. D’s spirit frog marched her towards the back of the house. L kicked her one good leg and trying to turn around.

            I figured if ghosts are real then angels and gods might be, too. I uttered a quick prayer, mangled I'm sure from lack of use. I was almost frozen in place and found it difficult to chase after them. Suddenly I broke free just as L turned the corner into her room.

            I couldn't stop him, he was too fast. I finally had to call for help. As I raced around the corner of the hall a child version of SP with long straight brown hair , dressed in a blue frock with a white apron, very Alice in Wonderland, appeared and caught L just before she would have been lifted out the open window and taken away. I reached them in time to take L from the fading little angel. The angel indicated that she'd taken that form so as not to frighten L further. She then shot out the window, growing as she went after the malicious spirit.

 

            The second dream was full on Wet Dream. I started out taking pictures. Lots of happy full hipped women and me were cavorting around a western style ranch house. The women were making good use of every room and every fairly horizontal surface by the time the dream was interrupted by the alarm.

 

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No Memory of Dreams for Me this Morning.

Dream memories wrecked by the wrong combination of annoying music and needy felines.

 

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The Bathtub Monster Dimension.

            I dreamed I was in a bathtub with the drain into a deep dark basement; one that I'd not known existed. I must have spent ten or fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to open the drain up enough to get down there to check it out. I then had the logical thought that I could just pick up the whole tub enclosure and go underneath it that way.

            Once the tub was up, I discovered there was just a slab with the drain connection in the bottom of a plastic square overflow pan. There was nothing down below.

            I put the tub back, and I could see down into the basement again through the tub overflow. Apparently the tub was the portal, and the portal was only visible through the drain itself and the overflow.       Just at the edge of my sight line I saw something grey and ropey moving out of view. I’d discovered the bathtub monster dimension. That's why no one could ever really find where drain monsters come from; the drain is the only portal! I wondered if I could get a light and a camera in there. When I came back with the webcam and the laptop, the portal had closed. I guess the drain monsters are as afraid of us as we are of them. Also I discovered that the portal is only open if there is water in the tub. (It doesn’t have to be a lot of water.)

 

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Buried Treasures, Portal to Another Time or World

            Still having a problem with my sleep cycle. Dreams are sort of choppy and more random than usual. This morning I had one five or six minute stretch that hung together in a single story:

            I dreamed I was in my old office at MCHS. The AV room was being dismantled for the coming renovations and I was helping move stuff out of cabinets. We pulled everything out and moved it to another room. When we got to the desk, and cabinets next to the desk, there were papers behind them that had been trapped against the wall, some since the school opened. Some of them had my writing on them, others had my dad's writing, and some were from the first AV tech. One of them was a game map from my very first squad level game test (RPG club helped with that play test in about 1996.)

            My dream then stopped being rational. I found a keychain from a Nevada city, several quarters, and a set of blueprints that showed a basement. The basement access was under the cabinets. We pulled the cabinets all the way out from the wall, and sure enough, there was a trap door in the floor.

            Dropping down into the basement was like dropping into another world. The light was different, the temperature was almost refrigerator cold. There were stacks of books and filmstrip kits of all sorts. I started to wander around and discovered several old projectors, still in their shipping cases, never opened. There was an electric cart, several tackling dummies still in plastic. The basement went back under the MDF and into the area below the textbook room. There was a door, my master key unlocked it. A hallway ran all the way to the center of campus and then branched off in three other directions. One path went under the theater, where there were literally hundreds of spare lamps and lenses and hardware for hanging lighting instruments.

            Another path went out to the science building where there were cages for small animals along both sides of the hallway. All of them were empty.

            The last path curved back to the admin building. There were hundreds of cases of paper, the ones on the bottom of the pallets looked like the boxes had been nibbled by critters. Other boxes looked almost new except for the layer of dust on the top boxes. There was a file cabinet with photos of all the first year's students, and empty folders for future years, as though it had been started, then forgotten about. We found an access way to a stair well and climbed out into a giant cave where the office should have been.

            The sun shone into the cave and we headed out into the daylight. We were on the side of a hill overlooking a forested valley.

            "Now I know why they sealed it off."

            I looked at VM and raised an eyebrow. "You'd think this would have been a big deal, portal to another world and all."

            "School wouldn't have opened on time, if at all. Can you imagine what a ruckus this would cause? We shouldn't tell anyone either." V turned and took the others with him into the cave.

            I just couldn't go back so climbed a nearby pile of rocks to see around better. I could make out the ocean in the distance. There were some large birds in the air, about twice the size of our California Buzzards. In the distance I could see a golden plain with several large animals moving through it and lifting the stalks of grain into their mouths with their trunks. For some reason the wooly mammoths didn't surprise me, but the silvery disks whipping through the air at supersonic speed did. I waved at the second flight I'd spotted, but they continued over the hills into the distance.

            I thought about hiking it down to the beach, but got worried about saber tooth tigers or wolves. I seemed to recall that large mammoths also meant large predators. I turned to go back into the cave, but it wasn't there.

            I then found myself spiraling up into the air, and then into the belly of a flying saucer. Inside were all globs of intelligent color and binging noises. I was then shot through a series of tubes and spun around a couple of dozen times. I could see out the porthole on the bottom of the saucer as we shot out over the ocean and then under it. The saucer raced past several large sea mammals with hand-like fins and flukes. The underwater beasts were obviously whales, and they had woven kelp into baskets which were hanging off their sides like saddlebags or purses. Tools of indefinable purpose were loosely held in their nearly useless hand/flippers. I'd seen a couple of kelp mats that had almost looked like this; I'd thought they'd been natural. (This was a Dream Memory, not a real memory.)

            There was a game of connect four involved at this point.

            Who knew that flying saucers would leak when underwater? I found myself free of the spinning and lights, but standing ankle deep in seawater that was warmer than I ever remember the Pacific Ocean off our shores. I began to wonder where/when I really was.

            More tubes and intelligent colors, more binging noises. There was a loud rumble and I tumbled out of, something, the saucer? I couldn't tell, I was too busy falling into the sand dunes and piles of laundry just off of the beach. There were several skeletons in with the laundry. I picked up a few garments that looked like they might still be serviceable, and found a construction hard hat that would fit. There was a broken thermos, a cracked leather tool belt with some electrician's tools in it, and a couple of pairs of boots that looked like they might fit. I made myself a little bundle of artifacts and headed for the beach.

            The beach was populated by attractive women in short leather tunics that laced at the side. All of them had dark hair and eyes, and they were all surprised at my presence. None of them spoke English. Latin and Spanish seemed to be out also. One of them offered me something to eat, a tuber of some sort. I traded her a few M&Ms; they were all the food I had on me. She squealed with obvious delight and called the others over to share them. I was sad I didn't have more.

             The tide was creeping in this whole time, and finally it rolled up around our calves. One of the women was too slow to grab her basket and it was swept out into the ocean. She wailed after it. I handed one of the women the tool belt and swam out to get the basket. The women were shouting unintelligibly behind me. It only took me a couple of minutes to reach it and bring it back to shore. Everyone was crowded around watching me, now up on the dunes. As I came out of the water, they started pointing and shouting. I turned around and saw dolphin fins scatter as a killer whale surfaced in their midst. That was why no one went after the basket. I began to get that "we're not in Kansas anymore" feeling.

            One of the women had dumped the tool belt onto a woven mat and was trying to figure out what the tools were for. Another had taken the flathead screwdriver and used to force open a clam. Soon the men returned from their hunting expedition. They were not as friendly as the women, until the tale of my swimming after the basket was told.  Near as I could figure, it was the swimming part that was impressive.

            I woke up along a stream under a willow tree. I heard a ringing; there was a phone in the bottom of the tool belt. I answered the phone, and then there was more spinning and tubes and colors. I was back at MCHS, but the hills were covered with Oak Trees and there was a stream running past the edge of the campus. I looked out towards the ocean.

The maze of housing developments was missing. In its place was a large forest with scattered houses and fields. I called home. “The number you have reached is not in service.”

I called my parents, they answered. I asked them for my home number. It was not anything I recognized. I called home. Someone other than N answered. She recognized me, and was wondering why I was calling so early in the day. I asked her for my work number. She was confused, more so than I, but gave it to me. I called it. I answered it.

“Wow, this is a funky dream.” We both spoke at the same time. I (at work) agreed to come over to MCHS and pick myself up.

Dream blew itself apart into Dr Seuss looking cars and more lights and tubes and spinning. Oh, and an ear ache. (The ear ache didn’t go away when I awoke.)

           

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Driving the Bus Dream.

OK, it was more like standing on the brakes of the bus. Trying to stop the bus from shooting through the intersection at the bottom of the hill. I do occasionally have variations of this dream where I'm successful at that endeavor. Not this time though.
The light was red, I wasn't going to stop the bus, everyone ran to the back and I started honking the air horn just before we passed through the intersection. Somehow I managed to miss hitting several cars. I then noticed that we were coming up to a "T" intersection. I thought about putting the bus in reverse to slow us down, but I didn't want to risk blowing up the engine. I was down shifted all the way to first gear and the transmission was whining as loud as the horn. I managed to slide around the corner of the intersection by scraping the bus against the side of a building.

I headed up hill and shut the engine off.

Hotel Room Dreams

Are always strange. Short, disjointed. N going in to shower and the passthrough door opening to reveal strangers who say "Just walk away..."

No that I could tell what they were doing anyway.

Random clips from past dreams. A few moments at work. An incident involving a horned toad that can only have come from my childhood. (Who knew they would be incontinent?)

Not on the regular system to don't have access to my normal editor.

This looks very odd.

Sky Castle and Documentary Dreams

Sky Castle Crash Landing
      I dreamed I was walking along the engineering deck of a large flying castle. I could see the huge furnaces across a thirty foot space from the deck where several people fed coals into chutes that rolled down out of sight. I was with the chief engineer and the Lord of the castle as he gave a tour of the facility to some guests. I was along to answer any technical questions that might arise. We walked past two non-working elevator shafts and entered the third one we came to.
Elevators
      I explained, in answer to a question from one of the guests, that our population had diminished over the years, so we didn't maintain all of the elevators. Only the one on this level. The far elevator had been turned into a storage silo for the castle's emergency gear. The central one was now used as a large conduit for the many steam tubes and communications tubes that now ran through the entire city. It also had a fire pole so that engineers and techs could move rapidly down into the lifting decks.
Infrastructure: Steam and Tube
      The Lord asked me to take our engineering inclined guests on a tour of the infrastructure. I took them on a tour of the steam and speaking tubes in the central elevator shaft. We then made our way to the Babbage engine room. There was a huge clanking computational device, we used it to track our motion and fuel consumption as well as to run some weather prediction simulations. It was all steam driven pulleys and stops and meshing gears.
      The output bezels shown in the ruddy light of gas lamps and numbers carved in ivory spun under the bezels and slowly locked into position. I showed them the outlook at the front of the lift station and the gauges that showed our airspeed and altitude. I noticed that the altitude gauge was decreasing a couple of hundred feet a minute. As I ushered our guests into the Victorian wallpapered elevator car, I leaned out to one of the calculators and asked him to check the airspeed and altitude again, then to get back to me.
      While we were in the elevator I heard echoes of a loud bang and rumble. It was far different to me than the normal sounds of the flying castle, so I knew there was trouble brewing. I stayed calm and got the party reunited with the other guests. The Lord of the Castle was waiting for my chief engineer as we saw our guest's dirigible cast off.
      As we were waving goodbye to our guests the chief engineer puffed into sight. His news wasn't good, and the Lord of the castle immediately ordered a civilian evacuation.
      The engineer and I conferred for a moment, and I raced to the central shaft to ride the fire pole down to the engineering decks to see if we could at least guide the city in for a safe landing.
Strip Mall
      I stopped on the shopping level, racing for the elevator storage shaft on the far end. I told people to get to transport unless they were engineers, then they needed to report to their emergency stations. I helped one of my engineering assistants out of her flowing Victorian dress and bustle.
      "Are you going to strip me out of my corset, too?"
      "No time! Now get going we need you in navigation to prep the escape launches." I dragged her by the elbow and pushed her towards the communications shaft. She slid down the fire pole ahead of me.
The Third Elevator shaft
      Upon reaching the engineering deck we parted company, she headed forward and myself aft to the emergency storage unit in the third elevator shaft. I was the first one to arrive with a key, so rushed up to unlock the doors. The crew began to pull out the emergency launches, which were filled with crates, and in the crates were thick rubbery tubes, thick brass cylinders with clock work mechanisms and several large javelins with trailing tubes of some sort. Each launch was dragged to the mouth of a coal chute and unpacked.
      I unlimbered the first javelin and showed them how to hold it so the power tube would unroll properly behind it. I stepped onto the stone crenelation next to the coal chute nearest the elevator.
      I looked out across the gap into the flames of the furnace. The fuel oil logs were just making their way down the chute into the flaming maws of the furnace some sixty feet below. The other engineers raced to their chutes and when they were all on top of their stations I pulled back to throw.
Powertap Javelin Toss
      Eight of us threw our javelins at once. All but one struck the fiery openings at the base of their chutes. I jumped back to the deck and raced down to where the steps went down into the flaming pit. There was a pool of water there, I dove into it and pulled myself out, drenched on the other side. Instead of running down the hot steps, I poured water on the stair rail and slid down to the bottom. Finding the cable for the missed javelin, I managed to untangle it and pull it back to myself. I got as close to the furnace opening as I could, and launched the javelin in. Steam was pouring off my clothing. Navigation was calling for full power, my crews were waiting for me to get back up, but I knew we might not have time.
      "Chutes one through 6 fire up now! No arguments!"
      I turned and ran for the stairs when I heard the shouts of success and anger mixed from above. Soon the shouts were drowned out by the sounds of wooden barrels crashing down iron chutes into furnace mouths. Each barrel exploded on contact, heat and flame spilling back into the lower furnace room at my back. By the time I got to the top of the stairs, my crew had found a bucket and doused the back of my flaming clothing.
Stoking the Furnaces
      Navigation came over the speaking tubes, all emergency lifting rotors were deployed, they needed full power, now. Part of the load in each launch was a half dozen barrels of fuel oil. We rolled the barrels down the chutes for furnace seven and eight. Each barrel crashed into the furnace below with a loud Foom!
Suiting up and Prepping for the Fall
      "Strip down and suit up now!" I shouted to my engineers and technicians.
      Everyone started pulling off clothing and reaching into the crates for the rubbery tubes. The emergency suits were a sort of living, rubbery material. Sealing the tubes,around the waist, neck elbows wrists, knees and ankles was the first step. I had to tell a couple of my gals that they couldn't were their corsets under their suits, they had to come off.
      "Modesty or your life, your choice." It was harsh but the only thing I could think to tell them. "You can put it back on top if we have time."
      I didn't say anything about how nice they were built but I was sure thinking it.
      Once the tubes were in place and sealed, there were tabs to be pulled and connected to each of the other tubes. A water and air sealed film grew out of the tubes and covered our bodies in a thick rubbery layer of projection. I noticed that while we were suiting up the launches were charging from the power taps below. Blue-white light filled the joints in the plating of the launches, and slowly they lifted from the deck.
      The helmet of the suit was created by placing a thick rubbery circle and molding it around your eyes like a pair of goggles. Its tabs connected to the rings on the neck of the suit. There was a goggle piece that went over the tube sealing against it. At that point you only had a few minutes of air trapped in the suit with you. That is where the brass windup canisters came in. They were CO2 scrubbers and oxygen tanks, each one would last about 4 hours. There were two tanks per suit, and there were several extra suits. I ordered everyone to connect just one tank and to stick the other one to their beltline for later. I had all the senior engineers hold on to the extras.
Sinking City
      I ordered everyone into the boats, we lifted off the deck and hovered near the ceiling in the heat and smoke of the furnaces. From that height, I could see out past the furnaces, we were coming down, slowly, but still dropping. We were over a large inland sea, not far from the shore.
      Navigation reported that everyone had abandoned the city, they had taken control cables and were 200 feet above the control room in their escape launch.
      The city struck the surface of the sea. Even though the city was only moving a few feet per second, the mass and displacement was tremendous. The city shuddered. I could hear things breaking as the shock wave rumbled its way through the city. The furnace room floor cracked. A portal opened near the ceiling and seven of the launches shot out into space. I knew they would have a six or seven hour trip to re-enter the atmosphere and land back aboard the city, presuming we didn't vanish beneath the water. My launch stayed with the ship. Our momentum carried us rapidly towards the floor, but we managed to just kiss the floor of the engineering room without harm. I could hear the water rushing into the furnace room below. There was the hiss of steam and the entire engineering room filled with steam as the sea poured into the raging furnaces, extinguishing them. We jumped from the launch, each racing to a furnace control, each opening the huge vents and the emergency fuel dumps. Only three of the eight were able to open the dumps, all of the vents opened. Soon the steam began to condense out of the air. It was raining from the ceiling. I could see out the windows of the engineering level, the surface of the lake drew closer and closer to the level of the windows. The water began to rise in the furnace room. We no longer had power to open up the escape portal. The launch was too large to fit through the opening on the observation deck, and far too large to go through the porthole like windows.
      I felt the deck shudder beneath our feet. We'd struck bottom, at least on the aft half of the city. The deck began to tilt. My crew raced back to the launch. On slipped on the wet sloping stonework and cracked open her face plate. Her exposed face immediately turned red. Another engineer pulled her to her feet and touched her goggle frame to his own faceplate. The two suits merged. We had to help them into the launch. The stairs forward into the furnace area overflowed and the city bottomed out on the forward end. The water in the area sloshed forward and then crashed against the bulkheads, popping open the door between Engineering and Navigation. The water surged back but didn't come quite to the level of the launch.
      My crew as silent. I looked where they were looking out the observation deck. The engineering observation deck was partly under water; water was pouring into the whole engineering section. Some wanted to go aft and wait for rescue, gambling that the aft part of the engineering room would be above water when we stopped sinking. If not, we would always be able to swim out.
      I suggested we head for the first elevator. The elevator car was on the deck below us. We forced open the doors and were just able to get the launch into the shaft on the diagonal. We floated gently up the shaft in darkness. Every snap, every crash, every reverberation of destruction was amplified by the shaft. I could hear the city collapsing in slow motion all around us. We came to the Plaza level and forced the doors open. A cheer went up as we sailed out into the open night air. Steam rose from the sea all around the city. The Navigation Blimp was to starboard and only 50 feet above the surface of the water. We angled over to them to offer assistance.
      The city still had sections of lights on, but was mostly dark. Several dirigibles were visible high in the sky, all were angling down towards the city. I spotted the Lord of the City's airship and ordered one of my crew to message them that all engineers had gotten away safely. Aircraft were racing low towards the nearby shore, barely visible above the large wave that followed them.
      I knew our pilots were trying to warn the communities on the shore about the wave that we'd generated. I found myself wishing I'd kept all my engineers here, we'd have been able to lend assistance with our launches. I was sure there was going to be some mild flood damage. I could tell the City Lord had thought of that too, several of his attendant fleet broke off from their path to the fallen city and headed towards the nearby shore, all of them flashing white truce lights on the front of them while signaling a tsunami warning as well.
      The city shifted under us and slid about 15 feet towards deeper water.
      I ordered my engineers into four teams, each to go aft and try to fire the sky anchors into the depths of the water. As soon as they were out of the launch I headed for the Navication Blimp. I didn't know if we could stop the city from sinking further, but wanted to try. There was a pet cat in my quarters, and I would suspect several others as well, that we might be able to save. Not to mention all of the property still in the city.
      I found myself wondering if we could ever lift the city out of the water. I also wondered about living on an island tilted at 10 degrees or so, could we make a go of it?
      When we reached the navigation blimp I could see that it had been damaged and was loosing buoyancy. Fortunately we now had room for the navigators aboard the launch. My shopping colleague had put her new corset on over her life suit, making for a very sexy picture, much more so than if she'd just been in the form fitting survival suit. I decided not to tell her that and just enjoy the view.

Filming a Documentary
      The director of many films in the early 2000s was focused on many adult erotic topics. I was interviewing and filming he and his wife when he dropped his fur coat and sprinted for the house. His wife struggled to lift his fur coat from the road. She didn't want me to help, as she was pretending I wasn't there. She donned the coat and made her way unsteadily to the line of Rolls Royce autos along their driveway.
      Her husband was running around on all fours, barking. She started picking up golf balls from her front lawn and tossing them between the cars for her husband to chase down. I was recording all of this. The golf balls kept flying past me with her husband racing to and fro. Like a scene I had taped with T and E many years ago, a ball finally came right at the camera and I had to duck out of the way.
      We then went into the mansion where the director proudly showed me a full wall collection of 8x10 color photos of a now dead starlet making her debut (though not known to the public) in his "Instructions from Anal Angels" series. I didn't think I would want to use that for the documentary and told them so. They then showed me another room with photos from the same series, this time of a current porn star, and also a series featuring his wife (from near the beginning of the series.)

Dreamed of Game Testing

I was sitting around my front room table with a bunch of friends (who all looked like themselves for a change) teaching them a new game mechanic involving tracking stats and actions on cards with poker chips. Everyone had a set of 6 sided dice, one of one color, two of another and three of a third. The colors were not related to the game other than as a mechanism to allow rolling of larger numbers of dice without rolling larger numbers of dice. (Say if you needed 7 dice you rolled all six and doubled the single die of a different color.) There was a part of the game that did involve using color to allow for tactical maneuvering. The more skill you had the more color choices you got to make. I'm not really sure how the game mechanism worked now that a couple of hours of work have gone by.

 

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Undercut Dream Islands

            I dreamed I was sailing around islands on the ocean with the worn underside again. This time I was on a ship with a crew of a couple of dozen people. We had a converted cargo container ship; it had been converted to a sailing vessel. We had some solar panels, but most of the sunny deck was being used to grow food in containers with the tops off and full of earth. There were mushroom farms in the holds, and families were living in the various quarters and unused holds below decks.

            We sailed into the archipelago to the largest island, anchoring in the shallows just below the overhang. We were able to shoot a grapple up to the vegetation on the island and a teenager climbed up the narrow rope and secured a ladder for us. A small armed party went ashore. We found the ruins of a farm house. There were several graves outside, one empty, the soil beside the grave was overgrown and there were plants growing in the bottom of the grave as well. Inside the ruins of the farm house I found a bed frame with a dislocated pile of bones in it. Apparently the last occupant had died in the bed. We agreed to move the bones into the grave and filled it in. While we were doing that a pair of small hunchbacked pig like animals came sniffing around. They weren't afraid of us. Some of the crew wanted to take them for meat animals, but I told them to hold off until we could tell more about the island. The two piglets scampered off when mom showed up. She eyed us up and down then decided to ignore us, taking her piglets into the thick brush.

            I split the group into pairs, each with a wind-up radio. They covered the extent of the island over the next couple of hours. There was a fresh water lake in the dead caldera in the center of the Island, lots of fruit trees, a few meadows of what appeared to be wheat or oats. We figured that a family of six to ten could live comfortably in each of the three farmhouses we found on the island. There was an old fishing dock on the island across from where our ship was anchored. There were a couple of boats sitting in the shallows, we could see them covered with ocean life, but the shape was still visible in the crystal clear water. There were tons of fish. I gathered everyone back and we held a meeting aboard ship. It looked like the group was going to vote to move to the Island, save for a small crew of us. We were going to sail to the other nearby Islands and check for other inhabitants as well as other resources.

 

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Death Ray Dream

           I Dreamed I built a "Death Ray" that worked by rapidly oxidizing things in a 30 degree cone in front of it. The “beam was more like a spray that shot out about 30 feet from the nozzle. Something about O4 plasma in an electrostatic field, the opposite charged field shot out on the outside of the field causing rapid and destructive molecular motion from the inside of the cone to the outside.

            I was running from aliens with a group of folks. We were making our way through a high density residential area, I was spraying down walls and roof lines behind our path. At one point I burned a hole in a building for us to make our way across the relatively uncluttered floor within. We then changed directions, hoping to shake off our pursuers.

Several of the young refugees running with us were complaining about the fact that I was armed.

            "If I weren't armed, you'd all be dead, you’re welcome to split off and make your own way."

            No one left the group. I made several piles of decomposing rubble behind and over our escape path. I couldn't bring myself to actually shoot at the aliens, partly because I didn't want to give our position away, and partly because I knew the death ray would malfunction.

            At one point we had to stop and replace the car battery and oxygen tank on the Death Ray.

            Other dreams were a little bit happier, but not nearly as memorable.

 

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M's 4th Wedding, Many other Dreams

      Instead of being the best man at M's fourth wedding, I was performing the ceremony. We had a licensed "minister" to witness and sign the papers and all, but I was supposed to actually perform the ceremony. This wedding was a bit smaller than the last couple. Both had been married a couple of times before. I'd been unable to talk them out of getting married. (Tax and benefit reasons over rode all other considerations.)
      We were gatered in her back yard, about 30 people were milling around getting set for the procession. The Minister, who was a friend of the bride's family, was quite shocked to find out that I didn't have a copy of the couple's vows, and also that there was no religious component to our ceremony.
      "Kind of makes you wonder." I said.
      We chatted a little bit before I tied my Hawian print bowtie and laced up my matching cumberbund under my bright silver jacket. I had matching Tabis and thick hardwood sandals. I pulled out my leather journal and opened it to the pages I had marked with M earlier. I showed them to the minister, explaining what I was going to say and where he would get to jump in with his legal disclaimer.
      "No mention of God?"
      "They've each been married multiple times, it sort of violates the 'no man put asunder' concept. It would be difficult for me to make such comments in the same way you would find it difficult to marry someone in the name if Vishnu or Ronald Reagan. This time we're going to keep it civil."

      My other dream has something to do with really small, but very cool technology. Wrist mounted or carried in a pocket. Full color screen, mine was round, but others were widescreen or square. Mine also had a connection to my glasses, so when I looked at it the screen would be viewable as a full widescreen image that could take up my entire field of view, or just one quarter of it, however I chose. Nifty for researching topics as they came up in conversation. Don't really remember how the technology fit into the dream, though.

2006 06 02

      We were at a performance of "Pirates of Penzance" that had no stage. It was essentially a "reader's Theater" performance. The singers were sitting in the same type of chairs as the audience, facing them. The orchestra was up on a platform behind the singers and a thin fabric partition. There was plenty of sound from the orchestra, though, it was larger than the cast by at least double.
      At one point in the performance, the cast invited the entire audience to go with them for the finale of the show, which was in a studio set up to look like an English coastal town center. There was the finale of the show, and then the shops opened up; food and drink were served. The cast came out and mingled with the patrons. It was a great deal of fun.

2006 06 03

Blowgun for Middle Schoolers
Patchwork People in Patchwork Worlds
End of the World,Secret Hiding place Via Tupperware Closets.