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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.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Diablo III and Still Forest

       I dreamed I was playing a video game. It was the isometric overhead view, and I was playing a character dressed in black and silver. My main attack seemed to be a cone of cold effect. As I played I discovered that I could either keep the cone going (and deplete my mana considerably) or I could freeze my enemies and then hit them with a large blunt weapon to shatter them. The combination attack took a little bit more effort, but was faster when facing individual opponents.
       At one point I was making my way through an underground passage when I came to a section which had false walls that gave away after I had passed them. Behind the walls were two agitated mobs. They swarmed me from all directions.
       I discovered, quite by accident, that I could create a ring of ice effect by spinning in place and casting the cone of cold. I didn't have enough mana to keep it up long enough to beat all of the enemies. I gulped a potion which began to restore my mana. All of the sudden I was in the POV mode, with the frozen ghouls all around me. I spun around again, re-freezing them all. Then I began carving a path back the way I came, hoping I hadn't missed any other false walls. I didn't quite make it out of the group when the spell wore off and I had to freeze them again.
       Back to the isometric overhead view, I kept getting hit, disrupting my spell. Fortunately I was armored enough that I wasn't taking much damage from the monsters. But I was starting to get frustrated. It looked like I was just going to be plinked to death a couple of hits at a time. Finally I managed to get the ice cone to fire, and swung it around my attackers. A couple of hammer blows later and I was back in a large room, running free. Every so often I would stop and freeze my nearest pursuers, forcing the ones behind them to go around them, and thus giving me a little more time. I ran back to the narrow hole that had been carved in the back of the cellar, there I was able to make a stand, facing only one or two enemies at a time. I could freeze them in the hallway, and crush them just before the spell wore off, allowing me time to recover enough mana to freeze the next batch.
       Rinse, Repeat. I was enjoying the game, but wished I had a greater variety of strategies to fall back on. I had nothing that would damage a large group like I'd been attacked by, I could freeze them, if I had enough time to cast, but that was it. (Ice in this game apparently did little damage, thus the need for carrying a huge sledge.)
       I was, after two dozen kills, finished, and found myself walking back to the original ambush site, enjoying the animation and graphics of the new game. There was not a single drop (smashing your enemies into ice cubes seemed to curtail that sort of thing.) I hoped there was a chest or something in the ambush area to make this trip worth it. My armor needed repair and my weapon was wearing down, both would be expensive to fix.
       I knew I was dreaming, and suddenly found it difficult to stay with the game and just play it, instead I found myself trying to figure out what I was looking at, what sort of character I was playing, and who had developed the game. The more I tried to figure out what I was looking at, the less coherent it was, until finally I was left with just barely conscious thought.

       I did fall back to sleep and had another dream just before waking. Forest, brick path, heavily over grown. It may have once been part of a park of some sort, as there was the rusted remains of a cast iron bench on one side of the brick trail. The air was thick with the smell of decay, difficult to breathe, nothing was stirring in the brush, and even the tops of the trees, with a few green leaves yet in the sun, were still. The sounds of the forest were missing, and even my own footfalls, a jolt of pain just in front of the heel with every step, barely made any noise at all. I wanted to get away from the decaying smell, but didn't really know what direction it was coming from as the air was so still. I just hoped it wasn't from me.

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Monday, July 30, 2007

Comic Dream

       As one might expect after four solid days of little sleep and A LOT of comic related input, I dreamed in a multi-panel comic book form with full bleed. Especially after I was bitten by the dragon. It was a small one, so I just had a nice row of fang marks in my fore arm.
       There was some sort of ruckus in the throne room, so I raced up there, tripping over my long dark green robes on the carpeted stone stairs that lead up to the hidden panel behind a couple of suits of armor. I crashed against the panel, but it didn't open. I noticed that the hinges were on my side, so, releasing the latch I stepped down a couple of steps to swing the panel back over the stairs. I marveled that if I had to unlatch the door from where it was safe to stand to open the door over the top of the stairs, I would have had to be nine feet tall. I rushed into the throne room to find the air full of cat-sized dragons, flashing their silvery teeth and breathing little jets of fire.
       The king's guards were covering his majesty with their tall shields and trying to fend of the little dragons with their halbreds, devices that weren't really meant to be used one handed. They might have looked impressive while standing at attention next to the throne, but were not terribly practical. I took off my pointy hat and snagged one of the little dragons with it as it flew past.
       That's when I was bitten.
       I whistled a special call, and four cats leapt into the throne room from the secret passage. Their eyes glittered with excitement as they saw the small flying dragons, and the hunt was on. I watched as the first of the little flying lizards dove too close and was swatted out of the air by a leaping red Tabby. The dragon cracked against the tile floor with a resounding finality. The other flying dragons began to fly higher, out of reach, and of course, out of range for their own attacks.
       I walked to the king, stopping to check out the broken dragon, it was a small clockwork mechanism that drove the thing. "Interesting," I muttered to no one in particular. I started charging the capacitor in my staff and when one of the clockwork dragons dove to prevent me from reaching the side of the king, I zapped it with the end of my staff, it sparked noisily, and crashed at my feet. The capacitors wound up again, the whining noise drawing the attention of more of the creatures.
       The guards moved to come to my aid, but I waived them back,"Get the court out of the room and keep the king covered."
       Apparently the clockworks were programmed to attack solitary figures because they dove at me again. I intercepted the first with the end of the staff and swing it into another before releasing the charge. They popped and sparked, twisting uncontrolled into a third that had waited too long to pull out of its dive. I stepped aside, the three of them dropping just a few feet from me and setting the carpet on fire. One of the cats, a harlequin colored tom, had climbed to the top of a display case and jumped about six feet into the room to land on the back of another of the dragons. The cat kicked away just a couple of feet from the ground, the force of it causing the little mechanism to snag on the carpet and tumble, tangling itself in its wings. Another red tabby pounced on it from behind one of the courtier's chairs and broke something that caused it to stop moving all at once. The cat sat back and started cleaning its paw, bored already.
       By the time I reached the king and his guards I'd zapped two more and there was only one left flying around the dome of the chamber. It looked different than the others. Larger, and somehow more organic. Before I could order the windows on the second level closed it dove out and flapped its way out across the city, following the river out of town.
       I noticed that my arm was swelling where I'd been bitten, and realized that the mechanism was poisoned. "Has the king been bitten?"
       "No, my guards acted quickly, I am unharmed." His Majesty turned to the nearest guard and sent him to fetch the doctor. "I've seen this before, the doctor can stop the poison. I wonder why they chose such a weak poison. You're going to be uncomfortable for a couple of days, but the doctor will pull you through. Unless this isn't really what I think it is, it isn't even fatal."
       "I think this was supposed to be a message," I stated, "So who have we ticked off, now?"
       "I really have no idea. I think that should be the first thing you figure out for us when you feel better."

       The dialog in the dream seemed a bit stranger in the phrasing, but this is essentially what was said. I wish I could remember the exact words, it was almost like speaking in a different language, very Latin. Even while I was watching the dream, I kept seeing frozen moments of time with white borders around them. I knew I was imagining the whole thing, but somehow the panels seemed like they were real.

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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Party

       I dreamed a dream that was washed away by the morning romping of kittens. When I finally fell back to sleep, I had a weird sketchy dream. N and I drove to a party. N was silent the whole time, very unusual. I parked in a gravel parking lot about half a block from the large three story mansion. As we approached I remarked on how much like the Munster's house it looked. Still no reply.
       Several people were leaving the house as we approached.
       "You were N's husband weren't you."
       "Yes, she's gone on ahead."
       "I'll stay for awhile, then."
       She was a tallish woman with short dark hair, busty, like most of N's friends, but I really didn't recognize her, she must have been from N's Dance Macabre group, perhaps from her workplace, but I still didn't know who she was. We walked into the party together. I couldn't find N after that. Everyone at the party seemed to be friends of N's, some were our mutual friends, some were people I recognized from her descriptions or photos from her various work parties.
       I seemed to have great difficulty following anything they said to me, most of it I heard as nonsense sounds and gibberish.
       I made my way out onto a balcony on the second floor, but there was still no sign of N. The balcony turned into a bridge and I crossed into a twilight forest (It had been night at the party.) This was exactly the sort of place N would find enchanting. The silvery barked trees were picking up the hints of rose and orange high above the ground where their leafless tips caught the first rays of the sun. I wanted to stay and see the sunrise through the trees, but a pair of ravens swooped down and hopped in front of me, sweeping me back across the bridge with their wings open. I could have gone by them but felt they were not hostile and were in fact looking out for me in a very gentle un-raven-like way.
       When I got back into the mansion it was empty except for a small silver and grey casket. My breath caught and I shuddered, then woke with a start.

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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

The Golden Hunters

       During my nap this afternoon, I do like being off of work, I re-dreamed one of my dreams from this morning. Or, at least in my head I understood it to be a repeat, at least in the theme of the dream. I was in a store, an old fashioned general store, and I was picking up some clothing to wear with my kilt. I ended up with a pair of chaps, knee high boots and several western style work shirts and matching pairs of socks, two pair for each shirt. I also bought a couple of brown and camel colored Utilikilts. I dressed and checked myself out in the mirror of the back room of the general store. It was me, but what an odd combination of clothing. I stepped outside, took a pair of pistol belts out of my saddle bags and strapped them on. I then mounted up and rode off on a huge dust colored horse with a dark mane and tail.
       Just outside of the town I was joined by a large golden mountain lion, and we slipped into the forest, tracking something. (Not someone, I'm sure I would have knows if it was a someone rather than a something.) The horse was sure footed, and seemed to keep pace easily and quietly with the lion.
       The dream shifted to a written page, maroon text, almost black, on a parchment colored background. I hit the scroll wheel to go to the top of the chapter. It read something like this.
       "The Golden Hunters"
       Racewind and Mountain Dawn followed the beast's trail. The trail was plain as though the beast had painted the fallen leaves of autumn red with its own blood. Racewind carried the man they called Buffalo Chip, only recently bound to their cause. If not for the company of Mountain Dawn, Racewind would have abandoned the hunt long ago, the blood he smelled was brewed too much of the blood of his kin.
       The buffalo who'd brought them together, hunter and prey, had brought them also the man. The man carried the barking death on his hips, but secretly neither thought it would do any good against the beast.
       Mountain Dawn thought the man knew that as well, carried them for what little comfort they would provide, a link back to the oil, iron and fire of his own world.
       Mountain Dawn fully expected to die in the coming conflict, the blood colored leaves smelled too much of his own kind, too much of larger, faster, better fed. Mountain Dawn was many years from holding his own territory. He was now old, and unlike in the first few contests he lost, he knew it, knew it in his bones, his tendons and in his teeth and claws, and though wiser than the strong young lions who ruled from the high rocks, he knew he would not be winning any more contests, there would be no more mates. It was his time.
       "I think this snark may be a boojum, boys." The horse shuddered beneath him and the lion growled. The man could not smell the blood in the color of the leaves, but followed the trail with a skill that he had no reason to possess, but had since childhood. He could find things, find things and bring them to light. It was keeping things that he seemed to have no talent for.
       Until the Buffalo had come to him, standing serene on his third floor balcony, eating his potted ferns, he had every reason to think his talent was a natural use of his normal observational abilities. Finding the horse and the lion right where his 'hallucination' had left them?
       Well, that started him down a whole new road. And, for the second time in his life, he let go of everything save for what he carried on his back or in his pockets. Trouble keeping things seemed to be a condition of being able to find anything.
       There was more, much more, but the trail had come to a fork, and the beast had crossed a road then become lost in a stream. The lion and I stepped out in a double spiral away from the horse, hoping to find the trail along the road, the stream or in the forest.

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Convention, Truck Bomb

       I dreamed I was at a convention (ComicCon starts tomorrow, so no surprises there.) The convention hall was small, much like it was when we only took up a half of the civic center for the Comic Convention. Like then, I was traveling with a woman who was only interested in the movie memorabilia. While I did have some interest, it exerted a lesser pull than the games, books and comics.
       In the dream I found a dealer who had comic versions of Fudge, Call of Cthulu, and Spare Parts. He recognized my name and wanted me to stop and sign copies of the Spare Parts rules for people. I said I was happy to sit for a while, my feet were in more pain than usual, and sign copies for anyone who purchased on. Pretty soon there was a small crowd around the table, people asking about other rules supplements, and how soon they would see them.
       I didn't really have a good answer for them, as I still had to go to work every day to pay my bills, Spare Parts wasn't able to do that. They were excited when I told then that the artist and colorist were here as well, and they would be quite the catch as they didn't attend many conventions, and weren't really industry artists (as they both worked for their own commercial art companies.)
       My companion was getting bored, and a little jealous of the attention I was getting, so she slipped off to the Hollywood Book and Poster booth along the back wall. That was fine with me, I'd realized much earlier than the dream's time frame that we weren't really suited for one another.

       The dream that woke me this morning featured a couple of backwoodsy sorts picking me and Little John up in their stake bed truck. They drove me to my temporary home at a motor hotel, the parking lot of which was full of running shouting children. While I was cramped in the back of the truck, I found a copy of the Unibomber's Manifesto, and the writings of the pair who'd blown up the Federal building. I remembered smelling diesel and fertilizer when I put Little John in the cage on the back of the truck. I got very nervous. I found a remote control with a single red button on it. I quietly slipped it into one of my cargo pockets. It looked to me like the receivers and detonators were actually stored under the front seats. I toed the switches on them and they flickered to life, fortunately there was no beep or anything other than a small LED on each of the four detonators. The driver and his companion kept yakking about the horrible state of the nation, and how our colleges were all to blame. I saw an invoice in the back where a delivery was listed for our local university.
       We arrived at the hotel complex, with new dormitories, under construction along the road in front of it. We had to drive through the site, and it was a bit bumpy, worrying me that if the bomb was too unstable it could be jarred into going off. I pulled the outside of the cargo pocket well away from the button on the remote, wishing they had built in an arming switch on the remote as well as the bombs. Before I thought to turn off the receivers we'd arrived. I thanked the men, jumped out and opened up the cage to let LJ out, he ran into the hotel room when N called him, the kids in the parking lot distracted by his long fluffy tail, stopped their game and ran over to N to ask if they could see him again. She started to say "no" but I stopped her and told her to let them in and just make them be quiet, LJ would come back out to see them.
       I didn't know I was going to do it, but as soon as the truck turned to go through the empty construction site (it was Saturday or Sunday no work was going on) to get to the road, I reached into my pocket and after the truck passed the manager's office I pressed the detonator button.
       There was a rapid ripping under the front seat, four bangs almost in unison, then one large bang that knocked me to my ass.
       Unfortunately, the front seat was apparently close enough to the home-made high explosives, and they went off anyway. The whole front of the manager's office was blown out as were all of the windows in the hotel. On the good side, the children were all with us, and the manager's office was empty this time of day. Except for the possibility of the Manager being there.
       I ran over, but couldn't get in the managers office. I sprinted out to the street to help with anyone who might have been driving by when the framing members of the construction site went flying. I was bleeding and the kids were shouting, running around. N grabbed the phone and called 911.
       I'd realized, as the truck was turning to go through the construction site, that I might not be able to get to the police before they actually killed hundreds of people. I felt bad about the damage, and worse about killing the bombers (they might not have been acting alone.) But I really couldn't convince myself that there was anything else I could have done differently.
       N caught up to me.
       "You knew this was going to happen, didn't you?"
       I didn't deny it, nor confirm it. "They were mighty suspicious characters. I could tell they hated the University, but I didn't know this would happen."
       I did know that I would be spending a lot of time with the local police and the FBI. I hoped there was enough of the papers from the back seat of the truck to back up my story. I didn't yet know if I was going to tell them that I had the detonator.

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Sunday, July 22, 2007

Flying Car, Paranormal Investigators

       Woo Hoo! Flying car dream. I was driving, flying, with N, S and C were also with us. We stopped at a farm house and enjoyed a meal while interviewing them about their crop circles and mutant animals, which they didn't actually have any to show us. I appears that some men from the government came and took their animals away, but at least gave them enough money to buy new stock. They are waiting until next spring to see if the crop circles and mutations return. We agree to come back again, and I promise to bring them some real California oranges and lemons from the trees in our back yards.
       In the end we figured we had met some very cool people and the trip was well worth it. We got lost flying back out of the place, and I couldn't convince N to allow me to fly high in the air and just head west until we spotted a big city or road. At one point we ended up looking out across a mountain gorge, and the road had ended at an abandoned gravel pit. We decided to camp out. When N and C had fallen asleep we gently lifted off and climbed into the night sky. It only took a few minutes to see the lights of a small town and we descended to the ground outside of town and drove in to refuel. Unfortunately the station was closed, so we had to wait until morning.
       When the sun came up and the station opened we found out that we were in Wyoming, a little further North than we would have expected to be, but still, closer to home. While we were filling up and the women were getting stuff for breakfast, the garage owner started telling us about the bunch of bigfoot hunters that had just left town.
       "They left too soon, though. He was back last night, rummaging through the trash bins behind the cafe."
       "Cool. Do you think anyone would mind if we interviewed folks about it? We write for a magazine that does stories about the people who experience events like this."
       "Townsfolk are pretty protective of this bigfoot fella, so you aren't planning on shooting him, are you?"
       "Only with a camera, if we come across him. Like I said, I'm actually more interested in the people of your town, how they feel about bigfoot, what they really believe is going on, how it changes their lives, if it changes their lives."
       "That's different, most of the group that just left had tranq guns and cameras and night vision gear."
       "Probably scared your bigfoot away."
       "I think someone from the town was hiding him."
       Now, I thought that was a very interesting comment. S wanted to go home, thinking this was a big hoax, but I thought that made it all the more interesting. N and C decided they liked the town, so we decided to stay another night, even though it would mean driving in shifts to get home by the end of the week.
       By lunch time a good portion of the town had turned up to check us out. After looking at our web sight and reading some of what S and I had written (S was still writing fiction mostly, he even had a couple of fans in the crowd) the townspeople were willing to talk to us, admitting that they told some different versions of the story to 'tourists' and the more rude of the investigators. We asked them to tell us those stories as well, just so we could have them documented. I realized we would be coming back here, too, there was just so much local folklore being spontaneously generated.
       We checked the girls into a hotel room, and S and I camped out in the van, overlooking the garbage bins. Sure enough, about 11:30 a woman came out of the cafe, put a couple of pans of something down, then went in and shut everything down. A few minutes later, a hairy man, not a bigfoot, crept out of the forest edge and raided the bins and ate the contents of the pan. We got some good night vision images, but decided not to take any flash pictures.
       "That's not a big foot."
       "Never thought it was," I replied, "but this is far more intersting."
       In the morning I talked to the hotel clerk and showed her the photographs we'd taken.
       "He's not hurting anyone, and he seems to be happy."
       "We're not going to invade his privacy, and we don't want to disrupt your tourist industry. I'd like to talk to him, if possible."
       "Only, no one can talk to him, he runs from everyone. You can leave messages for him, sometimes he writes back. We leave him books from the library sometimes. He always returns them on time."
       I brought out a couple of our books, wrote a note explaining that they were gifts, from the authors, and that we'd love to tell his story, too. He could write us, or talk with us, next time we were around. (Spring break, I wrote the dates.)
       "If there is anyone he regularly corresponds with, we'd love to talk to them, perhaps they would be willing to help exchange messages."
       "I don't know if he'll go for that, he's vanished for weeks at a time if he thinks someone is stalking him."
       "We'll be out of town this morning, so no pressure. We'd just like someone to relay any messages back to us that might come along."
       "I think I can find someone to do that."
       "Thanks."
       By the time I'd finished chatting with the clerk we were loaded up and ready to go. I grabbed a little breakfast roll and some juice and we hit the road.
       

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Friday, July 20, 2007

Audio Engineering, City Mages

       I dreamed I was recording the on-air efforts of a female talk show host. We were broadcasting and recording from a cave in the mountains. Our internet connection suddenly failed, and shortly thereafter the phone connection also failed.
       "Get me back on the air!" the woman screamed at me.
       "I'm just here to record you." I did manage to reset the router and get the internet connection back up, but the connection to the radio station would not link up. "We need a real engineer here. How about if I send the last caller through to the station via email, and they can play that until the connection is re-made."
       "Well hurry!"
       I hurried. In the process I managed to clip off a few seconds at the end of the call. I knew the Doctor was going to be angry about that, too, so didn't tell her. I managed to get a response from the email I sent to the engineer there, and he took the file and set it to play on air. I then started working on making the phones work again. I couldn't get her desk phone to come up, but managed to forward the calls to my cell phone, which I then was able to plug the headphone wires in and rewire them to go through the sound board and into the recorder as well as the headphones.
       The Doctor didn't want to use my cell phone, so I had to re-forward the calls to her cell phone and connect my hacked headsets to it. She complained about that, too. But soon we had her back on the phone with her callers. I was able to start recording them, and then emailed the recordings to New York. It meant a delay of several minutes, but the Doctor was back on the air.
       I could tell from the looks she was giving me that this arrangement wasn't making her happy. I braced myself for impact after the final call of her three hour show was up.
       She ranted for a good 15 minutes, I recorded the whole thing, since she didn't bother to take off my headsets.
       I then forwarded the emails from the NY engineers, indicating the trouble was on their end and they were working with our hosting company to fix it. I then showed her the commendation from the station manager on my quick fix, emailing two to three minutes of the show at a time to them so they could keep on the air, even though the broadcast was a little bit delayed, we were still on. I showed the conversation I had via email with the engineers where we worked out a way to make a cell connection back to NY as a backup in the future should this happen again. And then I pointed out that I had cut up and resoldered my own headset rig to keep her on the air.
       She apparently was not a person who would back down in the face of evidence that she and her raft of assumptions was wrong. So the last thing I showed her was that most of the equipment we were using, the mixer, the MP3 Recorder, the studio microphones, etc, were all my own personal equipment.
       "I can afford to buy all of that myself."
       "Good, I've left you a list so you can."
       "You're not taking that stuff out of here!"
       "I have just sat through twenty minutes of you explaining how I'm not good enough to run your show. Well, even after I've showed you what NY and I went through to keep you on the air today, nearly live, you can't seem to say you're sorry, or even thank-you. I don't need the aggravation, so I will be going back to my studio. You hired me 'at will' instead of on a contract. Well I agreed, because my wife is a fan. 'At will' works both ways, Doc."
       "But, Monday's show!"
       "You have two almost three days to find someone or learn how to work the controls yourself. There are plenty of folks out there who can run a mixer and recorder."
       The Doctor was still shouting when the phone rang and NY was on the line. Not for her, for me. Apparently they had re-established the connection just at the end of the show, and had heard everything. Rather than hand me the phone, the Doctor put the conversation on speaker phone.
       The senior engineer begged me to stay on, promised to set up the system I'd suggested, offered a yearly contract at a considerably higher rate of pay, enough to retire from my real job, in fact, and then pointed out that the Doctor would have to come to their studio in San Diego, or NY if she didn't find a way to keep me on, they weren't paying for anyone else to make house calls on her behalf, that wasn't in their contract.
       "Fine, I'll pay someone myself."
       The engineer asked me to stop at the studio Saturday afternoon, "I know we can find a place for you."
       I finished packing up my stuff, and left, knowing that by the time I got down the mountain there would be several messages on my machine about making bumps and recording SSA's (Self Service Announcements) for Monday's show. Before I was at the end of her driveway, the Doctor would completely forget that I'd quit.

       Just before waking I had a short little dream where N brought me a little orange headed ape, an orangutan! I didn't know what to say, other than what the hell were we going to do when it grew up and weighed 200 pounds.
       Cut to the future, I am barely able to hold on to an intricately engineered staff device of some kind as I race across a warehouse district rooftop. I come to the edge of the roof. Whoever, or whatever, is chasing me lands on the roof with a loud chunking sound then I can feel the roof shiver as it glides towards me.
       "Where is that damned Ape?" I muttered to myself, then managed to make a line shoot from the staff out to some power lines across the street.
       The effort almost wipes me out. Just when I figure I'm going to have to use my staff as a club against whatever is following me, a huge red and orange head pops up over the ledge of the roof. I'd say my little orangutan had grown quite a bit more than 500 pounds. He grabbed me under one ape smelling arm and grabbed the shimmering line with the other. He leapt out into the space between the buildings and swung us safely down to the ground level, a full half a block away.
       I turned back to see a long Komodo, about 12 feet long, slither down the warehouse, shattering the windows it used as foot holds.
       The orangutan stood, shouting and growling a challenge. I was too weak to support him, though, and even with the two red tabbies rushing down the alley ways to help me, I didn't think I had enough in me other than for an escape.
       Suddenly, there was a tiger, and a mustang with a robed rider. There was an Asian woman, in a gold traced silk gown who stepped out of a Honda convertable, another tiger jumped out of the passenger seat and heeled as she approached.
       "You should bond one of my babies instead of your little kitties, next time." She said as she bent down to pet my white footed tabby on the head. The tabby rubbed her hand, then jumped up to hug the young tiger around the neck. Her adult tiger had joined my orangutan in corralling the Komodo, who's handler had not shown him or herself yet.
       "More juice with less brawn, besides, they can get into places un-noticed."
       "I thought you'd given up the breaking and entering game," she looked me over, "but apparently not. You have some pretty serious injuries there."
       The man in black dismounted and the mustang, hooves bursting into flame joined the other two large animals.
       The Komodo stopped its advance, realized it was in danger of being flanked, then turned back to climb the warehouse, where only the orangutan had any real chance of keeping up with it.
       The man in black tied back his slicker and withdrew an ebony short staff. He touched me with it. "Broken bones in your foot, how the hell did you make it this far?" There was an agonizing buzzing and I nearly fainted from the pain.
       The Asian lady shot him a look, "Gentle!"
       "I may owe you both my life, but I don't have to be happy about being drawn into this, and it works faster if I don't have to be gentle."
       "Faster is good. I had no intention of drawing you into this, either of you." The pain lessened and the buzzing fell off some. My tabbies were now at my heels looking up at the man in black.
       "My kittens cannot seem to say 'no' to yours," the Asian woman said. She turned back to her car and summoned a fringe and golden bell covered staff to her hands.
       "And I always pay my debts, I owe you a huge one. Damn! those cats a strong, I've mended a half dozen bones and they've powered it all. How did you teach them to do that."
       "Yes, you will have to teach us both that trick some day."
       "That, and the giant ape trick. I really want to know how you do that." I could tell the man in black was pondering the benefits of a twenty foot long flaming horse. My orangutan friend had grown to half the height of the building and was in a position to pick up then squash the Komodo. I stopped him. I didn't intend to start a war here. The Komodo flailed around in the ape's grip, unable to get a tooth or claw on the giant ape.
       "It is no wonder you never have energy, you give it all to your shimarae. (I am not certain exactly what she said, it may have been in Chinese.)"
       "You have to spend it to get it."
       "Or collect it and nurture it," she replied.
       "There, I'm done, and still ready to party. Should we take care of this lizard for you?"
       "No, I don't want to start a war here. Put him back with the thought that he did his job and scared the intruders away."
       "Oh! tricky, I like a challenge," the bells on her staff began to jingle in a rising crescendo of sound.
       I told the ape to put the Komodo back on the roof.
       "Ung?"
       "Really, more people stuff, trust us, it'll work," I added a "for awhile" under my breath.
       As the ape shrunk back down to his still giant normal size, another couple of staff wielding folks showed up. With the exception of the Chinese woman, who was all about tradition, I had noticed that the gaudier the costume and animal, the less talented the mage. Most of these were very flashy, but there were a couple, like myself, where the flash was exclusive to their staff and animal companions (if they had any, some could work without them, I wasn't one of them.) There was one man in the crowd who I took note of. He was dressed completely normal, save for his snakeskin boots and his stave was sheathed in a snakeskin pool cue bag (and might have been a pool cue for all I know) He was powerful, I could feel it ripple.
       While most stayed a half block away or more, he strode right up to us. I think he may have been tougher than the three of us together, but he wasn't showing any hostility.
       "Trouble?"
       "Injured myself while exercising the ape. He's tough to keep up with. You?"
       "I may need some help and you look like a good team."
       "We're not a team, I just owe him a favor."
       "Or a few dozen," the Chinese girl amended, "We are acquainted, but don't normally work together."
       "Perhaps I can change that. Let me buy you dinner in exchange for listening my proposal."

       I would dearly love (except for the pain part,) for this dream to continue at a later date. I really want to know what I was doing that had me running from the Komodo in the first place.
       
       

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Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Carpet Party

       I dreamed I was in a large room with a new carpet that had not yet been stretched to the walls and secured. I was with most of the other LAN Administrators from work, plus a few other individuals, some teachers, some former students, and a couple of friends I haven's seen in a while. We were milling about, visiting when I got it into my head to make the carpet stretching into a sort of party game. We started spiraling out from the center, shuffling our feet to stretch the carpet and about halfway into the room I switched to crawling to the edge. Everyone followed along each radiating out from the center. I then started singing a sort of weird sing song rhyming song that I was making up as I went along, This is a very inaccurate reconstruction, only the ending rhymes are correct:

       "Big Jim, thought himself lord of the jungle.
       King of the snakes, leaves and the dirt.
       He rolled for a crit but got a bungle.
       Good thing only his manhood was hurt.

       I only sang the one verse. The rhyme pattern was ABAB and like a jogging cadence, the rest of the team echoed back each line after I sang it, which gave me time to think of the next line. after the final line everyone laughed and we were at the point where I was able to pass around the setting tool for the carpet and everyone got to hook in their edge. I still needed to do the hallway, but that looked like it was going to be easy. It wouldn't even take two or three extra people to finish it in just a couple of minutes.
       

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Monday, July 16, 2007

Alternate Reality, Comic Convention

       I awoke shortly after N slipped out to work. But I didn't recognize where I awoke. The bedroom window was looking in the wrong direction, and instead of an ivy covered hillside with wisteria, grapes an a couple of scraggly fruit trees, I saw a huge white gazebo, low flowering plants and a hedge of oleander a hundred yards away across a lawn that looked as manicured as a putting green. I looked around, stunned, thinking "where's the lawn jockey," but gratefully not seeing it.
       I turned back into the room to get dressed. There were two closets, I figured that the one with the blue lizards painted on the doors was mine, because the other was four bi-folds in a peachy pink with white lace over it. I figured that had to be N's, despite the pink part (N hates pink). It sounded like there were people in N's closet, rustling and breathing, so I decided not to open it.
       I didn't recognize hardly any of the clothing in my closet. I dug around, finally coming to a box on the shelf in the back. I opened the box and found a loud Hawian print shirt and some white bib overalls. The overalls didn't fit, the shirt was a double-X L so it was actually a little loose on me. I looked around and found a couple of utilikilts rolled up in the bottom of the box as well. I shook out the best looking one and belted it on. The sounds coming from my wife's closet were beginning to unnerve me, so I found a pair of lace up sandles strapped them on and then headed out for breakfast.
       I managed to find the door to the hall, but from there was completely lost. I had no idea where anything was. I found an office, too neat to be mine, then a book room, not really a library, but a room with books just piled around its perimeter with a couple of chairs and a small table with book binding repair tools on it. There were a couple of opulent bathrooms, again, one with the blue lizard motif and the other with the lace over peach motif. I slipped into the blue lizard bathroom and checked myself in the mirror. It was me, a little whiter and my hair a little wilder and somewhat shorter than it is now. I brushed my teeth and looked in the medicine cabinet. There were dozens of bottles, almost all of them prescriptions, and almost all of them completely full, most still looked like they had the cotton in the top.
       I made my way to the front door, and stepped out onto a porch. It was white, with vining roses growing over waist high white latticework across the front. I said good morning to the caretakers who were working there. After a moment's surprise they responded to me.
       "Would you like some water, or juice, it's already getting hot out her."
       Again, they looked like they were in shock. "No thank you, sir," one said.
       "Better not let the missus catch you in that," another one piped in. His partner shushed him immediately and began to apologize.
       "No worries, I was just feeling nostalgic."
       They nodded and, upon hearing voices from the end of the driveway dove back into their work.
       I stepped down to greet my wife and her entourage. I didn't see N in the crowd, and was very confused. A woman with a nearly perfect figure strode up to me, looked me top to bottom and then did a modeling twirl in front of me.
       "Well, how do you like it?"
       The outfit she was wearing was a clingy tube dress, flattering. I opted for the non committal "You're looking lovely, as usual."
       "Thank you dearest." She pecked me on the cheek. "What are you wearing?"
       "I was feeling nostalgic." This seemed like a safe reply.
       "It is old-school, but your legs are sexy as ever, it works on you." She turned to pose with me for the photographers in the crowd.
       "Smile, you're about to start a whole new fashion trend among my male admirers."
       I smiled, "Sorry, I haven't had breakfast yet."
       "Why didn't you yell something up from the kitchen staff."
       "I didn't know I could."
       "Let's get inside, something's wrong with you."
       I couldn't have agreed more. She blew kissed to the crowd and towed me back inside.
       "What's wrong with you."
       "This is not my world."
       "We've had this discussion."
       She called for some breakfast to be brought to our patio then hurried back to our bedroom.
       "Millie, get this on the exercise floor, it still seems a bit large in places. Bring my house body."
       As we walked through the halls, a woman in a maid's outfit brought up a headless body. My wife stopped and pulled her head out of the body she was in. Her spine whipped around into the "house body" which was a slender wisp of a woman with hardly any hips or breasts. She turned to look at me. "I know that bothers you, sorry dear, but you need breakfast and I need to work a little bit off of the new body before I report for filming next week.
       "I didn't see anything wrong with it," I offered, weakly.
       "Don't even think about it, that's just a work body."
       I followed her into the bedroom and she threw open all four of her closet doors. One held clothing, and the other held about eight headless bodies, all supported just off the ground by metal plates at their neck line with feeding and waste tubes running into and out of them. They were all of various sizes, none fat, a couple almost anorexically thin, and disturbingly, tucked in the back almost out of sight, one that could easily be a child's body.
       I was ready to run out, but held on for breakfast, I really was starving. I stepped out onto our patio and a maid brought breakfast. I thanked her, again, the surprised look was the reaction.
       "You're welcome," she whispered back and then hurried of as my wife entered the patio in her third body for the morning.
       "Let me drop you off on my way to the script meetings, you can see if that kilt company would like to come out with a retro line with our endorsement."
       "OK" I answered looking forward to getting out of here.
       "What's wrong, you look like you don't know who or where you are."
       "I don't. I was expecting to wake up to ivy, a hot tub outside the doors where I'm now eating breakfast overlooking acres of grass, thirteen cats..."
       "Who's Ivy?"
       "Ivy, a leafy green vining plant, growing on the hill behind the house I own."
       "I thought we'd sold all your properties so we could buy this place."
       "May be so, but what I'm trying to tell you is that I don't remember any of this. The last thing I remember is sending N off to work from a half asleep state."
       "Oh. Nothing since then?"
       "No, it's like I've slipped into an alternate reality. I don't even know your name."
       "Oh dear. I knew this could happen. We can fix this. I'll get you an appointment right after my script meetings and take you there myself."
       "Thanks. I've got to change for the meetings."
       There was a jump in time and I found myself in downtown San Diego, I did pop in to the Utilikilt shop and they put me in contact with their marketing people. They liked the idea of a retro release, particularly if I and my wife would appear in the commercials. Since I got the impression that was what she wanted I agreed to the concept and asked them to contact my wife's agency to work out the details.
       I checked my phone and discovered that the Comic Convention was in session. I rooted around and discovered that I had a membership waiting for me, so went to pick it up. The volunteers escorted me right out of the pickup line over to the pro tables. I tried to show them that I had tickets waiting for me, but they insisted that I should not have to wait in line for them. They sent a runner for them. They asked if my wife would be joining me.
       "Her schedule is pretty busy, new scripts."
       "New body, saw it on the view this morning. You're a lucky guy."
       "I think so." I said, grinning. Really, I had no idea if I was lucky or not.
       Runners brought my badge, I talked them out of letting me go without the pro folder, as I explained that I really wasn't a comics pro.
       "But your movies, we're even running a couple of them this con."
       "Thank you, but I guess I still think of this as primarily comics, even after all these years."
       I made my way into the hall, grabbing a list of the seminars. As I walked around I bumped into a gal I know who is a teacher at the school district where I work, or worked. I asked her what was going on. She looked almost like she did in her twenties, but we were in our mid 40's the last time I talked to her.
       "What do you mean?"
       "Last time I saw you was in your classroom at RHES, I only remember about 6 months after that."
       "Serous brain fade, have you seen someone yet?"
       "Not yet."
       She took my hand and pulled me into one of the emptier side corridors of the convention center. Before she could tell me anything there was a reporter and a photographer there. "Who is she?"
       "This is RG, one of my old high school friends, and one of the prettiest women I've ever known. Don't you agree?"
       "Will she be in your next film?"
       RG blushed at that. Making me think that my films might not be the sort of thing she would agree to appear in.
       "I don't know, she's never really expressed and interest." Again, I decided to go with a safe non-committal reply.
       "Are you lovers?"
       I didn't know entertainment reporters could be so brazen.
       "I was never that lucky when I was young.If I had been, I don't imagine my life would be what it is today."
       "So you are attracted to her?"
       "And you, and your camera operator there and about two thirds of the attendees of the convention. I'm a man, how could I not be attracted?"
       During the interview I was walking RG to the pro-lounge, and saying I would be happy to talk to them later. We ducked into the lounge and our reporters wandered off to make other people miserable.
       "Sorry about that, I suppose the real me would have known that could happen."
       A security person arrived, "Do you want me to escort them out of the convention center? They know they aren't supposed to interrupt without asking."
       No, it's OK, they just got a little bit excited, no harm done.
       "I'll be right outside when you're ready to leave."
       "I don't..."
       "Thank you," RG interrupted. Then when he'd stepped away, "You want him to be with you, we had a murder of a guest here a few years ago, you're famous enough and married to someone with a rather, um, rabid, fan base."
       "Am I famous because of her or me."
       "Actually, both, but it's hard to separate the two these days. She wouldn't be anything without you."
       "Do you think you could have been her?"
       I could tell the question shocked her, and was something she hadn't actually thought about.
       "No, there's some real talent there that I don't have."
       "Not sure that's true. You're one of the most intelligent and talented women I know."
       "Compared to third graders."
       "Do you think I miss the schools, in this life I seem to have now?"
       "I can't answer that for you, do you miss us?"
       "In my head I've only been on summer break two weeks, so no, but that's because I think I'm going back to work next week. I'm not, am I."
       "No, I can't imagine you are, though if you wanted to fund and teach ROP production classes or something, I bet they'd fall all over themselves to let you."
       "I'm getting the impression that might be a bit controversial."
       "Yeah, for our district, may be."
       "This is an odd question, but, do you know what happened to N?"
       I never got an answer to that question.

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Friday, July 13, 2007

Race to the Ball Game

       I dreamed I had a rice rocket, electric, though. It was shiny, whiney and fast! I was following some friends out to PetCo Park for a ball game. The driver of the car was someone I haven't seen in over 20 years. We left from the parking lot of the old High School. (Before it's current renovations, apparently.)
       R was a rocket jockey in some previous life. I don't think she drives without putting her foot to the floor - on either pedal. She is motion sickness on wheels when she is in traffic. (Two foot driver in an automatic transmission car.) Once we got to the freeway, she hit a clear patch of road and took off like a shot.
       The phone rang, I picked up on my helmet headset, "Voice command, answer."
       "Aren't you going to keep up with us?"
       "I know where you're going. I'll be right behind you, unless the Highway Patrol gets you first."
       "I haven't had a ticket in two weeks."
       "Right. See you there."
       I saw her vehicle's brake lights come on about a half mile ahead of me, could see the smoke from her tires. R's phone disconnected from mine. She cut over and accelerated about thirty yards and slammed on the brakes again. Apparently there was traffic up ahead. I caught up with her, then when we slowed to around fifteen MPH I started cutting the lanes to get by the problem.
       I was free of the clog and a couple of miles down the road when R passed me again. One of her passengers mouthed "Help me," out the side window as they passed me. I had a spare helmet on the back of the bike, so I indicated it.
       "Thank you!" she mouthed back as they passed another vehicle.
       When I got to the park, I realized that the motorcycle parking was in a completely different place than the regular parking. (Not IRL, just for this dream.) There was even a nearby ticket booth. I realized, as I got up to the front of the line, that I had no Idea where the rest of the party planned on sitting, in the cheap seats along the left field line was all I knew. I told that to the ticket person and she started showing me all sorts of options for ticket packages. I couldn't seem to convince her to just sell me one ticket, to this game. I finally had a bright idea.
       "Give me your phone number and I'll call you after the game for details on the various ticket packages."
       Oddly, that shut her up, my goofy plans almost never work, and she sold me a ticket for the game. I could see the cafeteria area behind her, and thought that would be a good place to watch the game from, and it was along the left field line. Interesting layout for a ball park, I thought. I made my way in through a maze of turnstyles and X-ray machines. My phone rang.
       "I'm in the left field cafeteria."
       "We got stopped so we're running a bit late, we're just in line for tickets. R can drive sane if there's a cop right behind her."
       "No line at the gate by motorcycle parking. I'll wait here if you want to come over.
       "No, we're almost at the front, save us a table near the wall."
       "OK, I have one," I put my helmet down in the middle of the table and took a chair from a table with only three people at it. "We're the fifth table in, looking right down the line."
       "See you in a bit... Hey just sell us tickets to this game, will you. Sorry, gotta go, see you in a bit."
       She hung up the phone as I said "good-bye."
       I loved the tables overlooking the park, sure, we were a few yards further back, but we were in the shade and actually had a little more elbow room. I could only imagine what this deck would look like during a big sold out game. The chairs would all be piled out against the wall or even up on the tables. It would certainly be an interesting security challenge. I ordered 5 waters and a pitcher of beer to start us off with.
       The pre-game announcements began and I settled in to wait for my friends.
       It was then that I noticed that it was daytime in the park, while it had been twilight when we left the parking lot of the school. I leaned out, thinking it was just the brightness of the park's lights, but no, the sky was blue with little fluffy white whisps left over from the marine layer still hanging around the top of the structure.

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Thursday, July 12, 2007

Big Mac Daddy, Trucker Micro-Biologist

       I dreamed I was at a special promotion ceremony. I was one of 50 graduates of the "Dootson School of Trucking" and had earned myself one of 50 Tractors with the sleep-over cabin. N and I were planning on retiring early to a new career. Apparently we were short of truck drivers and this was a way of getting more on the road. I was explaining that all I needed to do was drive four days a week and I would be replacing my current salary and benefits. While I didn't own the trailer, I was on a long term contract to drive for a microbiology company. I had the back of my truck, one of fifty on the deck of an aircraft carrier, open to give tours of the special 'cleanroom on wheels' trailer that I was going to be hauling from city to city delivering biological precursors and hauling back product for packaging in California. (In my home city, even.) The whole reason I got the contract was that I was the only driver who'd impressed the company that I actually knew what they were doing, and could understand the monitoring software that was used on the trailer with almost no training. They also liked that I was a computer tech and would be able to help people over the phone from the road. (The route only involved driving six hours a day, leaving me some time to do phone support. In a way I was actually doing two jobs for the company.)
       At one point I was standing on the back of an empty trailer telling N that we could own one of our own in just six short years, and we could fix it up like a motor home, sort of the ultimate tow-behind.
       As I watched our promotion ceremony, we had a big screen video production playing overhead, at one point there was a live aerial view of the aircraft carrier and our five wide by ten long grid of trucks. There was us on the fan tail stage and a few hundred of our family and friends on the deck between us and our trucks. The ship was steaming into port, San Diego, and the intent was to drive the trucks down onto the island, across the base and then back in formation across the Cabrillio bridge for more photo opportunities. The sunlight glinted into the camera from the solar cells of fifty trailer roofs. (Although the tractors were all Bio-Diesel Electric Hybrids, the solar cells were really to charge the batteries for the onboard GPS, computer and cell phone systems, not much else.)
       Until we had enough to pay off the trailer I wanted, N was going to stay home and take care of the cats on the days I was driving. (I would pretty much only be home on weekends.) Once the school was paid off, I intended to work out the contract then sell the house and retire to the road after customizing our trailer. I figured I would have enough for the trailer and twenty years of food and fuel. I had all ready purchased some retirement property that had full electric and sewer hookups, as well as a paved drive circle to get the rig in and out of the place.
       The promotion ceremony had gotten to the point where they were calling our states and names, so my attention snapped back to the stage and the crowd. California is early and I stepped across the stage to take my diploma, license, and to shake the hand of the Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Commerce as well as the Vice President of the United States. I think I was the oldest one in the promotion ceremony.

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Monday, July 09, 2007

Distributed Computing Pet

       I dreamed I worked in a large open mall area, selling some sort of tiny device which allowed you to participate in a live game of some sort that included everyone else who carried one of the devices. In the dream, the devices were a combination of self-winding and photo-electric powered. They had a little sensor to detect and communicate with the other game devices, and they had a few simple controls. Other than that they had a 3d LCD matrix and as you moved them around your view of the game "world" would change based on the units around you and what their owners were doing. There was also a small speaker so the object could "talk" or sing.
       The Dream City Mall was the most visually stimulating part of the dream, though. The mall was a couple of stories tall around the kiosks where I was located. I could see hundreds of people moving around the mall, and of those, I could see dozens carrying the little game devices. I had a display that showed a view of the mall from above with all of the devices located and the currently active links they employed. All of the actual human to human communication was shown in blue links and the device communication in yellow. There were pockets of green and gold as well as maroon and brown in the malls decorations. The same colors were mirrored in the game world. Although I can't now say how it happens, in the game world when a certain number of units and their activities synchronize, the units begin to chant or sing in unison, it is a happy sound, pleasing.
       During the dream a group of kids and onlookers begin to chat about their "pets" and suddenly the units begin to sing. Soon others are talking about them. Soon after, I have a rush on the booth and sell out of the units in just a few minutes. I also sell cases and carriers, like cellphone add-ons. I sell out of all but the ugliest of those as well. Very popular are the "Piggyback" or "Papoose" models, they allow the game to be carried in the same carrier as the person's cell phone. The proximity to the cell phone also boosts the antenna size of the game unit and it can make more connections while the cell phone is near-by.
       An owner of one of the trendy boutiques comes to me and asks if we sell the large display unit that I have over the booth. I say that we do, but there is a list of distributed computation projects that you have to choose from when you buy one. (That is one of the real uses of the game devices, it seems, to participate in distributed computing tasks when not actively plowing through one of the game worlds.) I mention that you can also choose to subscribe to a computational task yourself. I didn't expect that a trendy boutique would actually have such a task, but I was running one for the mall security as a means of paying for my space in the mall. I know that my other distributors have similar processes running, and that some cities have even begun to subscribe to modules that calculate traffic and allow for the city staff to analyse data on signal timing and other traffic control measures. We offered free family packages with a parental control and monitoring application that was turning out to be a good safety feature. We'd already prevented a couple of abductions and the game results in many run-aways returning home, because many kids who run away won't run out on their pets.
       As I woke from this dream I realized this was a very early version of the familiar from my short story of the same name.

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Sunday, July 08, 2007

Chalk Lecture in KPFM, Night Terror

       I dreamed I was listening to a lecture by a woman who used multi-colored chalk to illustrate her lecture. The lecture was in a Killer Pizza from Mars, but instead of movie posters on the walls, there were blackboards. The blackboards were all different sizes and each had a tray full of various colored chalks, some of which were fluorescent. As the woman spoke, I sketched a scene from Star Wars (Luke hiding from Vader on the second Death Star) only in my scene, the characters were Lego Mini-Figures.
       "Why Legos?" S asked.
       "I like Legos, and I draw them better than real people," I answered.
       "That's just weird." S couldn't seem to take his eyes off the drawing, though.
       I had made the overhead light a part of the drawing, using it as the source of light in the Death Star picture.
       The woman made her way over to our table. She stopped talking and pulled out a piece of chalk, making a second beam of light seem to come from the single lamp, this one in chalk, she than added a scene next to mine on the wall, rather than on the blackboard. She drew the space battle taking place outside of the Death Star. Unfortunately she didn't draw Lego ships. For some reason that made me a little bit angry at her, but I didn't interrupt her, just mentioned "It would be cool if the ships were also Lego."
       "I can't draw Lego."
       "How's that?" S asked, "Everyone can draw Lego." He then pulled out some red chalk and began to draw a Sand Crawler and Jawas on the wall as well. He made the Crawler look like a Lego construction, and his Jawas had glowing red circle pieces for eye.
       "Now that's cool." I said.
       The woman huffed and wandered off, her space battle incomplete. I started converting her drawing into Lego ships, and things started looking better. She wandered back to her tables and continued her lecture, whatever it was.

       I had one of those short little "wake with a start dreams." I was in my kitchen, everything going along so normal I would swear that this is in fact a memory. I was cleaning off the counter when I swept up a fur covered eight inch rope. Only, I realized with a shock, it wasn't a rope, it was one of the kitten's tails. I called the two red tabbies names, shocked, trying to find out who had lost their tail. My heart started racing and I woke terrified. Everyone was safe and whole, but they were now expecting breakfast.

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Thursday, July 05, 2007

Cat-Fish, Visiting Wet Dream

       In my first dream of the night I was traveling north out of the Dream City. I was driving in the rolling hills north of town when I came to a familiar crossroads. The southeast corner was always some sort of pool, lake, wetland or manmade water feature. This time it took the form of a garden pool with one curved wall just a few yards from the road. The wall was unusual in that it was made of transparent material. I stopped and looked through the wall, expecting to see brightly colored carp or some such.
       What I saw was a fluffy calico cat, about 25 pounds of cat, swimming under the water chasing little guppies. I was shocked. The cat looked like a perfectly normal house cat, only a bit larger, and seemed completely at home swimming and rolling through the water. There was a caretaker there, so I asked about the cat.
       "We have lots of catfish," he pointed out into the rest of the acre pond.
       I saw a couple of wet tails break the surface and vanish, and one little red head with large triangular ears poked its nose out of the water just a couple of yards from me. It meowed and then dove back under the water. I watched its progress from above. It played with another cat, and then chased some fishes for a little while.

       The second dream of the night is long gone, other than to note that I awoke shivering and sweating at the same time. Only the screeching remains, there was lots of screeching going on, not all of it was me.

       The third dream was unusual in that I had a kid with me, she was blonde, skinny and about 10 or 11 years old. We were visiting people in an apartment building, an old friend of mine. Our daughters were watching TV in the front room while my friend and I talked in the kitchen. (I cannot recall what we were talking about.) Every time I passed the living room my friend's daughter had changed into something skimpier, until, like my daughter, she was just in a shirt and panties. Unlike my daughter, who's nightshirt came down around her ankles, the 20 something year old's shirt didn't even make it to the top of her rather round hips.
       My friend called it a night after another few minutes of conversation. I hesitated to go and check on my daughter. The last trip I made my friend's daughter had unbuttoned all but the bottom two buttons of her shirt, revealing a rather healthy cleavage, and no bra. I was starting to be concerned about her influence on my kid, so decided I'd better declare it bedtime.
       I walked down the hall, my daughter headed in the other direction. "I'm going to get the guest room. You have to stay in the living room with Cammy."
       "Uh, yeah."
       "She wants to. I think she'd be a good step-mom. And even if not, you'll like her."
       "Uh, well, I'm not so sure...."
       "I'm almost a teen, I saw the way you looked at each other. I'm going to bed now." She flung herself at me and I kissed her goodnight.
       I stood in the hall, making sure the guest room light was out. I turned to face the front room. The TV was still on but the rest of the lights were off. I could only see the back of the couch. I really wasn't ready to face the woman in the front room.
       "Go already, she's going to catch cold." my daughter stage whispered out of the guest room doorway. She shut the door before I could think of a reply.
       I went to the front room. The couch had already been folded down, the blankets were strewn to one side. Cammy was lying with her back to me, her shirt bunched up to where I could see most of her muscular back. As she rolled back to greet me I could see into the front of the shirt. She was a little bustier than I would call perfect but her breasts were a perfect combination of firm and softly round. She was a delightful sight. Her face was perfectly framed by her dark hair as it swept in a little half curl under her chin line. I could smell the desire from between her legs. I realized I was in trouble, a seriously good time trouble, but trouble none-the less.
       
       

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Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Red Goop

        I dreamed I was on another world. We had some red goop in glass vials with long glass necks on them. The necks were about 16 inches long and slightly curved. The bottle was maybe 15mm across. When the red liquid poured out of the bottles, two of them, each took on the form of an animal it had been exposed to and then the shapes, a snake and a tiger rolled together and tussled for a few seconds. In the tussle, my bottle was knocked over and the neck broke from the bottle.

        Another technician managed to get his goop back in his bottle. I was trying to get a burner going so I could melt the end of my broken bottle and neck back together. That didnt seem to work as I had nothing that I could hold the hot glass with. I got the idea to seal off the end of the neck and heat a length of it in the flame and then blow a new bottle shape in the bottom of the neck. That sort of worked. We didnt have much luck coaxing my goop back into the bottle.

        Let it cool a bit first, then well try again. Its contained for now.

        I closed the all glass enclosure with my red vaguely cat shaped goop in it. The goop prowled around its enclosure, much like a cat, then suddenly shifted into a snake form.

        Look! the other technician shouted, grabbing a camera.

        The goop shifted quickly back and forth between the cat and snake shapes, and then settled into a plantlike state. We hadnt seen the plant state before. It actually unrolled leaves and the color shifted a bit. It turned them to the lights of the lab.

        Whats it doing? the technician asked.

        Feeding, I replied. It seems to be storing energy from the lights. Theres a tiny increase in mass, as there isnt really anything but the dust in the enclosure to use as nutrients.

        I dont see any dust.

        Thats why it was romping around. It was collecting more material.

        The alien absorbed energy and then did something completely unexpected; it changed again, this time into a catlike bipedal form.

        There must have been skin cells in the dust in the enclosure. It has absorbed some human DNA, the technician shouted, surprised and shocked at the thought of if.

        Or it is a really good mimic, I said, It has had quite a bit of time to observe us recently. I doubt that there would be enough information in a few skin cells to replicate, in miniature, a human form.

        The technician calmed down.

        Much later, I was outside the buildings, taking a break when there was a loud grinding noise from beneath a military vehicle. The gunner, a young woman, was thrown from the gunnery chair. The vehicle rolled back and bucked as the pavement beneath it rumbled. Her back snapped as the vehicle rolled back over her, folding her backwards.

        I called for my team to get her out of there. There was a wild red goop under the vehicle. We pulled the wild goop into a tube and tried to get it all.

It found the wounds of the gunner, and retreated partly into her body. In so doing, it made repairs. The gunner gasped back to consciousness.

She reported that there was no longer any pain and she wanted to get up and go back to work. The doctor showed up and we helped him with the red goop, but it was now fused with her. She started to become frightened when she saw the color of her skin, and the unusual nodules under her skin at her back and neck.

While I was pretty sure she was going to be all right, I didnt know what effects we would see long term from the symbioses. The cat and the snake that had been exposed many months ago were both doing well, and behaving normally. They both had the same discoloration of the skin and unusual nodules under the skin along the neck and spine as the soldier was showing. Both seemed healthier than ever, especially when they could spend time in the sunshine.

Ad astra per technica,

FF

Monday, July 02, 2007

Watchtowers, Interview with the Haunted.

       In the dream that I remember, from a night or two ago, paper walls with cardboard towers made a barricade around a vinyl battlemat the size of the whole front yard. There were Lego mini-figs All Along the Watchtowers.
       The music (All Along the Watchtower) began to play in my head, and I knew that I, too, was a Cylon. But the game had to go on, so I resolved to ignore the call and throw a few more rounds of dice with my friends.

       This morning's dream found me in a large house in the countryside. I was interviewing a woman who believed her house was haunted. During the interview her grandfather came down to the kitchen table and scoffed at her haunting.
       "The house is old, it shifts when the temperature changes, nothing more." Grandfather chided his adult daughter. "Now, if you want to know about a real haunting, your Nana and I lived in a real haunted house, one that stands abandoned to this day. I'm sure she's gone and joined the haunts in that place."
       "Nana is in heaven."
       "Aye, she may as well be, she never found the spirits of that house as disturbing as I. She loved that house, the spirits in it, loved it all, far more than me."
       "Grandpa!"
       "It's true! I'm not complaining, she loved me, too, just not as much as that place, but love enough for me, love enough for me."
       I turned to the old man. About his daughter's haunting, I had to agree with him based on the notes I'd taken during her interview. I pulled up a new notepad on my small tablet computer.
       "Do you mind if I take notes."
       "Eh?"
       "It's what I do."
       "I don't know."
       "I won't use your name and the real locations if you wish. But someone should make a record of your experiences."
       "All right then, make notes, or recordings, or whatever you do these days. But I don't want to be seeing or hearing any of this until I'm gone." He smiled at me and prepared to tell his tale. "After I'm done here, we can go and get the other side of the tale, it's only a couple dozen miles from here. I still own the place."
       "Gran, I thought you'd sold the place years ago, after Nana died."
       "She didn't want me to. I sold another bit of property and set up a trust to pay the taxes on the place."
       "How come I didn't know about that?"
       "It don't concern you, child, you've got enough of my property, most of it while I'm still kicking around here, so enough about it. We're wasting Mr Firefly's time."
       I was surprised that he called me by my pen name, I hadn't used it here on this visit.
       "Yes, I know who you are, that's why I'm talking to you. I trust you to tell the tale, clean up the telling, but not change it all around. I knew that when I read your piece that was told to you by Gail Miller, it was prettied up a bit, better than Gail ever told it, but it matched more what she told me fifty years ago than the tangled tale she tells now. I don't know how you did it, but you managed to dig the original tale out of her, right and true."
       "Gail is crazy, none of that stuff ever happened."
       "True enough, but" Grandpa and I finished the sentence together.
       "She believes it did, and that's what's important."
       "It shaped her whole life, and the lives of many in her community for three generations. It is a tale that wanted to be told." I added.
       "And you did it without calling her a 'nutter' or worse. I almost wish you hadn't changed her name, maybe she'd get more of the respect she really deserves."
       "Really, Gran."
       "Your grandfather is right, Ms Miller experienced something powerful, and no matter the truth of the event itself. The truth of the power of the event is still there, and still echoes through her life, bouncing ripples off everyone she's loved, or helped or opposed her whole life. Some people find God, some are touched by a book or a play or a person, and some are touched by something that we can only marvel and wonder about. There is no evidence, and there is not a single other person with that experience. It is not any less profound because only she experienced it. The change in her life still ripples through the community.
       "People have been inspired to great and terrible deeds by the smallest of fictions. That makes a good story, and good story is about change."
       "I don't know that there is much change in my tale, but it is as true as I can remember it."
       The old man began to speak and I began to record and make notes. I know that I didn't need to write his words down, I had those, but I needed to keep the timeline square, to notice hesitations for further questioning, to note where detail was missing. The cool part of the technology on this was that there was a timeline on the recording, and everytime I made a note it linked to the moment in the recording that I started to make it (and pulled out a high resolution still image to tag it with.)
       I don't know what that software is, but I want it, and I want it now....

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