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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.

Friday, May 23, 2014

Deserted Island, Robot Invasion

In the first dream of the night, I landed on a deserted island, dropping from who knows where on a parachute to land off the shore of the largest of three small islands. Fortunately there were some date palms, dandelions and lots of easy to spear fish in the shallows between the islands. I set about getting the lay of the land, hoping to find fresh water. There was a little pond in the center of the largest island, but it was brackish at best.

I was able to use the parachute to make a large dew collector and managed to find several plastic jugs washed up around the beaches that I could use to store the water. I made my shelter near the brackish water and went to bed the first night after a handful of dates. The subsequent days involved swimming out to the two smaller islands. Neither of them had much to offer save a large rock which I figured I could use for a signal fire. There weren't any land animals, but plenty of insects and shore birds. I soon discovered why the shallows between the islands were so bereft of sand. The tides drew back and revealed a wide rocky expanse surrounding my three little islands, tons of tide pools, the humidity was intense. Apparently, the islands were at one point a single island, and for many hours or days at a time, they continued to be a single island.

By the time the dream ended, I had been there several days, and knew that I needed to find rescue, as the fresh water issue was going to be a problem.


In the dream just before waking I was dodging around the edge of a little village, broken down stone walls, overgrown hedges, empty buildings, but not yet ruins. I was separated from my group when there were a number of ripping static sounds and thunderclaps. The robot invaders had arrived. There were three main types, two smaller car sized robots. One with red lights and long manipulator arms, and the other with long cattle prod type appendages that could shoot shocking bolts about forty yards or so. There was also a huge robot in each of the four groups that had teleported into view. The huge robot had many turrets with which it could barrage a bunch of small grenades, some of which had gas, and some of which were essentially little EMP pods. The gas was caustic, but not really toxic to people, it covered metals with a corrosive slime, however. I suspected it was actually made of nanites, but didn't have a way to determine that.

We had discovered early on in our resistance that the robots would not actually attack unarmed people who made no aggressive moves towards them. Unfortunately they were pretty determined to salvage any sort of vehicle or electronics they came across, whether it was being used or not. We'd also discovered that they really didn't like smoke, and if you could surround a group of units with smoke, they would teleport away in short order. We were armed with leather and plastic "guns" that fired a stream of liquid that, on contact with the robot surfaces, would create huge volumes of smoke. (This was easier than trying to get the entire ground around them smoking, and if you could hit the robots just below their sensors, you could trick them into thinking they were fully enveloped in smoke.)

Soon I was running around, diving behind walls and hedges, spraying the nearest group of robots in smoke generating spray. I wasn't sure I would be able to get them all, but discovered that if I got the sensors on the big one, and most of the smaller ones, it would teleport out. This time, however, it left one of the smaller robots behind. My squad mates wanted to blow it up, but I thought it might be better to capture it and study it if we could. It was apparently out of ammunition, or low on power, because it was unable to defend itself with the cattle prods. The weapons weren't even crackling like usual. The robot cowered and tried to back itself up against a building. When I touched it, it felt alive.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Robot First Person Shooter

I dreamed I was involved in a first person shooter that had one roaming around a large ruined city shooting at giant robots and their human controllers. I had a sidearm, but my primary weapon was a giant robot that I controlled with a game pad. A game, in a game.

I was having a great time taking down robots left and right, while my robot seemed to be nearly indestructible, at least until I accidentally stepped into a pit and my robot buddy stopped in its tracks, apparently out of range of the controller. The enemy bots made short work of him. I managed to avenge him, and one of the other players jumped down into the ruined basement to confront me. Our guns did nothing to one another, even firing point blank in the head.

I mentioned that this was a very frustrating game, since it echoed one of my nightmare frustrations - having a gun to defend myself and finding out it was utterly useless against a living antagonist. I woke up in a heart racing post nightmare state, even though I didn't really see the dream as a nightmare.

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Train-ing Day

Super secret agent training, on a train. Lots of dodging bullets and racing through crowded dining cars, climbing outside and across the top of the moving train. Unfortunately I climbed up to the top of the train to evade a couple of pursuers, or I should say, "tried" to climb atop the train. The tunnel the train entered had about eight inches of clearance, not enough to survive, even if I hadn't pulled myself head and shoulders above the roof of the car.

No matter how I rewound the dream the same thing kept happening, or I would get shot, or knocked off the side of the train, or captured in the dining car. I finally decided not to go back after I was dead, so the dream faded away to me sitting in a strange room. Lots of boxes and toys, all of them with strange two inch holes drilled through them. Little John came up to me and got a quick head bonk and a little pet, but was soon distracted by a cardboard box. It was too small for him, really, but somehow he got his paws into the two holes in the lid and pried it off. When he stepped into the box he changed from a big red tabby to a little grey and black tabby. I realized he'd somehow been transformed into Princess Tiger Lily. I did not like this one bit and my anxiety levels were through the roof. She stepped out for a Little John style head bonk and then right back in the box, I was hoping she would turn back into Little John, but no, she just curled up and died.

No, no, no, no, no! I took her/his body out and cradled it.

The dream wouldn't rewind. In fact it kept going. Miranda entered the room and stepped into the box, she turned into the emaciated shadow of her cousin T-Rex, who didn't even step out of the box before he withered and died in front of me. The room began to narrow and I forced myself to get up and find a door, it was at the narrow end of the room and it opened up to a ladder. The ground was rumbling and blurred below me, so I began to climb. Just as I cleared the top of what I realized was a rail car, the tunnel keystone took off my head again.

I woke drenched and shaking, heart racing, no kitties on the bed with me at all.

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Sunday, May 18, 2014

Convention Ready Hair

Night before last, and again tonight, I dreamed I was in the stylist's chair and she stopped before cutting my hair to make me look at the fact that I had developed a white stripe down the center of my head. (Last night a white spot in the very front.) This had the effect of making me look like I had a brown (dirty blonde?) wishbone on my head. I told her to cut my hair short enough that there was no brown on the tips of the white hair. I thought it would look cool for the ComicCon.

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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Wind

The air was getting dryer, and the wind wilder. The sail on the wind car began to vibrate and shudder, a sudden direction shift caused the whole car to tip wildly up onto two of it's three wheels and I nearly lost control as the boom smacked the ground and caused the whole car to lurch to the right, I managed to grab the sheet and shifted the counterweight just in time to keep from tipping over.

The wind shifted again and the whole car lifted off the ground, the boom swung over and smashed the side of my helmet, waking me up.

The crashing noise continued as I woke, the wind outside had brought down one of the dead limbs of the mulberry tree. It was still in the process of falling off the patio cover and smacking the ground on the other side of the hot tub. I opened the curtains in time to watch it collapse into the back yard, taking part of the orange tree with it. The only living section, of course.

Then I woke up. The wind was indeed blowing and the trees outside creaked with the wind load, but there was no fallen branch, and the little living section of the orange tree was whipping about in the wind quite cheerily. Princess Tiger Lily was perched on my head, afraid of the wind. I then realized that Tiger Lily has been dead a significant number of years now.

And I woke up. This time I didn't bother to get out of bed, shifting around so I could make some room between all of the cats. I pulled my hands out from under the covers, and realized I was STILL sleeping.

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I gave up trying to wake up, and then, yes, I woke with a terrible need to sneeze. After that, everyone was awake. I could see the wind puffing the curtains in and out as the house was breathing, I realized that the house was actually a little bit warmer than it was when I went to bed, even though it was still dark outside. I got up to shut all the windows and didn't even look outside to see the condition of the trees. I'll check that when I get home from work today. I don't know if it was the wind, or my sneeze, but the cats are all out of sorts this morning.

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Tuesday, May 13, 2014

New Cats, Survivor's Meetup

In the first dream of the evening, I was heading to the front room when I heard a tiny forlorn little meow. Following the noise led me to the dining room, and there in the far corner of the bottom shelf of the far book case was a fluffy white kitten with bright blue eyes. She saw me, and immediately switched from meow to purr. Teddy head-bumped my leg from behind as if to ask "can we keep her?" I put down a bowl of food for her, and another white cat arrived, this one was older, quite possibly the kitten's mom. She brushed past Teddy and myself as if she'd always been here. Somehow, that made me smile.

The bowl of food was next to the water dish, and Teddy laid between them and the rest of the house, guarding them while I went and got my camera. I was pretty sure from the ratty collar on the older cat that they were abandoned, but figured I'd print out some pictures and walk the neighborhood to see if anyone claimed them. I told Teddy we didn't want to be kit-nappers. He didn't seem to appreciate the pun.

I was thinking they would bring me back up to five cats, and that made me sad, because there were no more sprocket kitties.


Right before the water sprinklers went off out front, I was dreaming of another post-apocalyptic, digging out from the rubble to re-establish some sort of order, scenario. I have no idea what the actual apocalypse was for this one, only that there were very few of us left, and none of us were much younger than forty or so.

Whether the younger folks had all traveled away from the ruins to start new, or were taken in the apocalypse, I can't say. However, it was nearly the full moon, so those of us who'd stayed, or were left, gathered in the ballroom of the only hotel to have one in the area.

We'd thought about meeting at one of the college gymnasiums, but the hotel was more elegant, so it won out in the voting. Personally, I thought it was a little bit on the musty side, even though a few of us had raided the Home Depot to repair the roof and windows, it still seemed to get enough water to encourage mold to grow. I always waited until the last second to make my way through the musty hallways to the ballroom, which, at least, had hard floors and paneled walls, so didn't have as much mildew smell. We managed to get the generators started up and the room's chandeliers glowed unsteadily from the fluctuating power.

There was some trading, and some reporting of events of the past month, some fresh vegetables and fruit, some furs, some clothing and finally, some music and dancing. We welcomed new members to the community, and said goodbye to those who were leaving for what they hoped were greener pastures. For a change there'd been no deaths to report, and the people who were missing were accounted for by their friends or kin.

Folks returned from San Diego brought the news from the survivors there, apparently there was some sort of turf war going on, that made us all shake our heads. There really weren't enough of us left to imagine that there wasn't room enough for everyone who wanted to stay in the area, but the city was apparently being flooded by the high tides and that had forced some of the coastal sorts to abandon the convention center and Harbor Island, the other coastal communities hadn't been willing to absorb them.

There was lots of drinking with the dancing and soon folks were slipping off into the various halls and rooms for some private time. I was too drunk to make my way home in the dark so found a spot on a couch near the front desk, where, when I rolled over later I found N sleeping there next to me. "Don't get any ideas, I was just cold."


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Thursday, May 08, 2014

Behind the Stadium, Party Crashers

Dreamed of making love on the green green grass behind the stadium.... She's a little fuller figured than the previous model, and her brown eyes were a little closer to the blue/green spectrum. In the dream it was pretty clear this was a short term thing, a one convention only deal, five days and four nights, as it were. I was pretty okay with that, as by the time she was completely satisfied, I was thinking anything longer term would give me a heart attack.

To write anything more would be a chapter from an erotic novel, haven't had a detailed wild dream like that in a while.

In the second dream of the night I was at a party when a red-haired woman in a backless dress arrived. She was beautiful in the "there's my dream woman" sort of way, but wrong, terribly wrong. Whatever was walking around in her, wasn't her, and wasn't welcome. I forbid her to enter, not that I could block the entire garage door sized entrance to the party, and that seemed to amuse her. I could see the person inside fighting back against whatever was controlling her. She won out for a second and demonstrated the proper hand gestures for casting her tormentor back and forbidding her entrance. I played along and repeated the gestures, turning around as I did so. There was another woman there, heavy set and not too happy looking. I apologized, explaining that wasn't aimed at her. She brushed it off, but didn't enter the garage, instead electing to go around to the back gate instead.

I turned around and the slender red-haired beauty had found a sword from somewhere. I could see the entity fighting for control so I reached in and took the sword. The entity and the woman struggled for a bit until the entity won out and hissed at me "What, are you going to slay the innocent to prevent my fun?"

"Nope," and I slipped the sword up and across the small of the girls back as she turned to enter the party. The stroke, way more skillful than I could really do, cut through the transparent strap that held her dress back together at the top. I could tell from the entities surprised look that this wasn't at all something she expected, or even knew what to do about. She spun away from me, towards the driveway instead of deeper into the party full of potential victims, or whatever she considered fun.

I deftly cut through the knot in front of the dress that held the shape around her perfectly freckled cleavage. She spun around, the host momentarily regaining control to cover her embarrassment, and to keep the dress together. I could see her blushing all the way down her back. I reached out with the sword to where her thong rode high across her rather firm bottom, again with the transparent plastic straps, snip snip, and her thong was cut loose. I somehow managed to hook the tiny mesh back and pulled them off from behind. She gasped and turned to face me. I made the gestures, as she'd showed me and said the words to forbid her, and then reached out and pulled the girl across the threshold. The entity poured out in a puff of greasy smoke.

The red-haired woman knocked the sword from my hand. "You were supposed to threaten to kill me!"

"I'm pretty sure it was too smart for that bluff to work, besides, this way you're completely unharmed."

"And naked."

"Under your party dress, if you don't say anything, no one will know but us."  I let her step back and she let me tie the front of her dress back together. She took my hand to lead me back into the party, still blushing, all the way down to her freckled ankles.

As we passed through the door into the back yard, the heavy set woman I accidentally turned back earlier made the same gestures at me and I was pushed out and away from the party watching the backs of the woman and the gentleman who was still holding her hand. He was now blushing furiously.

I heard the entities voice, "Now neither one of us gets to crash the party." I could feel her pouting.

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Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Photo Opportunity

A photographer friend and I headed out to a grassy hillside just before a huge storm was due. There were a couple of trees near the top of the hill, one of which had a little tree stand in it. There was only room for one person on the stand at a time, so we took turns climbing up the fifteen feet or so to the platform. From that vantage point we both took several pictures, as the rapidly changing light was creating some interesting and moody effects.

While my friend was up in the tree, she spotted something coming out of the clouds. It was heading behind her position, so she shouted down to me to go follow it. I was sitting at the base of the other tree, so grabbed my camera, which was almost out of battery power, and ran to the top of the hill. She was scrambling down out of the tree as fast as she could go, and I managed to crest the hill in time to get a couple of blurry shots of the back end of a huge craft. I could plainly see portholes and a pair of glowing red and blue inset lines about four feet thick that ran around the middle and back of the craft. The whole thing was a slightly elongated ellipsoid with a "bite" taken out of the aft of the disk. The air was highly distorted in the aft of the ship, as though by a heat shimmer.

My friend reached my side just as the ship slipped into the clouds. She managed to take a few shots. I played back the last few shots I had of the airship, and all of them were slightly blurry. "I swear, it didn't look that blurry in person, it was clear and sharp, except for the exhaust ports in the back."

"Maybe I got a better couple of shots, I wasn't prepared for it, though, so the exposure is probably too long." She had been shooting on film, so we'd have to wait to see her images. At least she'd seen the airship coming out of the clouds from the front. I was excited to get home and do some searching for images like ours.

I was sad that my shots hadn't been a little steadier, suggesting that I was right up there in the ranks of amateur UFO photographers. She said we might be able to fix the motion blur in software. Especially since I had her and the tree in the best photographs as reference points. Since I had moved between the shots, she suggested that we might even be able to make a stereogram out of them and have an idea of how far away the airship was.

Even though the craft was very different from any we'd ever seen, neither of us thought it was an alien craft, we were thinking it was a dirigible of some sort we'd never seen before, mostly because of how quiet it had been.

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Sunday, May 04, 2014

Survival Boat

In this morning's dream offering, I apparently joined the ranks of the Doom Prep'ers. I decided to build an apocalypse survival boat - in my back yard. There were some very nice features, a solar powered water desalinization and recycling plant, Solar heat exchanger, photo electric panels that provided about two hundred watts during the day, and then via another heat exchanger I could drive a little 5 watt turbine at night or I could open up the mast stacks and let the wind generate energy as well. There was also a fifty gallon methane digester on the poop deck.

The wind stacks were airfoil sails but with a yard and a fabric sail on both sides of each stack (so it looked like I could run with four sails and a spinnaker as well as the wind turbines. There was a small electric motor, but I can't imagine it would generate enough horsepower to make more than a couple of knots. (I believe this was salvaged from Little Red, my Honda Insight.)

Because my back yard is "L" shaped, the boat had a bendy section in the middle! The aft portion of the boat had the wheelhouse, kitchen and fold out solar arrays as well as a back deck with two feet of potting soil arranged around one of two water treatment features. The main cabin was just below this deck. and had a Jefferson bed/desk, a visitor's lounge, and diagonal pane windows looking out from under the poop deck. This deck was the black water treatment area, so was appropriately named, with water/waste entering a compost pile/ methane digester, and then flowing through the soil field below the planters. There was a way to rig plastic sheeting up over the entire deck to turn it into a greenhouse during the winter.

The forward section of the boat had the more complex water desalinization and grey water treatment plant, essentially long rows of rock and soil and sand filled tubes that the water flowed through until it flowed into the storage tanks below decks. This was also the section with the heat pumps. Every horizontal surface of the deck was home to planters or hydroponic runs, and I had in the cargo hold an inflatable raft which could hold even more hydroponic runs once I was out on the water. In addition to the ton of water storage, the ballast area was set up to hold many cans of food, spare parts for the boats critical electrical components, and some spare tires and axles, and the materials to turn the bendy section into a fixed section before being launched into the ocean.

Because I live about 16 miles from the ocean, the entire boat was built on a pair of lowboy trailer frames. I was actually living in the main cabin during the dream, it was a nice red patterned fabric and gold and cherry wood accents. My computer and monitor were set into the Jefferson desk, leaving room for several paper books, mostly the ones needed to maintain my shipboard systems, as I didn't want to rely on the computer if something went wrong with the power systems.

As the dream ended, I was sitting at the computer, adding the canned goods I'd just stowed to the inventory and recalculating my survival times. The boat would have been comfortable for two people for nearly a year, easily support four people with rationing and supplemental protein, by fishing, scrounging or hunting, and, if you slept in shifts, could probably accommodate six to eight people. The water and waste recycling systems would most certainly be over taxed, and there would be no way to feed that many people for more than a few months, not on the supplies from the gardens I had built in, even if you could grow food all year long by putting up the greenhouse covers. I turned off the computer and looked out the window over the yard, the grapes were coming along, the lemon tree had a dozen lemons, and the mulberry looked like it was healthy. I suddenly realized that I hadn't finished the rudders yet, and that might be pretty important some day.

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Saturday, May 03, 2014

Cave Clanks and Werewolves

I was running on all fours, chasing through the forest with a lovely yellow Afghan looking (but much larger, still with the same slender proportions) companion. I could feel the leaves and branches crumple under my calloused paws, feel the saddle bags bounce against the mesh harness. We raced along the open paths, sometimes me leading, sometimes her leading. We'd occasionally catch wind of something interesting and would crash through the ferns and berry bushes to investigate. I could see the fur on my front legs and paws, it was thick, about two inches and mostly grey-brown with black patches.

On one of these little side forays we came upon a round opening in the side of a cliff. I transformed back to my human self and stooped down to see into the cave opening better. The opening would have been completely obscured were it not for the thick bat smell coming from it. I pushed aside the vines and roots and stepped into the entrance. The Afghan, Lydia I think her name was, transformed next to me, delicately sniffed the air. She bounced her breasts at me playfully, adjusted her harness and then transformed back, saying she was going back to bring the rest of the pack. I dressed and, using my wind up flashlight, proceeded deeper into the cave.

The bats only occupied the first large chamber, clinging to the roots and vines along the ceiling. I found that the cave continued past that chamber, a small rocky alcove contained a chiseled opening that headed down some narrow stairs. There were the remnants of wooden stairs in a couple of places, but it was only about four to six feet of a jump down to pass to the next rocky part of the path, so I proceeded by jumping over the wooden stairs, not trusting them to hold my weight even where they looked okay. I kept scanning the walls with the flashlight, hoping to spot some markings that might explain what I had found. I could feel air flowing gently down past me, so knew there must be another opening, perhaps at the bottom of the hillside where the spring pools on the opposite side of the mountain were located. We didn't spend much time over there, as that was Bai Yun's pack's range.

I came to a large chamber, split level, a large rectangular slab of material on one wall, with a square slab inset into its base. The square slab looked like it had been some sort of seal, but was now very pitted and scarred, as though something had been working at it. At the opposite side of the upper level was an adobe building that looked to be connected to the side of the cliff overlooking the lower level of the chamber. I could smell water at the bottom, and it very much smelled like the waters of the spring, so I knew that there must be another entrance somewhere below. I used the flash to try to pick out a path down to the water, but it seemed that the only way down was to jump, and hope the water was fairly deep, or to risk climbing down through the adobe building.

I turned back to the slab, and tried to make out what was etched into the surface. The slab was about fifteen feet high and ten or so feet across at the base. It was narrower at the top, about eight feet or so. It wasn't perfectly symmetrical, so I guessed that it had been carved out of something that was already here in the cave. I didn't recognize most of the languages on the slab, but about a third of the way down, discovered that I recognized some Latin words. I could tell the carvings were not literate Latin, as there were many case and number disagreements, and the verb tenses were all over the place. It was as though someone like myself had tried to put something together from memory, and oddly, it looked rushed. The whole thing looked rushed. There was a large pile of rubble at the base of the monument, and I could tell from the size and color of the chips that they were the debris from the carvings.

I could hear my pack coming down the trail, so headed up to greet them.

There was a huge thundering crack behind me, I turned to see the square chunk of stone pulverized and flying out of the base of the slab. Something mechanical stepped out on six legs, whirring and clanking. It lifted its middle legs up over its head, and lights flickered to life, it scanned the cavern, fixing a light on me. The other arm began to spin, like a Gatling gun. Lydia, still in Afghan form, with the rest of the pack behind her was highlighted on one of the slopes. The machine appeared to dismiss the wolf pack, but swiveled its gun back towards me, I instinctively shouted "RUN!" and turned back down the path as the machine opened fire.

A couple of the bullets hit me in the upper legs and right buttock, I rolled on the ground, transforming as I did so. The flashlight tumbled onto the platform, and the bullets followed its spinning path. I picked myself up, glad that the ammunition didn't seem to be made of silver or salt. I kicked the remains of my pants off, angry at losing them, as they were one of my favorite pairs. I heard my pack leaping up and away, I didn't want to go after them and lead the machines to them, so dashed from behind the rocks I was hiding behind for the adobe building. I glanced over to the opening, and two more clanking machines had scrabbled their way out of the monument, they lifted their middle legs and lights shot into the darkness, helping illuminate my path. I dove through a window into the adobe building, the ancient mud walls cracked and splintered as a fusillade of bullets tried to chew through it. I ducked down, feeling the heat of tracers as they sizzled through the air overhead. The building was essentially a stairwell, so I raced down the stairs, not really concerned about the possibility of a fall.

The metallic creatures made their way across the upper cavern floor, Each window I passed, I could see their sweeping lights, and hear the gravel crunch under their feet. Apparently they were looking for me, and even though they'd seen me go into the building, they didn't associate my wolf form with my human form.

The bottom of the building was bricked up, so I had to go back up two flights to a window. I squeezed through, and dropped the nearly twenty feet to the ground. I was really angry about losing my flashlight, as there was really no way to replace it. As I scanned the path along the underground pond, a light from above picked me out, and hesitated on me, I crouched to leap away, but the light swept on, apparently dismissing me. I headed back along what looked to be the freshest trail, though that was old enough to be nearly indistinguishable. I found myself in a twisting turning set of narrow tunnels, only one of which had any signs of traffic in it, though, again, those were old signs. I came to a curve in the tunnel where I could smell the outside, and thought I could just begin to see a glimmer of light. and there in my path was Bai Yun. He growled. He did not look happy.

I transformed, "Run, gun-clanks have come out of the cave."

I transformed back, he growled low, but nodded and waited for me to finish, then led the way out.

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