Bicycle, Blanket, Car Key Cache

I was riding my bicycle, and using a blue felt blanket as a sail to help catch the draft of passing trucks and just plain as a wind assist.

After riding a while, I took a break, curled up in the blanket. I woke and began riding again, noticing, after a bit that I didn't have my 'sail' any more. I stopped and checked my saddle bags. The blanket was missing, and it was starting to get cold. (The cats had stolen the blanket to make themselves a little nest at the bottom of the bed.)

I was then taking N to a place on our back hill, under the fallen Juniper tree. I had several things carved into the bark of the fallen limb, and I showed N how to interpret the carvings so she could recover the spare car and house key sets in an emergency. I don't know why I had a spare set for every car I ever owned still there, but I did.

Airship, Parent Adventures

        I dreamed I was on a large airship, the gondola being made of some sort of light wood, loose grained but finished is some sort of hard epoxy. I don’t know why that detail is important, but it figured more than once in my dream experience, even causing comments once between N and myself.

        N at one point rolled over in our bed and pointed her finger at my head like a gun. (Not really sure I was dreaming at that point. I was petting the rambunctious kittens and all three of them were purring at full volume, which triggered two of the older cats to purr. It was quite the purr-fest.)

        I jumped from the deck of the airship to the docking port, a rickety looking aluminum platform, well before the airship was moored. I wanted to make my way down to the gift shop and back up before N disembarked, just so there would be someone to meet her at the ramp.

        Later in the dream I was at Mom and Dad’s trying to help with a leak they had in the bathroom sink. The plumber had quoted them $900 for the job, but all it really needed was a faucet handle insert. I told them I would go to Home Depot with Dad and get what we needed. “It’ll take twenty minutes to fix, give or take a couple of hours.”

        Dad didn’t laugh at my joke.

        When we started out to the cars, there was a crunch and then two cars slid down their front hill. The pickup truck took off, but the sedan had to be pushed out of their yard. (Dad and I managed to push the wreck aside.)

The woman who was driving looked very dazed. She walked up to the next house, got into a little mini-convertible, and promptly slid down the hill against the retaining wall. I ran over and managed to get the small car into 1^st gear and guided it back up the hill. The woman was almost completely out of it, and I ended up holding her up and trying to keep her awake while Dad called for an ambulance. She wanted to get up and go, but her legs had stopped working. I tried to keep her calm until help could arrive, explaining that she may have a neck fracture and needed to stay as still as possible. She was skeletal thin, and had really short ash brown hair.  Her eyes were like E’s almost a purple color, very non-human looking in some ways.

I’m not sure but it also seemed that she had two elbows on each arm.

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Ff

Modern Fantasy Adventure

        I dreamed quite the active adventure last night. Running with N and A in a broken down city of some sort. N had a sort of Gatling gun. We found ourselves helping find and recover a group of orphans who had run from a train wreck caused by marauders.

        I wish I could draw well enough to capture the richness of the dream environment. Not to mention the crunch of the gravel and stone under foot, the smell of the charred ruins, the sounds of people in the distance, shouting. We made our way through a set of old subway tunnels where a man in a flat brimmed hat had a ‘universal’ remote for us. Unfortunately we had to excuse ourselves as I heard a child shouting.

        We raced up into a broken down building, I asked N to blow a hole in the wall on the third floor. Leaping through, (not really flying, but a hell of a jump) I found the child and picked her up before the single guard in the room could react. We became invisible, I’m not quite sure how I was able to do that, but I did. The little girl kept crying, though, giving our position away. He made the fatal mistake of following me as I jumped back out of the hole in the wall. N’s Gatling gun took him and tossed him back into the room. The little girl was so stunned by my action that she stopped crying. We landed as though we’d only dropped a few feet. I knew that I always landed that way, no matter what height I was dropped from.

        When we got back to the safety of the tunnels, the man with the wide brimmed flat hat (priest?) waited patiently for us. He still had the remote. I took it and thanked him. I looked at it closely. It didn’t have any manufacturing marks on it, no labels other than you might find on a standard DVD controller. (No eject button.)

        I tested it. It seemed to control time for everyone around me.

        “It’s guardian angel on a stick,” A commented.

        “No, I think that’s the guardian angel,” I pointed the man with the long coat and flat brimmed hat, who was all ready vanishing into the crowd. He tipped his hat to us. N and A decided that I should hold on to the remote, as I’m the one he handed it to, and I didn’t seem to have any other weapon. (Although being able to become invisible and jump 60 feet into the air gives one a considerable advantage over the average bear.)

        Later we were on a slope. N had run up to the ridge, but took a stun blast from someone on the other side. She sprayed the Gatling gun right down over us. I hit the pause button as the top of my head exploded. Then rewind. I unexploded. A unexploded. I let time step forward and found that I could move and pull A out of the way. I let the stream of bullets pass overhead and ran up to N to pull her finger off of the firing stud and bring her down the hill to safety.

        I knew that the remote had saved us, and that the batteries were rapidly depleting. I thought I could feel them recharging, taking energy from me, somehow. We snuck back down around the ridge. I used the FF button to allow us to see where the patrols went, and then rewound to our starting point. I went invisible and dashed across the encampment into the tent where two more of the kids were being held. I cut them loose and told them to hold on to me. I hit pause and we ran back to N and A. I could tell the remote was almost drained at that point. I looked it over, again the feeling that it was recharging. I found a button lock and immediately knew how to set a password. I keyed in a number, and then tested that I could unlock it. Satisfied, I tossed it into an empty cargo pocket.

        We walked the kids back to the subway station, where we found that everyone else had also been recovered. N, A and I climbed (well I jumped) to the top of the train. We stayed on until we were out of the ruined city, N clearing the single blockade with a well-aimed burst from the Gatling gun. A used some sort of miniature radar dish to cause the marauders to rapidly flee the area.

        On the way back N asked if there was a way to FF us so we didn’t have to make the long walk.

        “I don’t think so.”

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FF

More Aliens

        I had another alien dream, this time the aliens were communicating by sending chemical signals from a dozen orifices in their “faces” to one another, essentially smell talk. It was very difficult for people to understand them, and though they had the ability to hear, hearing wasn’t connected to their language centers, as smell isn’t to ours. Some of them were able to learn our language, and some of us were able to learn theirs.

        You had to have a really good nose to understand their language. I had a really good nose, but limited ability to learn new languages.

        The aliens had four legs and two arms each covered with white fur and ending in four very sharp claws. They also had some mastery over DNA as they were altering people into copies of themselves. I witnessed one such conversion, it was not pretty and the person was so disturbed by the changes that they were unable to communicate, which was the whole reason for the DNA makeover in the first place.

        I found myself meeting with several brown and white aliens in an attempt to communicate with them. Writing was something that I thought might work, so we began with that, and sketching. Their text looked like Sanskrit almost. The alien woman I was working with was about as good an artist as I was which is to say, not much. We started to make some progress. The goal was to negotiate our way to a peace of some sort, as the aliens were not really trying to invade and take over, they just needed to stop and take on supplies.

        It turns out they had materials to trade with, not to mention the advances they could offer us on technology. We’d kind of gotten off on the wrong foot by attacking them first. They’d landed in the middle of North Africa, initially, as the climate there was closest to home. (Seems they came from a  large desert of a world, one with much less biodiversity than our world.) I found myself wondering how they had been able to grow so large. She explained that diversity didn’t mean paucity, and they were, in fact, the largest animal species on their homeworld.

        They had a true insect-like hive structure, where the breeding class was completely separate from the working classes, even though, if she were separated from the hive long enough, she would be able to breed as well. She seemed to be fascinated by the fact that we were millions of little hives (families) and still managed to keep everything working.

        When the alien started getting romantic, I started to worry, remembering how awful the DNA transfer was.

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FF

Alien Invasion

        I dreamed nice long detailed dreams or running (WOW influence I’m certain) through our neighborhood, trying to get to a road out that wasn’t blocked by large red trash trucks full of black and purple screeching aliens. Other than blocking the exits on the roads, I didn’t see that they were doing anything else. I went to every road and they were all blocked.  I walked across a corner lot’s yard and out along the sidewalk on the main road, and then crossed the street in the middle.

        Jaywalking seemed to upset the aliens, but they didn’t come after me. I walked back around to the park area, but that entrance was blocked. I went back around through the other, public park, there were no aliens there. We could get in and out, as long as we didn’t drive our cars.

        I hiked it back through a couple of back yards to get home.  (Their streets were blocked also.) When I arrived home I turned on the news, but there was nothing on about the alien invasion on the news. 

The aliens seemed pretty hostile, just not overtly aggressive.  As far as I could tell, the only effect they were having was to prevent anyone from driving.

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FF

Fever Dreams

       Last night was a tossing and turning sort of night (I have some sort of bug) that had tossing and turning sorts of dreams. At least partly inspired by our newfound World Of Warcraft hobby, I found myself being wrapped up in vines and unable to escape.
       In other tossing and turning moments, I was falling off of a balcony at a hotel of some sort, trying to swim through the air on the way down to get to the pool. That really didn't work. Woke with a full body convulsion from that one, cats went flying off of the bed in every direction, there even might have been a growl and a hiss or two. (Poor babies.)
       In another dream I was reading the proof sheets for a collection of plays, some of which I had written. I really wish I could remember more of that one. I would like to know what sort of play my feverish brain thinks I have written. (Other than the three one acts.)

Highly Detailed but Dead Bird

       I dreamed of the red and white pidgeon that was taking a shower in our lawn sprinkler last evening. Unfortunately, in the dream the pigeon had been killed by something. Its remains were in the yard, nearly in the center, and only the back, head and one wing were left. I was extremely upset about it, as was N. N wanted to blame T, but I didn't think it was him, as he actually seemed to shy away from the bird the night before.
       This was one of those dreams that I had to get up from and go look outside. It was so powerful it completely knocked out the memory of the much more pleasant and adventurous dream I'd had earlier. I at least remember the Title I gave it: "Adventures of Multi-Colored, but not a Rainbow, Teddies." The image of small bears, panda-like, but instead of black they had colored fur, smoke, brown, red, blond, dappled white and grey(almost blue), and the only unatural color was a sort of green.

Dreamed a Different Game

Nan has begun to play World of Warcraft. Now, instead of Diablo II, I have had my first WOW dream. Don't remember what it was about, but just that I knew exactly where it came from.

Computer, Turtles

        N buys a new computer system for me, and then sets it up so it only really works well from her side of the partner desk. It is very cool, though; we have both got connections to the internet and are able to network directly for some software. In the dream we are playing World of Warcraft, and then when N calls it done, I switch over to a multi-screen version of Crimson Skies. By turning her widescreen around to face me, I am able to get a 180 degree view out of the cockpit of my virtual aircraft.

        I have a non-N running character in WOW also, but I can't seem to configure the three screen trick for that program and go back to flying the highly modified corsair. The physics model is funny, I can fly full speed (over 400 knots) and then kick the airbrakes and fire all my forward facing guns to drop to stall speed in less than ten seconds. It is a great trick for taking out planes that dive down on me from directly behind.

        This morning, after N's alarm went off I fell back to sleep and dreamed I was climbing in a forest. Giant trees with trunks nearly 20 feet across were growing out of a thick mossy bed of soil. There were only a few spindly low-light ferns and the thick layer of needles and moss between the trees. I was going up the bark and finding nodules of some sort of tree parasite. The wood in the burl of the parasite was apparently very valuable, so I would climb up and knock them off the host tree. I was sawing away at a particularly large one, and when it was almost through I went around to the far side of the tree and thumped the trunk with a mallet, the shock drove the burl off of the trunk. It fell to the ground with a loud thunk. It broke open, revealing in its fernlike shield leaves hundreds of hand sized turtles, colored like bright gem stones, blue and green. I felt bad that I had displaced so many rare climbing turtles. They just started climbing up the tree trunk, in three or four lines, like giant ants. I was glad that I hadn't killed any of them, and surprised at the same time. I'd dropped the burl from at least eighty feet up, possibly more.

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FF

Nap Dream

Nap time is rare, being able to actually remember a nap dream is even rarer. I was running, not hard, just the way one does when we're young and trying the get somewhere. Unfortunately, I wasn't young in this dream, so, much like would really happen, I was feeling winded even from that relatively minimal effort. I found myself pondering, should I run faster, so I could stop running sooner, and would have time to rest a bit before going into where ever I was going (don't know where that is, precisely) or, should I slow down just a bit and arrive just in time, but not as severely winded. The answer seemed to depend on how quickly I could recover my breath. Trouble was, I couldn't stop and see how rapidly, or in my case more like slowly, I would recover. The longer I ran, the less options I had. Speed up, or slow down. I began to think that I could maintain this pace, and at a certain point, a short bit before arriving, I could walk and then arrive mostly recovered. I decided to continue at my pace and then walk so I would arrive just in time, and, hopefully, with my breath recovered.

I was so focused on my internal calculations that I really didn't have any reactions to the place I was running through, but I should have. There were dozens of large vehicles zooming across my path, but not rolling, they were actually walking on their tires, like short limbed metal buffalo. I didn't find this the least bit odd. When I was waking up, I wondered why I didn't just flag one down and ask for a ride.

Everything Familiar

        I dreamed I was trying to get ready for work, but events kept conspiring to make me late. All I remember is how everything in the dream was familiar, but not exactly like it was supposed to be. N had brown hair; the cats were all the wrong cats. The bed was an old full sized bed instead of a king. The backyard had a white vinyl and glass enclosure instead of the natural wood, and it went all the way to the retaining wall, even though there were still plants off of the patio. There was brown carpet in the master bedroom instead of green. The kitchen had a black refrigerator, side by side instead of over under.

        I had a red car, but instead of an old hybrid Honda Insight, it was a gas-powered V-8 Plymouth Valiant (new looking.) The house was painted white with dark green trim. The master bathroom had all maroon ceramic with brass fixtures. The walls were still yellow.

Sadly, I was still large, though much younger looking. The books on the shelves in the living room were all still piled up, but they were different books.

My office, where I still kept my shoes and work keys, phone, etc, was pretty much the same except for the rocking chair and large desk were gone. Instead I had a kidney-shaped conference table and three chairs. There was no obvious computer. That kind of kicked me into the “Now I know I’m dreaming,” mode of thought, but I hung in there a little while longer.

Unfortunately, I was just out of it enough to get lost while I was driving to get to work, as the roads seemed to be the most changed, and the work key that I had wasn’t anything like the keys I have now for work, also, I was dressed in a button down with a tie. The kilt didn’t strike me as odd, although I don’t currently own a khaki colored one, and I don’t wear them to work as I may have to crawl around under desks. 

I had another dream before waking, but remember only thinking “I’ve had all that stuff in my dreams before, especially the running on paths between houses and trying to get out of a neighborhood. In fact, I think I had one of those dreams a few days ago. No apes falling from the sky in this dream though. “

I was vaguely disappointed about the “no apes” thing, though. And, to be honest, I really don’t remember the dream having anything to do with running through people’s back yards.

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FF

Lost in Little Red, Lost Back Stage

       Last night's dream escapade involved driving through a neighborhood in search of the way out of the neighborhood. I found myself driving in circles, always ending up in the same cul-de-sac. No path seemed to take me out of the neighborhood. Finally I asked and someone pointed me to an overgrown path that went between two houses.
       Little Red was small enough to fit. I pulled her tires up onto the two worn tire tracks and followed the path between the houses until I came to a shiny new stretch of wire fence (the rectangular grid type not chain link.) I got out and looked at the stretch of wire across the path. It was much newer than the wooden fence posts it was stapled to on either side.
       A woman came out of one of the houses. "Get away from there!" she shouted at me.
       "I was told this was the way out of this neighborhood."
       "Who would want to leave?"
       "I'm lost, and trying to get back to the freeway."
       "Well, you'll just have to..." she paused and then looked around. I couldn't see what she was looking at, she followed the invisible something for a bit and then turned back to me. "You want to make love to my daughters!"
       I had no idea where that came from. I looked around again. This time I did see a tuft of red hair and a little summer dress scoot back behind her house.
       "Too young for me, if they grow up to look like you, call me then." The woman was also red-haired, well rounded and only a little thick, still very attractive.
       This seemed to snap her out of her dangerous seeming weirdness and back into her normal weirdness. "I should call the cops on you."
       "How would they get in to get me?" I asked.
       The dream ended before I could get an answer.

       In another dream I was in full Japanese Kimono and mask, I had to go to the bathroom so made my way to the bathrooms back stage, but you had to go outside to get to them. As I was adjusting my costume to make water, I heard a child-like noise behind me. I turned around. A little girl was looking at the urinals, pointing. "What's that."
       "A Urinal, this is the men's room." I stated.
       She looked like she was about to panic. It was obvious she'd been surprised by my voice. I hushed her and ran to the door, pulling it open a little bit and looking out.
       "No one there, the women's room is just across the walk, go for it." I held the door open for her.
       "Thanks," she muttered and shot across the walkway to the other rest room.
       I was laughing so hard I couldn't pee.
       Later, I was on stage, and I heard her in the audience tell her parents that's the woman who was in the men's room. (So I guess she didn't figure out I was a man beneath my kimono and mask after all.)
       The play was going quite well, despite the fact that they'd put me in the wrong costume and I didn't know any of the lines for this character. The two of us they'd mixed up in wardrobe just quietly fed one another our lines, and since most of the performance was dance and pantomime, we weren't too bad off.
       We did change into our proper roles at the first opportunity. After the show the Stage Manager came back to give us notes, not knowing what had happened. Unfortunately one of the notes was that the first act was the best he'd seen for dance and pantomime, just a little slow on the line pickup. We decided to change roles, but this time to learn the other's lines first.

Poor Man, Rich Man

       Tent Collapse, Three layers, folded and re-set the broken poles to a much lower height. Worked out well as it was freezing and the smaller internal volume was much easier to keep warm. Morning arrived and I climbed out to find myself in a tent city. Many of the tents had collapsed under the weight of the snow during the night. I started calling at collapsed tents, helping those who were in need of digging out. I had a large red tabby with me, he had to come up to my thigh, and must have weighed forty pounds. He sniffed and I dug. When we were done we'd managed to dig out a couple of dozen people. The digging went much faster, as those we rescued, after getting some warm breakfast came back and helped with the others.
       The Cat and I hadn't had breakfast, and when we made our way over to the breakfast area, everything was gone. I told them it was OK, I had some cat food for Mandrake, I was sure he would share. We went back to my broken tent. I had most of a 20 pound bag of Science Diet Hairball control, and a couple of boxes of raisins. The tent and our cook kit, my wool felt blankets and a couple of shoulder satchels and an extra few pairs of socks and underwear were all I had for the two of us. I had a few coins, but didn't know what I could possibly buy with them that would make our lives much better. I was pretty sure I didn't even have enough to by a single bit of lunch meat.
       Mandrake ate a little of the cat food with me, then shot off through the snow looking for 'rabbits' which I knew that all he would find would be big rats, but he thought of them as rabbits. I didn't want to break his heart, so I never told him they weren't rabbits. He wouldn't eat them, but brought them back so I could cook them up. He did, when there wasn't snow on the ground, love to eat bugs of all sorts.

       I then dreamed I was incredibly rich. (Talk about opposites. I was buying a 256 year old house that had been struck by a meteor in the late 1700's. You could still see the hole in the floors of the second and third stories, and the crater down on the first floor, where there was a hand shaped ceramic flow on the bottom of the crater. The Hole Tour allowed us to visit most of the house. I decided to buy it, and wrote a check for it on the spot.
       I got myself and several friends moved in and then we went out the back yard where I had some bleachers and an oval racetrack. The racetrack was raised and people could walk around the inside of the track to operate small cars, mostly by pushing them by hand, but also by jumping into them and driving (some sort of virtual interface that was wired to our helmets.) We started racing and I wasn't doing too well, until I remembered that a lot of racing has to do with braking. I pulled into the pit and had my "crew" tighten the brakes and put on stickier tires. I shot back out at full acceleration, then slammed on the brakes to make it around the curve. I passed the last couple of cars. The crowd, who'd arrived to sit in the shade and eat lunch from the offices nearby, cheered as I began moving through the pack.
       I realized, after playing through another dozen laps, where I lapped the field twice, but was still being lapped by the leader, that this was going to be a whole bunch of rinse, lather, repeat. Not a bad little game/simulation, but I longed for the simplicity of the Cthulu 500 card game, as this was proving to be tiring. As my car would come around on the straitaway I would give it a boost by hand run over to the other straitaway, and then virtually hop into the car to make the proper braking and throttle maneuver to take each curve.
       It was fun watching the crowd respond. There was a yellow flag due to a player collision. I took advantage of it to go in and change my tires again. The softer tires didn't seem to last as long. The leader also pulled into the pits. That was when I realized the leader was being controlled by my left hand!
       What? Oh, that rebellious hand! I had a talk with myself and realized I was controlling all of the cars, because this was a dream. I somehow shot to the end of the race, only a few of the lunch crowd had remained to see the end. The score was Left hand 666 and right hand 555, whatever that indicated. I was several laps down from the winner when it was all finished.
       I was then on a road trip that started at the dream town mall, where I picked up several boxes of camping supplies. A group of us headed to the house to pack up the camper, but when we looked at the map that would take us up to the park we wanted to camp at, we realized it would take us several days to get there, and we really didn't want to take that much time. I got on the phone and called the airport.
       We drove down, and as a surprise to my guests, I drove the camper right back into the back of a large cargo jet. Crewmembers jumped out of no-where and strapped us in. The doors closed, leaving us in a darkness only punctuated by beams of light coming in through high porthole windows high in the cargo bay. I turned on the Bigscreen Monitor and dialed up the dreamnet. I pulled up our GPS and overlaid our position on a map of the area, then zoomed out to show our progress towards our campground. Once we were airborn I calculated that we would only be in the air three hours, then have another hour or so of driving to get where we were going.
       We decided to take advantage of the large monitor and play a pickup RPG. I fired up the 3d version of inkscape and loaded the data files for some caverns under some mountain range far from here, and then fired up a little spreadsheet table to create a dice roller.