Dropping in on a Class

I dreamed I was working at a college and dropped in on a Drama course. While this was obviously influenced by the movie we'd seen last night, "Middleton," it felt a lot like my other theater dreams where I am out of my element and not prepared for the class/performance. This one had the additional feature of my being shirtless. (The covers had been pulled off and I was getting cold, I think.) There was a prop piano that I was setting up with a microphone, not for the instrument, but for the folks who would be sitting around the prop. The piano was going to be staged so that the audience couldn't see the actor's hands who was supposed to be playing the piano. This was because there wasn't actually any keys on the piano, it really was just and empty shell.

I was very self conscious of my flabby old self, but the students didn't seem to even notice. They even climbed up around me to help move the piano into position and then we all sat together while the audio engineer adjusted the microphone settings.

There were other dreams as well, small snippets that vanished between the bed and the water closet, I do know that one of them was full of warm, fluffy, cuddly kittens. I was so happy to be the center of their little world that I didn't want to wake up.

RGB Troll Theater

I was a member of a troupe of performers, and the story we were performing was a tale of the rise to power and terrifying fall of an historic leader of the Tribe. Trolls were divided into three castes, Orange-Red were the political leaders, the Blue trolls were the educational and religious, and the Green trolls were the warriors. The lightest tinted of each group were the workers, farmers, and craftsman, and performers, of society. Being born to a family of depth (or strong hue) didn't mean you would inherit the hue, every troll started out like a clean white parchment.

There was something about your rank in society and your position that caused your skin to change as you aged, and there were even the rare trolls who took on more than one color. I was playing the roll of one of those sorts. My color, however, was applied by a combination of lights and makeup.

The show was a progressive show. In other words, the entire production moved through the village, and the regions around it, each change of location representing a new act in the performance. In many of my performance dreams, I became, as the dream progresses, more and more unsure of my actual lines in the show. (I think because I am waking up.) This time, however, I was very familiar with the show, and the story, and the character. As we moved into our second act, some of the crew, and performers were taking the ground route, to entertain our following audience, and some of the others were taking an actual airship. The trollop I was infatuated with was taking the airship. I tried to impress her with a little bit of magic, as I had recently discovered my flesh turning blue, and found I had shamanistic control over the wind and sand. It was getting so pronounced that in the first act, I no longer needed the blue lights and blue makeup.

At the end of the first act, I used my new power to stir up the dust under the red and blue spotlights that were on my left and right. This was a pivotal moment in the plot, my beloved whisked away by a powerful prince in his airship, and I a lowly shaman, had decided to take matters into my own hands in her regard, but there was a choice that had to be made, a path to choose, and until this point in history, no troll had ever chosen a blended path, at least not with any great success. (I knew as a modern troll that there were many such folks, even amongst our company and in our audience, but this was a historical piece and the castes were much more rigid in that time.) I stood as the lights picked up my swirling dust and the they swung over to each light a half of me...then suddenly the performance area plunged into darkness. (Part of the show, not a surprise to us in the company.)

We slipped away into the night so I could get a light dusting of red to make me a more purple or blended looking troll. I discovered that my beloved hadn't even been watching my climactic moment at the end of the first act, so hadn't even seen the magical effect, which I could hear our audience chatting about with no small appreciation. She asked if I could do it again for her, but my reserves were too low and the sand where we were conversing was a little too wet for the slight breeze to pick up the grains. She laughed and re-boarded the airship gondola, which was winched up into the sky as the airship, with the lighting and sound crews aboard headed to the location for act two. The makeup artist looked me over and put away his red powders. "Don't know what's going on with you, did you do your own makeup?"

I hadn't. I told him that. He grew very quiet when he realized it wasn't makeup.

He pulled out a jar of tan powder and slapped it all over me. "Well, however you did it, you need to tone it down, you're too hued for the second act."

I looked down at the palm of my hand. It was indeed purple, and much darker than I remembered. I reached out with my mind and sifted through the sands, grinding the grains even smaller and making an even finer powder out of the pile of sand at my feet. I was squeezing my hands so hard that the blood spilled into the sand, and was immediately absorbed and spread throughout the growing mound. I was immediately able to control the sand and the air about it with much more ease. With a start I realized that this was some sort of blood magic, something the character I was playing could do, but almost no trolls currently practiced, as it was considered a lost art.

We began our journey, the interlude route was where I would pick up my "army" of maimed and oddly hued trolls, the outcasts and untouchables of their time. We would also pick up members fo the local audience who fit those descriptions, and they would stay on the stage with me during the second act, no longer shamed for just looking different. It was in fact, during one such performance that I had joined the company as a young troll. Now our company director was stepping down, so he'd asked me to keep an eye out for promising talent, so I really looked forward to this part of the performance, part ritual and part improv.

What was different this time, was that some of the shamanistic miracles we would just read the holy text's descriptions of...I was fairly certain I had enough control to do some of the effects, even if just to a small scale. The first event was a sand bridge allowing the character and a maimed old man to cross a ravine. The bridge was in place and the airship would light it up as I approached. With the addition of all my flying red sand, the illusion was nearly perfect. We had a lot of people follow us to the second act at that point who might not have otherwise done so. I even heard surprised gasps from some of the crown, and saw a blue shaman eying me with a suspicious look on his face. He was missing some fingers, so I motioned for him to join me. I took his hand and noticed that I was already darker blue than him, it shocked me. He nodded to me, and fell in with my army. I could see my actress friend up in the airship looking over her balcony rail, she was in the company of an Orange Red troll of pretty deep hue, and I realized I had lost her. I didn't give up, as the character I was playing proved, "hue is a temporary thing, ever changing, and fortunes and feelings change with them."

After some more fluffing the sand around the dream broke up and I woke.

Hypersleep

Realistic detailed dream of the sort that made me think it was real, and caused some confusion about how I woke up in a bed with actual fabric coverings, and small furry animals.

I was a crew member on an intersteller ship. We had been awakened to perform maintenance on several ship's systems. Part of the repairs actually involved deploying a shield made of ice, and then a space walk to replace some exterior sensors and plates. Apparently we'd bumped into a fairly large (less than a gram!) chunk of carbon and lithium, and it had punched a hole into one of the storage decks (fortunately unpressurized.) I patched the hole while another crew member assessed the damage to the cargo. Then I replaced a couple of sensors while I was outside. When I looked at the ice shield, I could see little flashes of light as it took hits from the intersteller debris. It turned out that space was not as empty as we'd thought, or hoped.

I looked back at the scoop array, still amazed by the size of our endeavor. At a half mile away, it was impossible to tell if they were working or off, or even if there were any physical damage.

When we got back inside, we listened to some of the news and telemetry notes that had been continuously beamed to us from Earth. Lots of unrest and turmoil around the world. Several other "Earths" had been located in the nearby stars, and there were even broadcasts from the second colony, about twenty five years worth! Their target world had been discovered long after our mission had left.

We also had bad news. We'd lost a lot of our cruising atmosphere supplies, and so needed to cut our maintenance operation short. We put the bulk of the team back into hypersleep. Finally, there were only two of us there working on the final few repairs, the deflector anti debris system had depleted a significant amount of our power resources. It was obvious that we were going to have to use the emergency hypersleep stand-ups instead of the full featured ones, as that appeared to be the only way to guarantee that the debris mitigation would continue all the way to our destination. The stand-ups were a supportive framework instead of a high tech bed, the hookups were very simple and the mechanism encased the sleeper in a special ice like material. I monitored the freezing of my companion, and then with everything else powered down, connected myself by the bluish glow of the debris shield. I closed the ceramic screen, and triggered the process, allowing the cold to take me away.

When I woke up I was very confused, as the dream was so strong it was like a memory of a real life.

A Quiet Remote Place

I dreamed that a group of my friends and I traveled up into the mountains as far as we could by car, and then, when the road was at an end, packed our clothing, bedding, food, water, and tools into bags and satchels and a couple of wheelbarrows. We hiked up over a pass that was only just barely a pass, several times having to pick up the blue and red metal wheelbarrows and carry them over rocky ground too rough for them to roll.

We crested the ridge to look down into a valley that had obviously been settled at one time. There were massively overgrown trails, a rickety rope bridge over a small stream, and several ruins of buildings. There was a herd of deer in the fields, which were full of oats and mustard. (Both the deer and the fields I think.) Blackberry and raspberry bushes grew in a profusion of thorny meandering hedges, the gentle western slope of the valley was covered with peach, pear and apple trees, as well as walnuts and pecan trees. Vine of peas and beans were reclaiming various old pieces of farm machinery. Roses grew over one of the ruins, great tendrils of pink and white variegated flowers that you could smell all the way up the ridge. It was getting dark and we made our way down to the original trail that led into the valley. It had mostly fallen away, and was blocked in several places by rock slides. It would be a long time before we could clear enough to make the road passable again, if it was even possible for the dozen of us to do so.

Then there was a Hollywood style movie montage of time passing, buildings replaced with earth berm houses, using the old windows to bring in natural light, lumber reclaimed to make a barn and a watch tower, with a zip line down to the edge of the valley. We'd managed to bring up a generator (taken from Little Red, I suspect) and made a water wheel for power. I managed to rig an antenna to the tiny wind-up emergency radio so we could get music and news. People hiked out to the cars to make runs back to town for various supplies, at least for a time.

The state came and repaired the road, even though we didn't ask them to. We were able to move all the cars up into the valley, except little red.

A few months later, everything went crazy. It was an alien invasion that caused a panic, and subsequent pandemic, followed by an invasion of emaciated, diseased refugees. Folks who'd been camping out lower down on the mountain. About two dozen of them shuffled into our little valley from the recently repaired road. They climbed over the gates we'd put at the property line, but wandered listlessly around the settlement, not seeming to be aware that they were surrounded by edible plants.The fever seemed to leave them alive, but with addled brains. We hoped that they would recover, and their brain functions would return to normal. Fortunately only a few of them were violent, most were just confused and wandering, with a decided tendency to take the easiest path that led up and out from the trees. They'd lost all desire to eat or drink, at least until something fragrant, like oatmeal with black berries in it or bacon was offered. Even then, they ate and drank little.

Some of our village wanted to round them up and shoot them, but saner heads prevailed and we lured them into the barn where they could be out of the weather, and we could try to get them food. It was difficult, as we could see they were all sick, and we didn't actually want to get close to them. We sent people out to gather up tents and sleeping bags from the various campsites they'd abandoned. Our own supply of blankets was severely depleted. Food and drink eventually helped some of the sick recover, but others continued to decline. I kept worrying that this was going to turn into some sort of zombie apocalypse, but that didn't happen. We spent a large part of the dream chasing down sick folks, and then luring them back to the barn in the center of the valley. (That was where the main leech field for the septic systems started as well, so there were facilities in the barn for our guests.)

We'd lost contact with the outside world, the radio grown quiet and our cell phones no longer connecting to the network. We didn't know if there was medical help available. We sent someone down the mountain to find out, but they returned only a few hours later saying the roads off the mountain were impassable, and that someone would have to hike down into town. I wasn't sure our little valley could feed all of our refugees indefinitely, if they were to suddenly find their appetites, but knew that there were plenty of edibles up and down the side of the mountain, if we could get enough people foraging we would be okay. The apocalypse was in our very mild fall, so we'd just brought in a good harvest and had plenty of supplies.

Modern Medeival Mayhem

I dreamed of the future, but it was terribly like the distant past as imagined by folks who know that things could be better. Something had happened to our energy distribution systems, and we'd switched back to fire and muscle as our primary energy sources. Electricity and Internal Combustion still existed, but power transmission and fuel refining had essentially stopped. If you weren't connected and independent before the systems failed, then you weren't getting anything.

People had moved into living situations where many families shared a single castle like dwelling, thus keeping the refrigeration costs optimized. It was odd, having electricity for things like the refrigerator, and high efficiency LED lighting, but then having to use fire and muscle for nearly everything else. Apparently the information superhighway was also shut down along with the real highway. Even plain old telephone service wasn't available, but sometimes you could get wireless voice to work, or radio transmissions.

Towards the end of the dream I was conversing with a gentleman only a slight bit younger than myself. He was despondent about the lack of internet, missing television, missing online games and communications. The pressure of having to think about the energy budget of every activity was gnawing at him.

We were seated around a fire in a fire pit, low and high tech at the same time. The heat was being collected and used to warm a passive recirculation device that pulled cold air in off the floor and then expelled warm air from the rim of the collector that also served to funnel the smoke out of the great room. I knew that there were similar tubes all along the chimney as it passed through the upper floors. We were using the fire as light and as the center of our evening activities. Without warning, the gentleman hiked up his dhoti and rolled himself into the fire.

Immediately there was the smell of burning flesh and an unholy screaming. Myself and a couple of others dragged him out of the fire and doused him. He was struggling to get back into the fire and finish himself off. We wrapped him in clean linens while others raced to hitch up the car to our llamas.

Dreamlands Park, After Closing

I was visiting the Dreamlands Theme Park, and somehow managed to become separated from the rest of my group. I wandered around for a bit, checking out the shops in the far corners of the park. There was a little hat shop I liked, so was there in the little nook between two knolls when the fireworks began to go off. The fireworks signaled the closing of the park, and most people rushed to the little mock village in the front of the park to get the best view of the fireworks. I figured that would most likely be where my friends had gone. I stayed to talk to the hat shop clerks, and the milliner, who'd stepped out front to view the fireworks.

He commented that though they seemed pretty far away, we did have a good view of the show, because of the alignment of the valley. (Dreamlands Park, while a lot like Disneyland, was on much hillier terrain, more like Legoland California. It was an interesting feature of the Dreamlands part that there were several access tunnels through the hills and knolls of the park, leading from one section to another, and out into the loading docks and warehouses and kitchens in the back areas of the park. We chatted a bit, and he gave me a really nice scholar's/prelate cap to go with my cloak. As I walked to the front of the park, I stopped to talk to several of the craftsmen, as I had gotten to know them over the years.

As I passed through one of the large outdoor stage areas, some of the performers recognized me and invited me to stay a while for their post closing sing along. They sang the various shows' songs, and used the time to learn other shows' songs in case they needed to fill in, or wanted to change parts. I really wanted to get to my friends, but they convinced me to stay and sing a couple of songs. I made it through one song and one of the directors came and took me aside to ask if I would ever think of actually performing at the park. "Only if I don't sing," I laughed.

He laughed as well and said, "Of course not." He'd sent me on my way, having rescued me from the never ending song that had just started up as the performer's second selection.

Each time I stopped to chat, my outfit would change and soon I was dressed in cloak, scholar's cap, white frilled shirt and surplice, breeches that were black like my cape but with red and gold trim (also like the cape and hat.)

As I made my way through the candle and print shops, a group of clergy entered the shop and greeted me as Reverend Malthus.  I decided, after getting the "go for it" signal from the candlestick maker, to go along with the charade. I played the part for a bit, and then one of the clergy noticed my computer bag under my cloak and started going through it to look at all the odd "devilish looking" implements, pens, a watch, etc.  Most of the stuff wasn't mine, but I made it to be a sample of tricky German engineering, or a Spanish tube of ink with a steel nib, etc. It made for an amusing few moments and really stretched my imagination. We moved up to the Print Shop and while there, we picked up some more lost and found items to take to the front of the park. While I was there I noticed the real Reverend Malthus (well, an actor portraying him) making his way across the street with his own group of clergy.

Rather than a confrontation, we greeted each other as brothers, and laughed at the confusion of our "junior" clergymen. We posed together for pictures on each of the lost cell phones and digital cameras, figuring that would be a funny surprise for whoever claimed them. We spent a bit of time adjusting our costumes and primping our ruffles and vestments before each shot, trying to get just the right "serious and pious" expressions. He whispered to me that my friends were waiting at the front of the park, having figured out that they'd lost me. We gripped hands and hugged, sending one another on our way. He suggested (in character) that we should do this more often. We continued our tour, he handing me his group's Lost and Found items to take up to the management office, as he was actually still headed deeper into the park.  Some of my actors were very confused, so some others tried to straighten them out by saying that I was the "real" reverend Malthus and not their actor. I had a very hard time staying in character at that point I wanted to laugh so much.

When we got to the front offices I dropped my "disguise" and was back in my normal clothing, much to the younger actors' amazement. "It's the Old Man on the Hill" they whispered to one another.

"I can still hear you, you know."

Myself and the older actors and the office staff laughed at the blushing and stuttering youths. I smoothed things over by shaking each of their hands and thanking them for a delightful evening. I left a gold coin in each of their palms. (Too bad I can't do that trick for real.) My friends were waiting just outside the park office and we blended in and exited with the last of the happy and exhausted crowd.

Left Right Confusion

I dreamed that I couldn't tell Left from Right. Was trying to dance the dance we did last night where you turn right to pass left, or ... yeah, I think the dream instructions were even more confusing that the ones last night.

When I woke up, I still can't tell left from right. I will have to look that up on the internet.