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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Dreams: Wargames, Sexy, DVD

            I dreamed I was with a group of friends or squad mates for a training exorcise. We were gathered with about two-hundred other people. All of us were in black optical sensing suits with laser rifles or pistols. The setting was a moon-like desert area.

            The coordinators of this exorcise split us up into different factions by making our led armbands glow a particular color. They then gave us 100 minutes to set up. The goal was simple, take over the map, or survive everyone else. They demonstrated the suits. When hit, the suit would freeze the limb hit, on a torso or head hit, the suit would freeze completely and not allow the attached laser to fire. I was upset that my squad had been dispersed amongst the various factions, unlike all of the other groups, who seemed to be assigned all to the same factions.

            Oddly, the faction I ended up being in didn't have any of my squad. So I didn't fit into their command structure, and, therefore, they didn't know what to do with me. I spoke with my squad, and told them to do their best.

            "Aye, Captain!" echoed around the test area as the bell rang to send us off into our different starting areas.

            That was when I noticed that the group I was assigned to was about one quarter the size of any of the other groups. We looked at one another. We checked our map. We had no home base, either. There were several neutral checkpoints on the map, most in the central plains and with no cover. We found one, though, near the edge of the map and a corner, it had a huge moat around it and an earth berm, though only about 16 inches high.

            "Well, troopers, we only have about 90 minutes to dig in, let’s get to it." I suggested. The other officer was also a captain, but agreed and we took his platoons at double time over the plains to our new territory. The other captain wasn't willing to put any troops under my command, but was willing to listen to what I had to say about fields of fire and clearing out the few rocks in the plains leading up to us that might be used  for cover.

            At some point we found a bunch of buried glass bottles. I test fired my laser at one and it reflected back , fortunately bent funny, so we dug out more bottles and put them along the top of our berm. There was one boulder that I couldn't get moved, and it was pretty large, creating a cone in which enemies could approach easily. The other captain was unwilling to send out a group of snipers to try to make that approach invalid. I used a bunch of Lego men to illustrate the problem. One of the troopers made a little helicopter with a Dart Vader helmet over it and said if we had armored pullout maybe we could do it.

            The decision was made to hold the berm, we had a good command of the plains, and could snipe at other factions as they made their way across the map.

            Our exorcise started. I stood up and tagged all of the neutral markers on the open plains. One of my squad members raced over from the shadow of the boulder and shouted to us that they had received orders to take us out before completing the mission. He then fired the laser at the berm to demonstrate that their lasers were not set to low power any more. I fired mine; it was still at low power. I shot my trooper in the legs. His suit stiffened and he fell over.

            "Shall I contact the rest of our squads and pull them back to help?"

            I knew the carnage would be horrible if that happened. "No, But I'm going to use that boulder now, so come around this side and don't shoot anyone unless I tell you to." 

            I told the captain what I knew and told him to keep his troops under cover as long as possible and to sweep anyone crossing the plains.  I knew he and his troops must be spies or had done something really bad, but I know I hadn't, so perhaps the whole thing was some sort of screw-up. I jumped into the moat and climbed out the other side. Lasers were impacting the walls behind me, I could hear the sand fusing into glass and cracking as it cooled.

            I broke for the boulder as the troops behind me swept the first wave of attackers. I reached the boulder an pulled my trooper behind it. He offered me his laser, but I refused. I crawled around the boulder, pushing smaller rocks in front of me. There was a large body of troops approaching in the shadow of the boulder, just as I'd predicted.

            I swept my laser across them at chest level, I'd pulled my own helmet off and noticed that my own squad members were disarming those around them and ducking to the ground. Some of them began to crawl towards me.

            "You are not to fire on advancing troops unless your life is in danger."

            "Yes sir chorused back at me."

            This went on for what seemed like hours. Behind me, a small group had found a passage through the barrier mountains to the north of us. Their lasers had struck the bottles and enough had been reflected back to freeze nearly every attacker. But we had a couple of casualties. I was pinned down behind my makeshift wall and the boulder. I'd had my trooper stop a couple of hundred yards out so that they wouldn't become targets. I re-swept the markers and tagged them for our team. Pretty soon the time for the exercise was over, but there was no recall. All of my laser equipment stopped working, as did the ones behind the berm.

            The remaining few squads rushed us. About halfway across the plains, I ordered them to stop and surrender.

            "You're not armed, why would we do that?"

            I tossed a bottle at them. They fired at it. Again, the beam reflected back at them, bright enough to shut their suits down. I was glad the lasers they were using were tied into their suits. Soon, only my troopers, those who'd defected early were even still moving, and the platoons of my co-captain were able to move on the battle field. I had my loyal troopers pull back to the moat. I figured that we'd all be shut off and they would send in real troopers at this point. I have no idea why they wanted our little group dead, but I planned on keeping that from happening as long as possible. Sure enough, even my troopers’ weapons stopped working. I had them use glass shards to cut the training suits up and we managed to get the lasers working again as well. The only reason they didn't air strike us was that we were in a dome, and the entire training facility was beneath us. I sent a group out to pull in all of my troopers. Although, surprisingly, few of mine were disabled most had just been faking it.

            In talking with the other captain, I told him that we had to get back underground and on the base so we would have a fighting chance to figure out what was happening and to get clear of this mess. He wanted to know if I was going to be playing with the Lego people again.

            "No, not yet, I don't have a plan and I’m making it up as we go along."

            "Captain, we're getting messages..."

            I moved over to one of my sergeants, his wrist communicator was displaying new orders, to avoid hurting me, but to kill my co-captain and all his platoon. I pulled his arm in front of me and scanned my thumb over the scanner and asked if we could just arrest them and go through a real trial.

            "If you think they will come with you; that would be a good primary objective. Sorry about the confusion."

            I went to the captain and told him his choices. Die, or come with us as prisoners. I told him I didn't want to kill him or his troopers, they had fought bravely in an almost impossible situation, but I now outnumbered him, and I'd armed my soldiers first, of course. I also told him I would work to make sure that he and his troops were treated properly, because the way this all happened was not right. (I didn't like being made a target due to a "computer” glitch.)

            His troops looked at him. "Did you suspect us of something?"

            "Yes, but this is not the right way to do things."  I didn’t mention that I was still steamed that the orders had included me on the list of targets.

            They surrendered to us. I knew that the really hard part was about to start, dealing with an off-planet bureaucracy.

 

Sexy

            The next dream found me on the Futon with a charming firm busted (though smallish) young woman. She was N's build, and size but young and blonde. She began opening up her top and guiding me into fondling her. It was very odd because she wanted photographs. I didn't think that was a particularly good idea. So she turned off the lights. I still heard the camera going and knew she was just using the IR or night vision mode. I finally found where the camera was (by this time she was completely exposed if not fully undressed) and used a foot to turn it to the wall while she was distracted.

            Then I took advantage of the situation. Yum.

 

DVD

            The last dream before waking up this morning was of hanging with SCV and getting stuck on a freeway. We had to deliver a DVD to a festival, but before we could do that S wanted to stop at the printer's and get the labels re-done. There were some issues with the credits. I Zoomed off the freeway, causing several folks to honk at us as we had to cross the solid lines, and took us on a Mr. Toad's Wild ride through the very flat Midwestern town we were in. I shot us across the straight-aways at well over 90 MPH. I knew that if we didn't get to the printer before Noon there would be no way to make it to the festival, and it was 11:30 and we had almost 25 miles to cover.

            Somehow I managed to get us there with no tickets, and, more importantly, no accidents.

            "Messed up my gas mileage average, though."

            "It'll be worth it."

            Then when we sat down with the printer, the changes that we had to make were miniscule, and not in any way significant to the transfer of real information, it was all spacing, kerning and capitalization items. S then had to argue with the printer about the cost of the changes, as the printer had to do a whole new setup. Finally I asked if we could just get by with a color printout on a single sheet of photo paper for this ONE DVD. Then we could come back and haggle over re-covering the initial production run, after dropping off our entry to the festival.

            "We have to submit 5..."

            "Get printing," I picked up a pair of shears as the printer loaded photo paper in the slot of the printer.

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF

 

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Temple, River, Museum, Frog

            After my dreaming was disturbed by random noises, probably raccoons on the roof, I made myself memorize four words to help me remember my dreams when I woke up for the day a couple of hours later. Those four words are Temple, River, Museum, Frog.

            I then had another dream that when I woke, late for work, I didn't give myself any keywords for, so it is completely gone, other than to say the blonde in the bikini had nice boobs. (She wore medium blue with black lined yellow polka dots on her swimwear.)

 

Part One, The Temple.

            I was with a large number of people reviewing a stand of ancient columns on top of a smallish pyramid surrounded by thick forest. The temple had little left in the way of glyphs or carvings, and there were more modern scratching on some of the pillars. (Although by ‘modern’ I mean from the late 1800's. Some of the etchings, they were historical now in and of themselves, still they were graffiti, and modern in comparison to the age of the pillars themselves.) I had the impression, for some unknown reason, that the temple we were in was a later addition to what was probably the real temple, which would have been closer to the actual waterline of the ancient river. We stayed with the tour for a bit, then several of us eventually broke off, having discussions that amounted to the same, the real temple had to be somewhere else. This was just the lobby, or entry way to or from the former city.

            We paced out the pyramid and the layout of the temple, and then looked out across the forested valley, trying to guess the former lay of the land. Just from the layout of the pillars we set off in a direction that we hoped would be promising.

 

Part Two, the River

            In the passage of time, the river had become a swampy basin below the pyramid. We made our way down to the swamp. In looking around I found a hillside, that on pacing it out looked like it could contain a small temple. We went around to where our previous survey showed the historical river had run, and found an opening under the hillside. I cleared away a couple of bushels of dirt and tree roots, and there, still sporting some of its color was a temple wall. Tetheys was how the rough translation came out, but I knew that the actual temple was older than that tradition.

            The water began to rise around our feet and we moved up onto the stone of the temple floor.

            I felt the presence, even in this late age, of that ancient intellect and offered a libation from my canteen and then took a sip from the rapidly rising water at our ankles. Soon the water stopped rising and we were making our way back to the rest of the tour, satisfied that we had found our next dig site.

 

Part Three, the Museum Basement.

            The crowd made its way back to a modern building and filed slowly down the stairs into a dark, cool, dry basement. There were many displays and artifacts collected here from places all around the world. This had once been the private property of a wealthy plantation owner. The struggle to keep the jungle out of the plantation had become too much, but the plantation house had been gifted to a fledgling university and they had maintained it as an archeological field house and museum ever since. The jungle was kept only from the road and mansion itself, but came right up to the back doors of the museum. Vines twined in the air overhead and had started what would be short-lived holds on the gutters and shingles of the roof.

            I drifted to the back of the group, certain of what I was about to hear. Sure enough, MS stopped the group before a large wooden and stone upright circle, some 12 feet in diameter. "This is the portal which brought me to this world..." he began.

            It was the portal that had brought all of us to this world, but that wasn't really common knowledge. I didn't really want to sit through the lecture again, and didn't want to be tempted to upstage M about who had really discovered the portals and made them all work, at least for awhile.

            I made my way back upstairs and wandered around the natural history displays before heading outside to follow the current day river for a bit.

 

Part Four, the Frog

            In following the river, I came across a student of mine (former as I was no longer teaching classes) who seemed unusually still. "B how are you doing?" I asked.

            There was no response.

            "B, are you Ok?" I crossed the river over to him. He was standing, well, more leaning, against a tree trunk. His pants legs were rolled up and his shoes were dry on a root at about the level of his hip. His hands were cupped together in front of him. I waved my hands in front of his glassy eyes. There was a small reaction. I stepped back, he was breathing, shallow, but noticeable.

            "What have you done to yourself?" I asked.

            His eyes seemed to flick down to his hands.

            I gently opened his cupped hands. There was a very brightly colored, blue with black outlines around yellow patterns across its back and face, frog. The frog was mostly in a plastic specimen bag, its right front paw and head were still sticking out.

            "Be careful there, the frog is very toxic!" I heard from behind me.

            "Thank you, I know, that's why I've stopped. Do you have another collecting bag?" I knew the frog was toxic, but I also knew the paralysis would only be temporary if we could the frog out of contact with B soon.

            "Professor, sorry, didn't recognize you. I have one here."

            A middle aged man reached out and collected B's frog. "Are you coming back to the university?"

            "Not for awhile yet. Let me help you get B back to the field house."

            "Thank you. We keep trying to get him to lose weight. I'm tempted to leave him out here, serves him right for not wearing his gloves."

            I laughed, "Why don't you then?"

            "Jaguars have been spotted again; they finally seem to be making a comeback.

            "I'm glad to hear that." We managed to wrestle B back to the field house. I really was glad to have the Jag's back, they would help keep looky-loos away from the new dig site.

            "You don't look a day older than when you left us." My colleague commented. I think he suspected that I had come through the portal with the other aliens, none of whom aged here either. I was already grey haired when we'd stepped through and the grey had persisted at my temples, although my muscle strength and skin had smoothed over the years to some extent. Except for my hair, I looked much like I did when I was thirty.

            "Retirement, or semi-retirement is very good for you, you should try it when you get the chance."

            We got B settled on a lounge in the foyer and his professor went to bring back the doctor and a little antidote.

            "Well B, I don't think we can keep up much longer around her without the geniuses figuring out our secret, let the others know we need to meet. It may be time."

            B's eyes bounced up and down.

            The rest of my small party came into the foyer. They were eager to go back out and make a rough site plan and start planning the dig. I waved goodbye to B as we slipped out into the forest, GPS and tablet computers in hand.

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF

 

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

I Dream of Romance, and Horror

            I dreamed I was cuddling with SO on the futon couch in my house. My young red-haired freckled friend was depressed. She was pregnant with her second child. (?) She wasn't raising the first, having given the baby up for adoption. When I asked what had happened, her sister chimed in that "She had a celebratory 'moment' with her last director."

            S blushed and buried her head, "I was so stupid."

            ""Emotional. Expressive, it's one of the things I've always liked about you. I am envious though"

            She was crying. I told her that I still loved her and she could stay with me. I also mentioned that if she wanted to "celebrate" she'd better be prepared to keep celebrating. That at least got a sobby giggle out of her.

            Further discussion revealed that her director "friend" was pressuring her to have an abortion. She didn't want to, hadn't with the first baby, wasn't planning on it with the second baby.

            The dream progressed into the future, and S miscarried a couple of days later. It was sad for her, and a relief for her former boss. She still decided to move into the house with me though, at least until her next job.

 

            The next dream was more of a nightmare / horror movie style. I was working for a company that was doing some sort of teleportation device research. I was monitoring a test that was happening on a navel vessel at sea. The testing agents were in voice communication with me, and I was monitoring the testing apparatus via various data probes and video monitors. I had several engineers in the control room with me. We were in a monitoring facility in San Diego. The test proceeded, then things started jumping all over the place, images on the monitors shifted and turned sideways. On one monitor I saw one of our technicians reach over to right the camera, then half of him vanished, we could see his insides, all working.  I could hear someone throwing up behind me. He righted the camera and went out into the test area, setting up other equipment that had been knocked over, his invisible half still able to pick things up and move them. He hadn't seemed to notice, yet.

I switched to another view of his workstation, He was still working away, half invisible until he noticed that he was invisible, partly. He screamed when he looked down at his insides.

            "Shut the test down, " I radioed them, but there was no response. "Override the Tele-window, now." My engineers started shutting things down.

            Suddenly the rest of the techs aboard the ship vanished, and they didn't seem to be working on anything any more. Soon pieces of equipment vanished followed by other engineers and even sailors aboard the ship were being reported as vanishing. The probes began to fail and my boss burst into the control room, asking "what the hell is going on?"

            "I don't know yet, we're recording the data as it comes in, the readings will have to be analyzed it's all happening too fast to tell right now. I've already shut down the teleportation window."

            "The window isn't shutting down fully, I still show activity." One of my engineers reported shakily.

            "Damn, see if they can cut the power from shipboard."

            One of the cameras vanished, but it was still sending a signal. I pulled it up onto the main screen. We were looking into a fog bank, there were dark smoky looking smears in the fog, hints of treelike structures in the haze, one smear approached the monitor, merging with it and appearing to come right through the screen at us.

            "We hunger." came across the audio just before I shut the monitor down. The last thing I saw looked like a bloody human staggering out of the fog.

            A chill wind blew through the room. Everyone grew silent. I could hear more people vomiting around me.

            After several hours of trying to figure out what our date meant, we decided to stay at my parent's house as a group, we were just to weirded out to go and stay in separate rooms at the hotel, which was in Escondido.

            Mom made dinner for my crew and we got everyone settled for a couple of hours rest until we could go back to work.

            I awoke a few hours later. The tips of my fingers on the right hand tingled. I looked at them. They were invisible, I could see the cross-section of all my fingers. Bone muscle and tendons, all of it visible, no blood or anything. I woke my brother; he was missing his calf muscle and part of his foot.

            "I can still feel it, I just can't see it."

            We started waking everyone in the house. The closer they were to the television the more of them was invisible. I made them all move to the back of the house and, sure enough, the invisibility shifted to the closest person to the TV, me. I suddenly had the urge, uncontrollable, to run.

            I turned and started running, all of me fading into nothingness. I could see my limbs pumping; I was a black smear, hungry, suddenly. The TV beckoned, I ran for it not having enough friction to be moving hardly at all.

            I slowly approached the TV, even though I was running as fast as I could. The TV was a static filled image of a foggy forest with leafless trees barely visible in the distance. It looked like there might be human bodies slumped around the bases of the trees. I couldn't control myself and I dove through the TV screen.

            "No!" I shouted and somehow pulled myself through the TV and out the back of the chimney. I seemed to be taking form again and climbed to the top of the chimney. Once there I shouted down the flue "Hello, I'm out her on the roof."

            When I turned to look I realized the location was the same, but the homes and vehicles I could see were very Sid Mead futuristic. Even the house I was on had changed. The chimney was the same, but the walls and roof were made of curving glass. I could see my family in the home below me. They looked very surprised to see me.

            Mom was slender, and looked like she did in her early thirties. Her friend N was there as were a couple of my aunts, also all young looking.

            Mom recognized me and ran to the back door to let me in.

            There were hugs all around. "You look the same as when you vanished almost 50 years ago. (This would make my mom about 120 I thought.)

            "What happened?" I asked.

            "We're so glad you're alive." said one of my aunts.

            "Look how distinguished you look," said N.

            "He already married one N," Mom interrupted her.

            "N, is she..."

            "No, dad either, they were gone too soon. The dead had to stay dead."

            "I was," I sat down, very confused. "I'd thought I'd shifted into another dimension."

            "We don't think so. You were on the chimney all this time, according to your company. We didn't know if you'd ever make it back, so we kept the chimney together, just in case." Then she broke down crying and kept hugging me.

            I realized I was really hungry. Then I realized, they were all young again, and I wasn't. I then realized they all had a little black smear following them around, living off of them.  Without whatever treatments were keeping them young, my smear was killing me.

           

Ad astra per technica,

FF

 

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

I'm supposed to remember... What?


      I dreamed last night of waking from a dream and saying "I must remember to post this in the Drog." but then not even remembering the details of the plot, let alone any of the other actual content. Does that really count as a dream?
      This morning I dreamed of a photograph, either on the television or in a newspaper, it might have been online even. Brown railroad cars, dozens of them, derailed and tumbled together in the open parking lot or courtyard of a large building complex, also with brown roofs. The words 184 dead were somehow connected to this dream. I wanted to know how the train was going so fast that dozens of cars could be pushed off the rails and shoved into the small space they were in. There may have been flooding involved as well, though I don't know if the flooding caused the derailment, or the vice versa.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Island Hopping, Visitors from an Alternate Dimension

            I was piloting a small plane between Islands in the South Pacific.

            The first stop was a small island that didn't really have a runway, but a nice long hard beach. Landing was easy and soft, but I wasn't too sure I would be able to take off with all the mail and other things the residents wanted me to take. I visited for a bit, stayed over night, and then in the morning I pulled everything out of the plane and we put up a catch wire at one end of the island.

            With the weight of the plane reduced to the bare essentials I was just able to get the plane in the air by taking off into the wind. I then realized that I should spring for pontoons, then I could land just about anywhere if the seas were calm enough. I flew back around and hooked the baggage and cargo (two passes, half each time.) I had to put the plane in auto pilot to go back and haul everything aboard. After the second trip I set a course for New Zealand, and a real post office. I chatted on the radio with the islanders until I was out of range.

            I landed at a real airport in NZ. I delivered some of my packages and put the others in the mail. A small family group offered me a place to stay when I dropped off my last packages.

            I woke up on the couch in darkness, hearing knocking and voices demanding to open up. I went to the front door and looked out the window next to it. I couldn't see anyone.

            "What's going on?" one of the sleepy teen daughters came into the living room in bright pink pajamas and fuzzy slippers.

            "I thought I heard voices at the door, but I don't see anyone. They were demanding us to open up." I checked out the window again. No one there. "Maybe I was dreaming.

            We heard the knocking again, and again the demands to open up. I shrugged and pulled open the front door, still, no one out there.

            "Maybe they're at the back door" the daughter said and went into the kitchen. I followed. There was no one at the back door, either.

            The knocking happened again and we both turned to the cellar door.

            "What?"

            I shrugged again, and opened the cellar door. Two small furry lemur-faced creatures bounded into the room, one walking right under the kitchen table. They had some sort of radio earphone in their right ears, a respirator type mask over their short snouts and were wearing armored vests with equipment belts around their waists. Each carried a small ray gun looking item held out in front of it.

            "Oh! How cute!" the girl squealed with delight.

            I pretty sure that's not the reaction they were anticipating. In fact, though their faces were difficult to read, they seemed as surprised to see us as we were to see them.  The door began to close on its own, there being an air pressure differential.

            "Hold the door open!" I shouted to the girl. She reached for the door. I could see daylight from the cellar door. Dawn was breaking wherever that door led. I turned to the Kangaroo/Lemur creatures, "You'd better go back while you still can. I don't know if the rift will stay open.

            "Oh, uh, yeah." they clicked their tongues at one another in a very rapid almost scratchy sound and then turned and ran for the door.

            The girl was holding onto the door handle with both hands leaning out with all her weight. The creatures dove through the door, one low and one high.

            Slam. The door pulled shut, the girl staggered back and caught herself on the counter across the kitchen.

            I checked the door. The handle was cold, freezing, even though the girl had wrapped both hands around it. There was frost forming on the hinges of the door as well. I opened the door, ice crunching in the mechanism. I saw nothing out of the ordinary past the door, just stairs down into the cellar.

The girl pushed past me and turned on the light.

            "That's never happened before,” she said with the inflection to indicate that something had been happening.

           

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF

 

 

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Socks

            I dreamed of socks. Piles and piles of unmatched socks. They were all the same brand and style, but had been washed a different number of times, so the blackness of each pair was different. They had been all dumped in the center of a bed, not mine. I was trying to match up the socks by their fade levels. Just to make things more interesting, the light was failing, and the sun had gone down. I kept trying to tell someone that this really wasn't that important, or if it was, couldn't we just dye them all black again? No one was there to answer, and for some reason I was powerless to stop doing what I was doing. I couldn't even intentionally mismatch the socks and put them on the pile. I tried, but then I would pick up the mismatched pair and fling them apart, back into the unsorted pile. I asked myself, "What happens when I find a sock that doesn't match anything because it was washed separately from its mate? What then? Do I have to go and wash a sock until it matches? Do we throw them away? What is the deal with all the mis-matched socks anyway? How come there isn't anyone here to help me with this? Where's everybody. How come the cats aren't here to help. Why is the matching of socks so important? Who keeps dumping more unmatched clean socks on the bed. Don't we have enough socks? I could wear a clean pair every day for months without having to wash another sock! Hey, you guys! I thought I saw something go by outside the window. I'm not leaving here until all of these socks are sorted. At least they're not stinking socks. The last load that was dumped wasn't completely dry yet.

            That dream, though it had no particularly frightening content, kept me awake for about two hours, obsessing about it, trying to figure out what my demented brain was telling me.

            I just checked my socks. Both are black, but they don't match, as one has obviously been washed in hot water, or far more often than the other. In the past I wouldn't have even noticed, but now I am finding it slightly disturbing. (Not so disturbing that I want to go out and buy new socks, or go home and change, but still.)

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF

 

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Wet Dreams

            I dreamed of LT ; in this alternate reality she was still young while I was still turning into a whitebeard. Much as it had been 26 years ago, her touch was instantly arousing, even when it wasn't meant to be. (Partly because she had the most perfect figure I think I’ve ever seen, touched.) I spent most of my dream trying to hide my arousal: we were out at a performance where I was doing a poetry reading. (I had to sit on stage in a chair rather than standing.)

            In a later dream I found myself playing a "dating" simulation. The choices were getting more and more erotic, kissing, hugging, posing for photographs, helping your partner change into the next costume, then suddenly, you would be dunking your partner in a small carnival dump tank for the "Bad End."

            The resulting photos were pretty funny, though.

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF

 

Monday, November 13, 2006

Car Wreck Nightmares

            Both dreams I remember were car wreck related. One involved a bunch of us in a car going over the edge of the road, and discovering that the gentle slope we'd rolled off onto was only gentle until it came to the top of a retaining wall, where the fall was closer to ten stories of near vertical drop to the roadway below.

            The second one had a benign enough beginning, N and I were at Mom and Dad's, my brother and sister were there with their families as well. I think the occasion was a Thanksgiving celebration. We had just had a break after dinner, and Mom and the grandkids decided to take a walk down around the hill. Dad decided he needed to get hearing aid batteries, as his replacements were dead. N and I were cleaning up the dishes when the kids came running back into the driveway all distraught.

            "Grandpa's pancaked in the car!" Mom us huffing up the hill behind them. She was hollering for her car keys. I got the keys, but made Mom get in the passenger seat; she was too upset to drive. We drove down to the accident scene where the older grandkids were trying to help get Dad out of the crushed truck. He'd been sandwiched between a panel truck in front of him and a large SUV that had tried to drive right over him by the look of things. I could hear the ambulances in the distance.

            I woke myself up by groaning out "Oh! No!" and frightening the cats, who bounded away. I'm surprised that N slept through it.

 

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Thursday, November 09, 2006

Indescribable Visual Images

I wish I could paint what I see in my dreams. I just don’t have the words to accurately describe the surreal density of images. House, jungle, cats and computer games all overlaid in a fusion of sight and sound, but still able to be understood as separate parts of the whole event. I remember nothing of the plot, the sounds are faded, though they were loud in the dream. Even the images have begun to fade. Too bad we don’t have a way to capture what was going on in my visual cortex, or the part of the brain that interprets the visual cortex.

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF

 

Monday, November 06, 2006

Alien Invasion


      I dreamed, vivid action packed dreams unlike I've had in awhile. The dream started with a two on two basketball game on the asphalt courts of my former high school. I was playing well, for a change, and my team won. We made our way into the showers, firing up the public ones for the kids, and us staff members taking turns in the private shower. When dressing I found a Greek or Roman tunic in my locker. I tried it on, decided I liked it, but though it a bit short, so tossed my jeans on underneath. I headed out to the parking lot after chasing the last of the kids out of the locker room.
      The parking lot lights hadn't come on yet, but the sky was getting dark. I noticed it was overcast and starting to get chilly, the wind picked up. I put one foot in front of the other, when my toes touched my heel, jets fired to life below my feet and boosted me a few inches into the air. It felt like I was riding the smoothest running skateboard you could ever imagine. I shot out into the parking lot, looking for my car.
      Instead I was attracted to a low structure in the parking lot. I glided over and ducked down to see what was going on. There was a big cat turd below the three foot high awning. The awning covered one parking space. I noticed there was a furball hacked up near the cat turd.
      "I'm not going to clean that up! Gross!" and similar comments drifted across the parking lot.
      I was more concerned about the cat. I looked around, did a couple of "here, Kitty, Kitty!" calls. No sign of a cat. I whistled, like I do for our cats.
      "Cats won't come to a whistle," someone commented.
      Little John jumped out from under a nearby car and raced over to me, crouching down between my feet. I carefully picked him up and walked him over to my car. "Who else is along on this little jaunt?" I asked him, but aside from bursting into a loud purr, he wasn't telling. I decided to cruise the parking lot and the bushes to see if any of the other cats had somehow tagged along. While I was cruising at low altitude I suddenly decided to try climbing higher, to see more of the parking lot. It worked, but only by saying "Up, up, I'm climbing ever up," over and over again in a sort of chant. When I stopped chanting the jets grew quiet and I drifted back down to the ground.
      The sun was completely gone from the sky, I just happened to be looking out over Black Mountain when there were four huge red and orange rips in the dark purple sky. Thunder knocked me out of the sky, fortunately I was only a dozen feet up and a juniper bush broke my fall.
      There were four spiked vessels in the sky where the rips had appeared. They hummed and groaned in a vast chorus of alien machine sound. I could see the lights of small vehicles detach from the main ships and spread out in all directions, several of them headed for the school. They stopped in the air above the parking lot, three legs jetting out from each, they stood silent, watching the panic in the parents and students who were leaving their afternoon activities.
      The parking lot lights came on. Two of the half dozen tripods fired at nearby parking lot lights. There was even more panic. One of the beams went completely through the lamp and housing and ripped a huge hole in the side of the hill above my head. The other beam struck the small lap pool vaporizing enough water to fill the entire pool area and 50 feet above with steam. I couldn't tell if I was bounced out of the bush by the sound of the thunder, or the ground actually quaked from the force of the blast. Being on the ground didn't seem like a good idea. I put my toes against my heal and drew my legs beneath me, sliding out towards the trees in order to sneak around behind one of the machines for a better look.
      There were no more shots from the alien craft. I looked for my car. It was only about 10 feet from one of the alien craft's legs. Little John was on the dashboard looking out the window trying to see the craft which was almost directly above the car. I found myself wishing I'd left him free. He started pacing nervously, and climbing up and down the steering wheel. I shot out of the trees and whistled. Since I was behind the car he climbed into the trunk to see where I was. I could actually hear him meow at me through the glass. I didn't want him honking the horn with trigger happy aliens about.
      One of the two craft that fired on our lights slowly began to sink down on retracting legs. Finally it was squatting like a giant red enameled spider just above JD's Corvette. I "up upped" over a car at the end of the row I was in line with and then ducked down between the cars to make my way over to my own. The aliens seemed either unaware of me, or uncaring. On reaching my car, shooting rapidly across the open lane to get to it. I pulled the tail open, glad I hadn't locked it up (the lights flash when you unlock with the remote.) John was quite willing to be held, and he buried his face in my arms as I shot down the aisle of cars weaving and hiding behind the taller ones. I heard noises from the landed craft, but didn't turn to look back until I'd reached an open classroom. John jumped out of my arms and raced to the darkest corner of the room.
      Looking out the doorway, I spotted several parents and students pointing to the aliens as they approached. Some ran into the room with Little John, but most kept running to get around the building and away from the aliens, who to look at them were in some sort of armored suit, enameled black and red, in opposite proportions to their ship. They were carrying long tubes with several cylinders near the end closest to their bodies, and several had some sort of dish antenna array they swept back and forth in front of them. I could not tell what they looked like, and got the impression that the suit was not exactly form fitting from the way the leg joints were obviously fully mechanical. The suits had for legs and somewhere between four and 6 arm/tentacle appendages. I only ever saw three working at a time as the swept across the parking lot. One stopped and checked out the open hatch of my car.
      John had come out and was again between my legs. When he stood on his back legs and asked to be picked up, I knew it was time to go. I boosted into the hallway and shot onto the campus, then out the back of campus down the access stairs. I could see lights in the sky, and heard the roaring of helicopter blades and jet engines. I knew I didn't have enough fuel to get home, so started to plan on how I could make my way to my parents house. I didn't think Little John would be willing to go back to the parking lot to pack up the car and go. So far the aliens had ignored all of the cars that were tearing out of the parking lot. I flew us up the hill, Little John settling into my soft briefcase, and made my way to the top of the street overlooking the school. The aliens had taken to the air, except the one which had crew on the school grounds. John was just quivering in the bag, now. So I raced down the hill into the parking lot and got us into my car, Little Red. So with Little John, in Little Red with little courage left, I put the car in gear and drove us out of there. I was scanning through the radio trying to find some news, but there was nothing but static, anywhere. I don't think that was a good sign.
      I stayed on surface streets as long as I could, not wanting to get caught on the crush on the freeway. Surprisingly, there really wasn't much traffic. Less than normal. I managed to get across the lake and off the freeway again in just a few minutes. I didn't see any more alien craft on the ground, but there were some flights in the sky, mostly being harassed by large helicopters or F-118s. The aliens flew circles around the Marine jets and ignored the helicopters. No one was firing at one another yet, I was hoping that was a good sign. As I pulled into town I could see the lights of one of the large mother ships headed over to where our local airport is.
      N was at home, glued to the TV. CNN was on, in fact most of the cable channels were still on. Only radio seemed to be scrambled. Most of the coverage was audio, and really low quality video. N explained that the ENG stuff wasn't working, so they were uploading video as fast as they could over the internet, but they had to find a land line to send it in to the station.
      "Stay in your homes, stay off the streets, don't shoot at the aliens, or aim bright lights at them. Both actions can have the same fatal results."
      There was video of an F-118 shooting down two alien craft, then itself being disintegrated in a beam like that which had taken out our pool and the hillside at the school. There were other reports of damage to structures or vehicles, surprisingly few deaths were being reported, and no one was reporting what I'd seen with aliens actually roaming around in small land vehicles. I tried to call their number, but all of the lines were busy. I shot them an email, figuring it would be hours before anyone would be able to pour through the mass of communications to find it. N wanted to head for the hills, take all the food and water we could carry and go. She calmed down a bit when I asked her about the cats.
      The aliens were acting very, well, alien. No one could seem to figure out what they were doing, and to be honest none had fired without being fired upon first. They were staying away from the fighter planes as much as possible, and there really weren't any more reports after the first few minutes of fatal encounters. By the time the dream ended, I was more worried about what my own government was planning to do to us than what the aliens were doing.
      I should have been more worried. I woke up in a white room, tubes everywhere, fluid surrounding me. I was able to speak quietly and found there were dozens of others within earshot. As long as we spoke quietly, we were allowed to remain awake. I started a game, what did we all have in common, other than being abducted by aliens. It turned out we had all seen the alien ground forces, we had all stayed fairly close to the action and had not run away, or armed ourselves. Most of the people were young, early twenties. For every two dozen young people there was a middle aged person like myself. There was no one over about 60, and that woman looked more like 40. All of the younger women were pregnant, or thought after a bit of grilling that they might be.
      I was buzzed to sleep as we began to talk more excitedly about what was happening to us.
      The next time I woke, I was one of the first ones awake. The oldest seemed to have awakened first. There were huge piles of goods, basically giant erector sets and piles of canvas. We would be able to make shelter fairly easily. Food was another concern. The fact that there were several moons in the sky was another. There were fields of crops just outside of where we were all laid out. I counted the number in our group and the number of groups, I figured about 50 to 60 thousand of us. I didn't see N. I didn't see any one that I really knew, though a couple of the younger people looked a little bit familiar. Many of us older folks were awake and looking around, trying to figure out what was going on. Other than ourselves, the caches of construction materials, and I found several animal pens, one with cats in it, there were no signs of the aliens at all. I had my MP3 player in my pocket. No headphones, though.
      

Friday, November 03, 2006

Dry Planet

            I dreamed I was in a city that was on a planet that had almost no surface water, very "Dune" like. The city was on a huge spike of rock in the middle of an otherwise featureless desert. The ground wasn't so much sand as it was cracked rocky surface. There was a road out of the town that went across the wasteland. I could see several dozen stone bridges across the various chasms in the distance. Nearly to the horizon was another city, also shaped a great deal like a giant termite mound.

            I was in the city, making repairs to my aircraft. As I was taking a break from the repairs, essentially being done, I was looking out over the plains towards our nearest neighbor, a streak of light descended from orbit and landed, possibly crashed, about half the distance between our two cities. I spoke to my companion about renting a ground vehicle. We needed to get there before the salvage crews started out in the evening. Even though it was uncomfortable to travel in the daylight, I figured I could rig my solar wings to provide extra power and shade at the same time. We would be able to reach the site while there was still light in the sky. I would use the aircraft to shuttle survivors and equipment to the ground vehicle.

            There was really not a way to go off-roading any distance due to the numerous deep chasms. I also knew I had an advantage in that I had one of the only aircraft on the planet. (Most people didn't really travel as being out in the waste was uncomfortable in the extreme.) The only trade was really for luxury type goods and to move the population around. To that end children had to go to college in another city in the world, they could then choose to return home, but many would settle where they ended up. It was a fairly painless system to keep the genetic diversity going on this very sparsely populated world.

            I'd be surprised if the whole world's population was greater than a million. My job was ferrying mail and occasionally passengers from city to city. I also did some runs out into the waste to recover meteors and the like. I'd once found an uninhabited water site at one meteor strike. That find had made me independently wealthy. They didn't name the city after me, though; I was a little sore about that still.

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF

 

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Space Conflict, Fallen Angel

            I was discussing strategy with several others and pointed out that a single flight of small robot craft with heavy ordinance would take out any sized vessel with relative ease. Presuming only armor exists and no force field technologies. ECM and interception technology rules the day. I created a simulation to show them why it worked that way. After playing a few games with several different arrangements, the group decided that the unarmed fighter was king of the space war arms race and created the need for intense counter batteries and powerful sensor arrays. There were several cool game moments that were rendered in full anime space battle style. I wish I could really program like that.

 

            I had a scarlet and gold hotrod, well; the body looked like a hotrod. The insides were a hybrid; in fact it may have been Little Red with a new body and interior. I stopped at a school with a bunch of portable classrooms that were all covered with green stucco. The walkways between the buildings were like a maze. The room number I'd been sent to didn't exist. I tried to find it for awhile but got completely lost. Finally I found a class rushing out to recess and waited for the teacher. She confirmed that there was no room with that number. I tried calling my office, but no one answered. I got out to the parking lot and the place was very crowded with parents waiting to pick up their kids.

            Someone had double parked behind me, so my passenger, N but not N, helped me pick up the hotrod and turn it 90 degrees so I could drive out into the fire lane. Fortunately the planter was empty, the landscaping having not been put in yet. We bumped out into the lane where I had to stop for a Mom who was bent over facing away from us. I noticed that she was quite good looking, and the short skirt with no underwear look was a good one for her. N got out and escorted her back to the car where they crowded in. I like the bench seat modification, except the middle passenger has to deal with the transmission stick shift. There was a delightful tangle of legs on the other side of the stick, I found it very distracting.

            Somehow we got to the professor’s (?) with our passenger, and there were smoochies all around. I went ahead into the laboratory to let the professor know that we'd caught an angel. Said angel started to struggle to get out of N's hug at that time. I knew we were going to have a tough time convincing her that we meant no harm, and would watch the professor carefully to make sure she was safe. The angel transformed, towering and white with full 50 foot wing span, which is apparently what we were waiting for, I managed to hold on to one wing while the professor arrived from the back room with a scanner of some sort. N but not N was hugging her around the waist trying to calm her down.

            The scanning was over and we moved her back to the car. "See, nothing to it, no harm done."

            "We'll make it worth your while" added N but not N. There were more smoochies.

            The angel transformed back into the woman we'd picked up form the road. "That's different, then."

            As I drove away I found myself hoping that nothing bad was going to come of this because I really had no idea what the scans were going to be used for.

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF