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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.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Short Stuff, Working, Space Survival

Many little dream snippets.

Two featuring miniature people. The first was a vacation trip. Couldn't afford to go our selves, so sent miniature versions on the vacation. We got to be there, but in miniature form. It was like visiting a beach in 'Land of the Giants' mode. While at the beach one of the avatars dropped the room key down a sewer grate. In climbing down after the key, the avatar started growing, good, in that the long drop wasn't long any more, bad in that there was no going back the way we came.

Lots of large stacks of boxes and crates and a dark damp wall full of fist sized hollows, one of which had the key, which had morphed into the key for my old Plymouth Satellite. I had to slide down a pipe, then scale down a stack of moldy crates and boxes to get over to the wall.



In the second Little People Dream, the avatars were back home, and they were now living independent of us. They had developed their own personalities and shared our home. One evening there was a glass soup steamer over the fire pit. The steamer rolled off of its stand as the last of the soup dried up. The little man avatar threw himself in front of it where it rolled out into the room, absorbing the shards of glass as the tube shattered. I don't know how he knew the tube would shatter, but had moved faster than any of us. The female avatar raced to his side and collapsed, sobbing, and then shut herself off.

We put them in a series of sarcophagi on a shelf with statues of birds, because, as the avatar's instructions indicated, "There shall only be birds at our grave site." The avatars personalities had been backed up, but we knew that even if restored from that backup, they wouldn't be the same.



In another dream I handed in a couple of spreadsheets to an accountant, who was just raving about the quality and speed of the work. (Which mystified me, as it was something that took about twenty minutes.) She was cute, though, so I didn't mind the fuss.

I was sitting at another desk across the hall, and after my last appointment left, my old boss came in to express how disappointed he was that I had taken these other jobs. "All for what?" he asked.

"Less stress, and eight percent more per year in my retirement check."

I was trying out both jobs to determine which one I would keep, if either at the end of the year. One job was full time to half in the second part of the year, the other was half time to full time at the end of the year, so they complemented one another perfectly to make me full time. Both paid considerably better than the previous job.

My old boss wanted to know why I hadn't promoted in his department, so I had to explain that the education cost to do so was greater in terms of time and money, neither of which I would have gotten back on the job, not to mention it was only a five percent raise, not twelve percent.

"It's a waste of your time and talents."

I pointed to the happy accountant and the family that was just making their way out of the lobby, "not to them it isn't."



In the fourth little snippet, I was floating in space, having been ejected from my vessel by pirates. I jetted off into orbit near some asteroids and set up my emergency shelter. There was enough ice in the nearby asteroid to flood the cotton candy like walls and get the greenery growing faster than normal, that would scrub the CO2 from the air and in a few days provide food. I had enough emergency rations to make it that far.

I was floating in the center of the sixty foot diameter ball, watching the grass grow, as well as the gauges that showed the atmosphere percentages, the electricity production (the outer layer of the ball was solar panel material) and the positions of nearby ship transponders. Sometime during the second day, another commander drifted my way. He also had an emergency shelter in tow. I extended my airlock tube and the commander rotated to connect. I had still not completely gotten off of my suit oxygen as my bubble was still growing its atmosphere (I could have survived if I had, but didn't want to stretch the growing system.)

She introduced herself, and we compared seed stocks.  We traded some seeds, passing them through the tube. We decided not to visit one another yet. I could see that she'd been out in space far longer than I, her greens had grown more than a foot into her living space, and she'd trained some of her vine plants out into a sort of hammock, or nest. I indicated that there were good organic carbon solids on the asteroid I was orbiting, so we could grow some of the longer rooted plants in time.

She indicated that she was hoping to make a go out here, if she could just get a more permanent shelter. She then asked if she could keep my bubble when I was rescued. I had to admit that I'd been toying with the idea of tethering to the asteroid below and then hollowing it out. She let out a girlish giggle, and asked if I had two spoons. I pointed to my escape pod, explaining that I had my prospecting tools, including a portable mining laser. It was fully charged, still.

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Thursday, September 17, 2015

Four More to Go.

My dreams took their usual meandering path until early this morning. J and I found ourselves owners of a lovely ranch style house nestled into a hillside, lots of wood floors and paneled rooms. One of the paneled rooms was next to a space, that by looking at the rooms around it, should have had a room.

I started knocking on the wooden paneling until I discovered a hollow sounding area. We carefully removed the panel there, and discovered a doorway that had been covered up. The room was full of dusty office furniture, but sunlight was streaming into the room from a very dusty window. We both thought that was odd, as this room would be backed right up against the hillside, and it was early in the morning.

I looked around the walls and found a plastic covered wall plate with a smooth cover about a half inch in from the edges of the plate itself. I noticed there was a little thumbnail shaped divot in the cover, like someone had used a tool to pry the cover up previously. I started to use it to pull the cover off but then realized the cover was very flexible, so pressed gently in the center where it was bulged out a bit. The bulge inverted and the cover popped off into my hand.

Behind the cover was a set of unlabled controls. A row of white buttons on top, then a cross of buttons NSEW and center arrangement, then a couple of rows of buttons on the bottom. In each row the right most button was slightly larger than the others, and the center button of the cross was larger as well.

I pulled things away from the wall, looking to see what this might control. I found another larger panel, a couple of feet square, and behind it were several bundles of cables, some I wasn't familiar with, and some were Cat-6 ethernet cables. there were a couple of small hubs for the Ethernet cables, and there were faded labels on the wires. The alien looking cables also connected to what I guessed was a hub, but it was round and the cables plugged in from all directions. A much larger cable connected to one end of the alien hub and vanished into a conduit in the wall.

J was more interested in cleaning up the window to see what was outside, as she was convinced that this was like the other house where the hole in the floor went to another house in another part of the world.

When I woke up, (yes a dream within a dream) I was disappointed that the house wasn't real. I was telling the dream to J and some others at lunch, with J chiming in if I left out a detail. We were outside where other folks were passing by, when one of those folks stopped to listen. When I finished the dream he looked at me, and there passed a sort of odd feeling of familiarity. He smiled "Four more to go."

A woman who'd just come out of the cafe also smiled at me, "you know?"

"They just had the first,"

"Oh, four more to go." She took the gentleman's hand. "Welcome to the family."

I looked around, and several other people in their group waved at us.

J said she thought they were a little strange, but no stranger than the two of us having the same dream.


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Wednesday, September 02, 2015

Mobile Home (Wet)

J and I couldn't decide where to live. So, we bought a boat.

At the end of a trip from Monterrey to San Diego we ended up docked outside a amphitheater like venue, where I was repairing the rails. A rock and roll concert started. It was a group of older rock-n-rollers, covering a lot of sixties and seventies songs we both liked. Grandkids N and M were visiting along with Dad, and had never been to a concert before, at least, not on a boat.  They were having a great time. Our boat rode pretty high out of the water, and the two electric masts were gleaming pink in the setting sun. The raked main mast had the booms tied in tight and we were anchored both fore and aft. (The boat was all electric and wind/solar powered. It had two re-conditioned torpedo motors in addition to the sails.) I loved the dark oak color of the decking and sides.)

The band invited us to come backstage during the break between sets.

All the while this was going on I was replacing the old thick wooden railing with lighter, stronger, and more weather resistant composite railings. I was almost finished by the time the concert was done. I was just finishing the composite so it was the same color as the electric masts.

J was concerned about N's first back stage experience, but I pointed out that he would be fine (he was an adult in the dream, with dark curly hair.) Besides, she'd be there. Her son tried to remind her that she was almost seventy and needed to behave like it. I just laughed, figuring that's not going to happen. I did clip  her into a safety line before she climbed down over the side of the boat, better safe than sorry, right?

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