Sailing Ships and Wooden Cabins

I was, with a team of about 12, stationed on a wooden sailing ship that was searching for the Northwest Passage. We had been thwarted in our attempt and had retreated to the North Atlantic. Winter had been harsh, and the ship's stores were getting low. The captain wanted to make another attempt in the spring, so devised a plan to drop off the carpenters, masons and myself (apparently a structural engineer,) leaving us with about two weeks of rations (if tightly rationed) and the materials for a pair of cabins, which had been meant for way point storage to be set up. I was not particularly in favor of this plan, but the ship's crew made the decision for us one cold, wet night.

We found ourselves on a green shoreline, fumaroles sputtered and fumed in the distance. A wide fresh water river coming had a hot tributary. I looked at the sand on the beach and decided that if we could gather up enough viable seed we could set up our cabins, and then make a greenhouse, heated by the hot water, and we should be able to overwinter here if the captain wasn't good to his word of sending help from the Canadians on his first stop. (Since putting us off was in order to keep him from having to purchase more supplies, I suspect he had no intentions of telling anyone where we were.)

One of the carpenters opined, "It's too bad none of us are shipwrights." I had to agree. We decided that we would only set up one cabin, and look to making a boat of the other so that we might explore our coast and river valley better. There were only a sparse scattering of short woody plants around, so I figured we wouldn't be building much out of the local lumber. Perhaps the hot water was near boiling further inland, we could heat and cook all winter if that were the case.

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.

House Tour

Last night's dream was a perfect combination of every conversation and movie J and I experienced.

Mom  and Dad, in their 90's now, came to tour my home and to help celebrate my daughter's 16th birthday, High School Graduation, College acceptance. They had never been up to "the complex" where J and I had moved over 16 years earlier. We started in the office, I showed them the main development center, and there were the over a thousand servers that ran both our games and development software. There were no blinking lights in the entire place, as I found them too distracting. Only a couple of the team were actually working when my parents arrived for the tour, as it was quite late local time. I had to explain that the majority of our employees worked from home, or from satellite computing centers if there'd been enough of them to build one. Only just over a dozen developers and robot maintenance workers worked at the main site. Many of them had homes in another part of our business park.

A pair of cybernetic enhanced golden retrievers joined us. Part family, part guardians, they conversed, after a fashion, greeting Mom and Dad warmly. We stopped in the cafe, open around the clock and around the calendar, they catered to all of the local businesses, many of which ran around the clock as well. I explained that the kitchen was rarely closed, so if they needed something in the night, they could call over and it would be delivered to their room. The retrievers wondered if there were treats for them. I told them treats were for later, and they fell in behind us, friendly but alert.

We went outside to a nearby intersection. I pointed out a building across the street with three domes on top. You'll be staying in the red domed room, the other is empty for now, and "your grand-daughter's rooms are under the green dome. Her dome was rotating slowly and the clear windowed opening was slowly rotating out of view. "She likes to watch the stars at night when it's clear enough."

My mom commented that was just like her grumpa, and her dad.

I pointed to the rest of the complex up the hill, all solar cells and wind turbines. I was proud of the fact that our operations ran on almost wholly renewable energy resources. I had an experimental tidal generator on the coast, but it wasn't online yet. When  it was, I would be able to provide power to some of the other homes in the area as well. I was not planning on expanding the business any further.

"Cross now," one of the retrievers barked and we stopped our conversation long enough to navigate the curbs and cross the street.

We entered our home. It was very open on the bottom floor, and there were places were balconies overlooked the main hall. There were a couple of folks meeting quietly in one corner, some others playing cards. They all looked up and greeted me, so I introduced my folks around. These were friends and co-workers (employees, technically) who were using the main hall as one of the few well lit meeting places in town, I even had a robot bartender rolling around somewhere. It was the closest thing the island had to a night club.

I took my folks back up into the more private part of the residence. The retrievers got their snacks, and then headed back out to the main hall.

There was a large alcove in the master bedroom with a life sized photo of J and her five grand children, N was a young man, his little sister, M was a teenager, as was their oldest cousin. There were two younger cousins, twins, were tweens in the photograph. All of them were grown now, and a couple had provided J with great grand children, or would have if she was still alive. The family was still close with myself and my daughter, and that was a sweet set of memories. They kept J alive for me. In the photograph J was quite clearly beaming, and very pregnant. There were dozens of smaller photos lining each side of the larger photo, and there was a single perpetual candle below the center of the display. The whole thing was on an antique oak dresser with J's jewelry and some other keepsakes displayed on the top. It was quite the shrine. The whole thing brought up many bittersweet memories.

Mom wondered what had prompted us to become parents in our sixties. I answered that we'd been fortunate enough to have both the time and the money, so we did. I showed them the master bedroom, the pedestal for the California King had been refinished and modified to move the drawers closer to the edge of the bed. The headboard still held several books, a couple of teddy bears, and the love dice game.  The mattress was a climate controlled sensor bed, and the central area was the storage for the robotic paramedic that served the family. The bed spread was an antique quilt, one of the ones J had loved. In the center of the bed was a large cat, marked like a clouded leopard. He regarded us, then loped over to rub against Mom and Dad's legs. It was as though he knew they were family. "He's recently sired some kittens if you think you'd like another cat."

I eased the doors closed and we headed up to the roof, passing under the awning that made wintering through  possible, and we stopped outside my daughter's room. I knocked on her door and it opened almost immediately. She'd probably been watching the tour's progress on her tablet. She bounced out into the hallway and hugged Mom and Dad, genuinely glad to see them. she was about the same height as mom, bright blue eyes and cheekbones like her mother, brown wavy hair like mine when I was young. She was slender, but curvy, a perfect blend of our two families. (Perhaps unfortunately for her nose, it got J's bump and our length, like most teens, she was oversensitive about it.)

Mom was stooped with arthritis that had progressed too far to be treated even with modern medicine, at least not without replacing her spine, something she absolutely refused to do "I never planned on living this long!" she kept saying. At least her condition had been brought to a standstill, so would get no worse. Dad's hearing had been replaced, however, with implants, it was the only gift he'd allowed me to give him, and even then, I had to convince him that I needed his help for the "trials" of the devices, as I wanted to invest in them. (In fact my company now owned the company that made the devices, and we subsidized their distribution, about 95% of the cost for those who could afford it, 100% for anyone who couldn't. I don't think my dad actually understood why we did that.)

My daughter dragged her grandparents into her room; showing off the view and some of the awards she'd collected. Like her mother, there were piles of clothing on the floor and the beds, as I think she tried everything on every morning before heading out. She'd done her best to move the piles out of the way, or cover them with bedding.  She was, very much her mother's daughter. I was quite proud of her, thinking the J and I had done okay, and that the business, when I handed it over in a dozen years or so, would be in good hands. I had every intention of retiring and becoming a face to face game master, and gaming away the last few decades of my life with friends both old and new. (Unless, of course, we discovered the secret of immortality. Human life spans were now in the low 120s regularly, and the record was being  broken continuously by a woman who was in fact one of my virtual employees at 127 years of age. I didn't know if I would make it to that age, but it seemed likely that I would at least see Halley's Comet a second time.)

Strangled, Reclaimed House

Had a dream that started off serene enough. I was parked in a parking structure downtown, just checking my phone for the e-ticket to whatever event I was about to attend. And moving the porta-potty to the back seat. I heard a noise outside the car and turned just as someone reached into the car and wrapped a belt around my neck. I managed to get a couple of fingers under it before they pulled it tight, but I knew it wasn't going to be enough if I didn't act fast. I turned so the main pressure wasn't on my esophagus and kicked away from the door - it tightened the belt, but also forced the person into the side of the car. The dream ended before I could tell if that helped or not.

This morning's dream was muck nicer. I was in a hilly area outside of the Dream City, just down the hill from Cemetary House, where there were several old abandoned buildings. I had purchased them and was in the process of renovating them. I'd finished the master bedroom and a ball room and the kitchen. In the process I'd hired the displaced people to do the work, and they had renovated small homes for themselves. There was a child who no one claimed, however, so I made sure that there were a couple of rooms that could be used as bedrooms and let the child have first pick.

-----

Later in the night I was inspecting the roof and retaining wall behind the master bedroom, it was built into a hillside with a small private patio on the roof and to each side. It was starting to rain so I had gone up to the top patio to close the umbrella and take it in. I found another child sleeping in a damp pile of bedding stuffed under the picnic table. I convinced the child to come inside, and introduced him to my new staff.

No one knew who his or her parents were, either. I took the child to the front of the house where the guest rooms were. There were two sparten but clean rooms with a common bathroom between them. I told him he could stay in the room the other child hadn't chosen. I went to introduce them, hoping they knew one another, but she wasn't in her room. One of my new employees said the child became frightened of the storm and went to the master bedroom to sleep by the fireplace. She wasn't sure she liked that. I told her the children were allowed to go wherever they felt safe, it would be okay. She was welcome to come up and check on her to make sure she was all right. The new child asked to sleep by the fire, too. The house itself was cold, as I only had heat from one fireplace and the other furnaces weren't working yet. We hadn't even cleared the rubble out of the stairs down into the basement.

I took the pillows and blanket off the guests (or childrens') beds, taking a moment to show the child how the hammock linen storage worked. (A bright blue hammock above the bed with extra blankets and pillows in it. The child asked if he could sleep in it.

"Sure."

The child brought the hammock down and then took the pillows I'd taken off the mattress below and tossed them into the hammock. The little dark haired child's face poked out of a pile of linens and pillows, smiling for the first time of the evening. "I can really stay here?"

"Yes."

The child grabbed the rope and pulled the hammock up above the bed, looking down at us contentedly.

I asked the tall blonde women to bring some snacks for the kids. "I guess we'll be camping by the fire tonight." We went back through the large dining hall, I explained that I was going to recondition all the rooms so they looked like this.

"Empty, you mean" I looked around, there was a single round card sized table with a jade top and a small lamp, at the table was a single embroidered cushioned chair.

I laughed, "no, clean, with nice walls and floors, there'll be plenty of furniture in time. We haven't even decided what to do with all of this space yet."

Robot Shark, Split Personality Dating

The dream was in a future where one could have robots made to do almost any domestic task, and they could take nearly any form. I had an auxillary self, a duplicate, really, who served as my spare brain. It (he?) was a labcoat wearing, thickly bespectacled version of myself. Over the years, he'd become my primary face for dealing with the world, since he didn't age and was always in great shape.

Inspectors arrived, however, and I knew there would be trouble. My other robot (or one of my other robots) was a large housekeeping shark. It "swam" around the grounds picking up after my robot avatar and myself, cleaning the floors and other horizontal surfaces, and generally screening the folks who arrived unexpected at the front door. I think it was that last duty that had gotten us in trouble. The shark robot had very realistic looking teeth. Several rows of them, actually, it was modeled on a Great White shark, the last one in captivity had died a few years earlier, so I had the robot made in its honor.

The inspector was a woman I had met at a convention. Middle aged, but still full-lipped and dark haired with high cheek bones and bright blue eyes. I was fairly certain this was actually a robot avatar much like my own. We'd hit it off, or rather my avatar and hers had hit it off. For the inspection she was really present, as the government was restricted from using avatars to conduct business. Even though she'd come to put my guard shark down, she was kind enough to let us give her a tour of my home. She was quite impressed, and really didn't want to destroy my sharkbot after seeing it in action. However, she had a job to do.

After we dissassembled the shark and converted it into a strangely disjointed  cubist version of itself; three sections without sharp teeth or razor fins that were connected by shimmering cables. She recertified the guard shark as "safe" and allowed me to keep it. It still swam through the house, but looked more like a trio of battered Star Wars robot rejects leashed together and bobbing along comically.

The Inspector agreed to go out with my avatar and myself after the neutering of sharkbot was complete.  As dinner ended she expressed confusion about her feelings of affection, I reassured her that it was okay to love us both, since, really, we were just one person. Oddly enough, this seemed to satisfy her and the evening ended with a great kiss, or two of them, actually.

Gremlin Catastrophe

I dreamed I was a Gremlin (thanks ET and Elizabeth, I'm certain) on a
chunk of floating planet. Unfortunately, not the sort of Gremlin with
magical powers, so perhaps more like Goblins. The chunk was a huge
volcanic mountain with chambers in the formerly molten core. There were
close to seven hundred survivors who'd made it underground and managed
to seal off the caves to preserve both water and air. A nuclear power
plant provided energy and heat as well as the power to
electromagnetically shield the living areas, sort of.

The chunk of planet we were on was large enough to provide a bare
minimum of gravity, so we had pipes going to the former surface of our
world, dredging up as much plant and animal life as would fit, along
with air and water before it completely boiled away. I didn't know that
we could actually survive for long, as we'd already lost a couple of our
grow lights, and the replacement stock was very small, only about half a
dozen lamps.

I calculated, with the rest of the survival team, that we had all of
about a year and a half to survive on stored supplies, so our plant and
animal (insects, mostly) growing was going to have to be an incredible
success in order for us to last any longer.

We were apparently a few months into this when I was elected to
represent the non-scientific community of survivors, even though it was
partly my process that had hollowed out the air tight spheres in the
magma.

One of the groups major desires was to get radio working, in case there
were other survivors out there. Even though the science team was not
sure that was truly useful, they agreed to allow some small expenditure
of resources to construct the antenna on the surface. My survivors had
to make the environment suits, though, and provide the technicians. I
volunteered as did another.

The suits were hand made from donated and scavenged materials brought
back by the robotic vacuums that roamed the surface. Meanwhile, we came
up with a way of coiling the antenna wires and then throwing them out to
make up the antenna array. We practiced a few times in one of the
larger lava spheres, one that was partly open to the surface and
therefore nearly a vacuum. We discovered some small snags in the plan,
the wires would sometimes kink up and loop around, causing waves to
build up in them and then they would break. I requested a robot to haul
the lines around, but was denied, as the science team wanted to preserve
the batteries for emergency use. There were a number of technological
item that we weren't going to be able to replace anytime soon, if ever.

The other volunteer and I talked about the plan, and we decided that
rather than just popping out to the surface and tossing the wires
around, one of us would roll out the wires. It meant a couple of hours
of outside time, rather than just a few minutes. It may have been
chauvinistic of me, but I insisted that I should be the one to roam,
partly because I was stronger, and partly because I was actually
smaller.

We made the trip to the surface and one of the science council members
brought me a spare oxygen tank on the sly. That was going to make a huge
difference, adding at least another couple of hours of hard labor time
to the task (presuming no leaks.) We stepped out onto the surface from
the elevator air lock. The night sky was fantastically clear, I could
see the molten remains of the planet spiraling out away from us, the sun
was glinting off of the fragments of the world, many of which still
glowed white hot from whatever had sundered our planet. I saw that there
were some larger chunks still floating whole, and they looked as though
they might have splashes of light on them.

Whether the light was just from the fires of destruction, or signs of
other survivors, we couldn't tell, but were hoping to find out. I ran
the wires out across the surface in long bounds, maintaining tension the
on the wire enough to keep it from kinking. I anchored each end on a
glass insulting stake and we crisscrossed the crater with wire, then put
the receiver up at the focus of the makeshift parabolic antenna. With
about half an hour of air to spare we headed back for the elevator when
there was a huge burst of static on our walkie-talkies.

We looked up. Overhead was a huge blue and green fragment hanging in a
white circle of white hot debris. It was larger than our little
planetoid, and, unfortunately closing fast. I was actually more
concerned about the antenna's survival than my own. We raced back to the
airlock, telling the people below to brace themselves, something large
was coming. It wasn't until we got back below that we found out how
large.

The science council was in our little radio room, crowded around our
small speaker, chattering excitedly to someone about the inbound portal.


I was confused.

The white hot debris wasn't debris, but an interstellar portal, one that
had been poorly aimed, one that had accidentally ripped through our
world. I was a little upset to know that the council had known about the
portal. (Thus why they had been so eager to deploy our magma bubble
process all around the world.) They were now communicating with the
portal's owners on the other side, negotiating a rescue.

The rescue consisted of pulling part of our hunk of planet through the
wormhole, and dropping it onto a world that was being terraformed. We
would be evacuated to a large stable mesa on the planet, several hundred
rescue bags were being delivered to the surface above the large empty
bubble we had used as our rehearsal room. Several thousand more were
waiting to be delivered as we discovered and located other survivors.
The wormhole was a large version of the small vacuum hose carrying
robots we'd been using to scavenge up our survival supplies. Only it
sucked up planets and deposited them on this huge framework of a world,
to which we were going to be delivered as well.

I started rounding up the survivors and getting them to the hallways
leading to the large sphere, I was soon suited up again, and hauling
large silvery spring loaded bags into the bubble, where they rolled
slowly down to the bottom of the sphere next to the door. My partner and
I then rolled the bags into the airlock, where a family would grab one
and head out to the elevator. From there, like a large hamster ball, the
family would roll the bag out to the former parking lot of the facility.
We had to them all there in just a few hours. I don't know how we did
it, but we did.

A lobe of the portal swooped down and they, and the parking lot, were
gone. A few minutes later, we heard them shouting and cheering over the
radio, they had made it.

The two of us who'd stayed behind, though, to manage the communications
with other survivors, were not going to be so fortunate. Until my
partner remembered that there was an airfield nearby. We said our
goodbyes over the radio, then suited up one last time. We bounded across
the remains of the facility, watching the portal grow ever larger. We
found the airport, and most of the planes were a jumbled mess, but there
in a chunk of asphalt was a small bi-wing, staked to the ground. My
partner squeezed into the open cockpit, then I released all of the
tie-downs. I took the longest one with me.

There was an electric cart nearby, I stuck the nose wheel tie down in
its grill and started it up, then jammed the accelerator. I managed to
climb onto the wing and then into the front cockpit. The tie-down went
taut, and we started rolling along behind the little cart.

Since there was little atmosphere by this point, I had no actual
steering control, so just hoped the little cart would roll off the end
of the long slap of concrete and asphalt with enough speed to pull us
out, off the mountainside, and then through the portal well in front of
the mass of planet behind us. Well, that was the plan, anyway.

The little cart hit a bump, and bounced up off the tarmac. It rotated
and struck the ground on its two right wheels. It scooted forward a bit,
then teetered over onto its side. The tie-down strap went slack. The
cart was sliding to a stop, directly in front of us. I climbed out and
pushed on the right wing, then tried to keep pushing, but the low
gravity made getting traction difficult. I managed to tilt the wing up
and over the cart, then had to struggle to catch back up to the plane. I
dug my feet in and pushed hard, trying to stay on the ground and push at
the same time.

We approached the end of the tarmac, where much of the mountain had
fallen away. The small plane tipped up slightly as it bumped over the
shallow ridge the defined the broken runway, and momentum carried it
over the edge. I jumped after it, overtaking it, and several feet above
it. My partner had pulled in the tie-down strap and tossed it out in
front of me.

We hit the surface of the portal, and there was atmosphere. The plane
stalled beneath me and I grabbed the end of the strap. I shot over the
top wing and my fall pulled the plane's nose down, breaking the stall.
We fell, I pulled myself up the strap, watching the first bit of the
mountain hit the surface of the portal, and explode into fire. It was
gaining on us.

"Start the engine!" I shouted, but my partner waited until I was past
the engine and hanging on to the wing struts before trying.

I could feel the heat above us. The engine sputtered. I prayed that the
fuel system was sealed enough for the fuel to still exist. I worried
that the lubrication of the motor might have boiled away in the vacuum.
The propeller turned and I dove head first into the cockpit, trying not
to hit the flight controls as I tucked myself into the flight harness. I
put us into a slight roll and tried to aim for the nearest edge of the
mass being torn up by the portal. Small bits of debris pinged off the
hull and wings around us. The plane lurched as the engine coughed and
sputtered, cutting into the thin air enough to pull us forward.

Our radio crackled to life, the council asking what was going on. "Hell
raining down on this world, how do we get to you?" I asked, but there
was no reply, just repeated calls for updates on the situation. I
realized they must be out of our radio's range.

There was no answer for several seconds, long enough for us to steer
away from the debris falling past us, and soon any answer was blocked
out by intense static interference. I started looking for signs of life,
but there were none, deep canyons and crevasses with an odd silvery gray
framework were slowly being covered by molten rock that seared the sky
and crashed behind us with continuous shock waves that pushed us on the
front of a roasting wave of heat that made controlling the plane
difficult. We dove for well over a minute, our planet roaring through
the portal, being sucked to its final location a bit at a time as it
ground against the portal's surface, torn and collapsing to the ground
far below.

As we got closer to the ground I could see signs of plant life in the
distance, and we both decided to head in that direction, even though, as
far as we knew, we might be flying in exactly the wrong direction.
Clouds blotted out the sun and lighting arced all around us. The heat
began to be unbearable, our little suit batteries finally starting to
run down. We put the plane into a dive, building up our airspeed to the
red-line. My partner let me fly while she tried to find something on the
radio other than static. I told her to try the walkie-talkies, too.

There was nothing, however, but static and heat. At least both tanks
read "full" and when we got lower the air was cooler and smoother. I
spotted several lakes and meandering rivers in the distance and gently
nudged the plane in that direction, we needed to find flat ground to set
down on if we ever expected to be able to take off again. Problem with
grassy fields is that you couldn't see how bumpy they might be from the
air, so a long stretch of gravel shoreline seemed like a better plan. I
found myself wishing we'd looked for a float plane.

The radio crackled and sputtered, but we could make out our council,
we'd been flying in mostly the right direction, to judge by the Vortac
radios, once I got them tuned to the same frequency.

I wondered how their radio was working at that distance, but it dawned
on me that we were probably using a radio from the group that killed our
world. I flew for a few minutes about ninety degrees to our former
course and then took another bead on the radio. The lines were very
nearly parallel, either their radio was moving, or we were hundreds of
miles from their location.

The dream jumped ahead several days. We'd set a lean-too up using the
wing of the plane as a roof. We'd apparently just about run out of fuel,
and were only using the engine to charge the batteries to keep the radio
going. (I figured we could listen about an hour a day for the next five
months or so.)

We'd heard other survivors on the radio, even managed to talk a few
moments to some of them as they passed so far overhead that we couldn't
see them, so knew our little group wasn't the only one that survived. I
kept a fire burning and hoped that someone would fly over and see our
bright yellow plane from the air. We'd managed to find grain and fruit
that was edible, as well as some fish-like things. (Information from the
radio helped identify animals that were safe.) My partner was confident
that rescue would only be a matter of waiting for the collection of our
planet to cease, then the aliens would be able to fly out and pick us
up, they were too busy rescuing others at the moment.

Another time jump. We were indeed rescued, but had to leave the plane
behind. I took the radios and the battery, though, just in case. I was
in a group that was overlooking the deposited remains of our world,
still molten and glowing, but with odd bits of other planes and loose
remnants of debris that had somehow been cast out from the periphery of
the storm and littered about this new world. I'd found some old phone
bills, along with the other papers that had somehow survived the intense
heat, or been blown away from the cataclysm.

It was all sort of depressing. The aliens were very tall, about two to
two and a half times our size, but oddly similar in construction. They
didn't have tails, though. They were very, very, sorry; and seemed to be
doing everything they could to rescue whatever populations they had
found still alive, they had even turned over their pre-built colonies to
us. Still, from a world of several billion souls, we now numbered only
in the thousands.

I looked down at the pile of papers I had collected and then let them
drop from the ledge I was standing on. They fluttered down into the
still molten remains of our old world and vanished in a series of
flashes. I hoisted my radio pack and headed back to our observation
tower.

Glass Building and Crochet Critters

DROG 20111102

Glass Tower Escape

Yeah, um, not sure what this was now, vaguely remember that it was like my work building, only several stories taller. Everyone in IT was packing up their desks and getting out. We'd been outsourced..

Windup Crochet Critters

Now this was a very weird, but cool dream. I had crocheted a ten inch eyelash mite, and a much larger bedbug sort of thing. The eyelash mite was made out of some sort of yarn that wriggled when it's temperature changed. I warmed it up, then as it cooled it raced up my parents screen door. It was actually sort of amazing just how far it could go, about a dozen feet or so. The bedbug, which remembering it now was actually much flatter, wasn't made from the same yarn. To make it go I had to hook the mite up to its back. The mite wriggling pulled on the threads that controlled the bug's legs.

It crawled under my dad's touch and down into the neighbors yard, where I expected it to be torn to shreds by the dog. The dog seemed to be afraid of it and it curved back around and made it almost out to the street.

Holly.

I have absolutely no idea of why I wrote this. I can't even say if it is a woman's name or the plant.

Blue Nanite Skin

In last night's dream I found myself looking through a microscope at tetrahedral frames with tiny spherical motors on each end. They were able to connect to one another and still move in a very fluid fashion. Each nanite had a small open pit in e center that somehow served as transmitter, receiver, and memory.

I could see the bundle of nanites in the field of view form up into a long twisted tube. The length of the control pit, because of the fouled nature of the nanite geometry was far longer than it would seem possible. I found myself wondering if they could build up to a point where they were intelligent.

When struck by light the nanites were a bright blue. I stretched out a small sample of them across the back of my hand and they smoothed themselves out like a thin film if oil. in just a few seconds they were using my hair and dead skin cells to fuel their expansion. I hadn't counted on that. Soon the nanites had completely covered me in a blue second skin.

There was a few scary moments when the suit tried to cover my eyes and mouth, but after a bit of wrestling, I was able to pull them back and convince the suit that I needed them to operate properly. When I managed to get out of the room I was in I saw myself in a mirror, I looked like The Tick. I remember thinking it could be worse.

Sparky's Submarine

DROG20110725

I dreamed that I was playing  Axelpyre's youngest child, a somewhat incompetent chemist and engineer. He sat atop a ramshackle submarine, in the middle of an alley, brick building on one side and sandstone on the other. In that regard the game looked a little bit like Minecraft.  The submarine was setting atop a rectangular carriage that was little more than a frame for two electric motors and a slew of batteries. The controls for the cart were at the end of a long ribbon cable that reached up to the edge of the open cockpit.

You're way ahead of me. Yes, open cockpit. Did I mention that Sparky here was an incompetent engineer? Hush now and let me finish telling what little bit of action followed.

A Roc of indeterminate origin croaked out it's hideous warning from high over the buildings of this rather crowded part of the city. For not non-obvious reasons, Gnomes are quite terrified of Rocs flying overhead and squaking  out their names. Now I knew that the Roc would never have fit in this narrow alley, but it seemed that the game would come to a standstill if Sparky didn't have some sort of action creating reaction to the sudden appearance this menace. 

He floored the vehicle, thrusting both control sticks forward. At this point in the dream I stopped playing and began living the part. The motors whined to life and the submarine launched itself out of the alley, in reverse. The motion was so unexpected that I fell forward and the controls slipped out of my hands and fell down onto the floor. The fall caused a bump that momentarily stopped one of the motors, causing the contraption to make a sharp right turn not going in the correct direction, of course, on a oneway street. Other cars honked and swerved to get out of the way. 

The road went down hill towards the shore of the local bay. I scrambled for the controller, but the bouncing caused me to miss it, knocking it, instead, off the ribbon cable! 

I managed to get myself upright and to get the pair of submarine propellors turning. I reversed thrust and that slowed the vehicle down, some. By varying the torque on the submarine's engines I was able to veer a little to the left or right while driving the wrong way though traffic and the signals. For good or I'll, the Roc had spotted me and was flying low over the buildings waiting for a clear shot at me. His presence had scared many of the drivers of open carriage autos off the road all ready, so my path was mostly clear to the bay. 

With a much smaller bump than I expected I drove off the road that ran along the shore and heard the rocky causeway grind away the electric carriage, flinging the sub into the shallow water. I was still driving backwards, with one eye out for the Roc.

The Roc was banking over the cities edge and coming around for another pass at me.

"All hands, dive! Dive! Dive! Dive!"

There was no one else aboard. And as I struggled to empty the buoyancy tanks, I realized that I hadn't installed the dome for the cockpit, yet.

"All hands, prepare for emergency surface!"

Frantic now, I looked at where I was headed, set the motors to full reverse and barely managed to roll the sub over just in time to avoid being plucked out of it by the Roc.

I slewed the craft around just in time to miss a bridge abutment. "All stop!" shouted to my non- existent crew. I put the engines in full forward and brought the craft to a stop under the brick and concrete supports that lifted it up away from the shore to arch gracefully to the far side of the bay. I could hear the Roc high over the bridge squaking out it's frustration. 

I also thought the moldy algae smell was a little overpowering for a game.

Road Trip, Threesome? Shopping with T-Rex, Photographing Soccer Playing Moms

       A and I were trying to convince our wives to join us on a road trip. The reason it took some convincing was that we were going in a large hovercraft of our own design and construction. It looked like a steam turbine powered convertable. The skirt was about 3 feet high and the thing was larger than Cecil (my former beige plymouth satellite). The skirt was black, but the body panels were bright red. There was no chrome on the thing, the jet engines were the natural color of the metal parts that made them up, black and grey and copper colored. The whole thing ran on a combination of bio-fuel and the heater element was some sort of pre-fusion reaction, the heat of which was controlled by a rod that moved the reaction masses together or apart.
       I think I can see why they may have been reluctant to go along.

       I then dreamed that N and I were intimately involved. A tall blonde woman, who I don't recognize, entered our room and asked if she could join us. I was certainly up for that, this being my dream and all, but I did point her to N to ask her.
       "But she's asleep!"
       I looked and N wasn't asleep at all, she was quite actively involved in what we were doing. I pointed this out. The blonde just started taking her clothing off.
       Sadly that dream ended.

       I fell asleep again, this time I found myself in the luggage section of a department store, right next to the sports section. The sports bags were filling the aisle just between the two sections. "Nice segue," I thought to myself. T-Rex started meowing for attention.
       "What do you want, Kitten Boo?"
       He stretched up to his full height, front paws raised over his head. He sometimes does this when he wants to get picked up. This time he danced away and kept focused on something over my head at the same time. I looked up. There was a red and black sports bag with open mesh sides and ends.
       I stood up and touched it. "You want this?"
       T-Rex meowed and let me pick him up. He climbed up to my shoulder and with one paw on my head, used the other to try to pull the bag off the shelf.
       "OK, I got it." I pulled a box down. T-Rex looked disappointed and started going into his long cat mode again. I opened the box and pulled out a copy of the bag. T sniffed it. I pulled out the paper padding and he hopped right in. I guess he was tired of walking. I couldn't remember what I'd really come in for, so headed for the checkout counter.

       I then dreamed that I was at a party. There were many very sexy women at this party. I asked where they were from. Although they looked at me as though I should have knows, they answered that they an adult women's soccer team, and they were celebrating their mostly winning season. I had my camera, and a nice external flash mount with connections to a battery pack. Small groups of the women would ask me over to take their photos. So I figured that was what I was doing at the party.
       As the party progressed the wine flowed and the women got more provocative in their posing. It seemed to get warmer in the place, and soon I began to see piles of clothing here and there. It didn't take long for the women to start posing for even racier pictures. I'd already filled a couple of half Gig memory sticks when someone asked me join in. I found myself wishing I'd had a timed delay on the camera, though I knew I could put it in movie mode, for a half hour or so, that was really low resolution compared to what I'd been shooting.
       So I resisted them, causing them to become even more exhibitionist in the process. I got some great shots, and then, when the last memory stick was full, allowed myself to be sucked into the swirling mass of femininity.