Fevered Dream

Started with our little community theater group in Dream City, I'm in the second seat of the first row. The show is going, the audience is full of former cast members and parents, and friends, and the recently homeless, watching, and singing along. It is a run through, working rehearsal, but with a few stops as possible. It is going well. familiar music for everyone.

Take the stage with your friends, the writer and director urge, looking at me for permission. Who am I to deny these people, all these talents, their fun?

There is the digging to enlarge the stage, mounds of stored flats and frames and crates,
Lead down below the hall to the back of the ruined temple on the other side of the block.
And an exterior door.
Street Level.
A short walk to verify, Ware house of house of storage for house of horrors. (See us in Octobre)

It is one of my warehouses, holding a now defunct show's sets I cannot make myself evict.
I smile.

I walk through to a street, a band was set up,
Streets blocked, then been told their promised gig could no go forward.
This City must Move
Without them.

Pack it all up.

Interrupted Nuptials, famous vocal cords grown old, but still grasping at the youth promised of wedded bliss. Fran-San Cisco will not have them.

Take the stage, both of you,
Join the show,
Take the stage with our little community of performers, we're moving the audience into the ground floor,
Opening all the crates.
Under UV lights,
The faded sets like cartoon fireworks, all horror long faded.
We perform the Entre` Act
The choreographer adjusts.
Then a Wedding
Then Act II
Dizzying effects,
Unforgettable Nuptials
A community restoration
"Hallelujah" sung by hundreds of voices.
"We can't sing that, we don't have the rights!"
"I wouldn't worry about that," the silver-haired groom, and owner of the song smiles. "It's meant to be sung. Just, like, this."
He smiles.
"We have three more nights..."
The band, smiles.
My director and choreographer smile.
The excavators smile,
The bride and groom look at one another, all honeymoon plans fled, they take the stage.
And smile.
We finish the song with the crowd.
And smile.

I awake, music still thundering in my ears.
I smile.

Crimson Bullfinches

Several dreams last night, one where I fell again, and this time scraped up my knee as well as twisted my ankle and banged up a hip. But the worst part was that I tore holes in my favorite pair of pants.

The last dream this morning found me in my VR rig at the office, logged into Steam Trunk with my non-development character trying to replicate a teleportation game bug that had been reported, but we were unable to reproduce it with the development accounts. (Probably because they had a different teleport/instance tracking system.)

I was playing in a high mob intensity area, working on a king of the mountain scenario, one of the slightly more common reported trigger areas, when I overlapped the bounding box of an "Extra Large" wolf mob. The sanity teleport kicked in. Then all the teleportation gizmos in my inventory, one after another, began to fire. I was suddenly at the bottom of the hill, then on the edge of some violet and blue cliffs, about seventy clicks away (one of my "vacation" teleports had fired.) Then to a sandy beach, then to a portrait mobile device view of the minimalist map (low bandwidth, icon based for mobile devices) then several others, including the holding area for one of the more popular team sport gauntlet arenas. When I appeared there, I was also in my Crimson Bullfinch uniform, so at least the uniform widget part of that teleport charm was working along with the teleport. The uniform was a sort of padded striped looking armor with a catching mitt on one manipulator and a ranged thrower on the other. I also had the wide angle /medium range helmet. I could see the top down gauntlet overlay showing a match in progress. I noted that both teams were advancing off center from each other in a four by four square, and had passed one another, but just before the match turned into a straight race the cowboy hats at the top of the leftmost square snared the top four of the opposing team and then their strikers opened up, knocking the other team's cargo tokens willy-nilly across the narrow field of play. A sneaky maneuver well executed. As I blinked away from that location I got a message from another player complimenting me on the outfit, and asking what color it was. The last couple of teleport gizmos fired and I was left sitting on the top of a stepped pyramid overlooking a jungle. I made a note that the text communication overlay needed to be improved in the VR interface.

Before debriefing with the debug team I searched back through the messages to respond to the player who asked about my gear. I explained that it was my "Gauntlet" scout/striker uniform, and the team colors were dusky maroon with black pinstripes.

Then I went back to the VR to try to figure out, with the bug fix team, where the heck I ended up, and how the bug had fired not only the usual teleport gizmos I had in my inventory, but even the unopened charms in my mystery loot trunk. The Mystery loot charms weren't even supposed to be generated until they were opened. I looked in the "Mysteries Trunk." All of the items were still there, and all indicated that they were still unopened.

The detail on the "Gauntlet" map was amazing. Also, I seemed to know that Gauntlet Matches were played in teams of Two, Four, Eight, Twelve or Sixteen. The Crimson Bullfinches fielded all of the team sizes. In the top down map, each player was indicated by a top down view of their headgear with their number below it and their cargo token in the center (if it hadn't been displaced yet.) Little icons next to them showed what type of manipulator they had and if your range and sensitivity were enough, you could see active charms by zooming in. The Crimson Bullfinches B-Team was one of the open teams used for pickup games, their uniforms were white with maroon pinstripes. Don't know why my brain thought it was important that I knew that.

Back to Work

I was called back in to work, but only for the purpose of collecting up the toys that had accumulated around my old desk. It was full of dozens of brightly colored thirty-millimeter plastic robots and toy dinosaurs. I explained, as best I could, that the toys weren't mine, as I had been gone almost three years. Everyone insisted that they'd been there since before I retired, though. I took the boxes they gave me, and started packing them up. Lots of people stopped by to chat, so progress was quite slow. Also, every time I went back after filling a box, there seemed to be more of the little toys, even where I had just picked them up.

After a couple of hours, I had about twenty shirt boxes full of plastic toys. I made my former co-workers take my phone number and email address, so that when the actual owner of the toys showed up, they could contact me for their return. As I was packing the boxes into my shopping bags, I was thinking there might be a game here somewhere. My former boss insisted that I fill out a time sheet so I could get paid for the day. I didn't think that was fair to pay me for a whole day just for two hours of packing up someone's toys. She suggested I could hang around and answer questions for people who came into the department. I tried pointing out that any answers I had were based on very outdated information. She insisted it wouldn't be a problem, and folks started showing up for tech help on their tablets and phones. Turns out, my boss was right. I did know enough to be helpful.

When the drop in hours were done, I turned back to see that the help desk was covered in more little plastic toy soldiers and insects this time.

I think I'd been set up.

Time Transit Tech Support

I had gone back to work, and after a three day training marathon, I started my first day of tech support for "Time Transit" a company which was using a new technology to see into the past, and occasionally, when conditions were applicable, into the future. Most of the first tier calls were of a pair of issues; username and password problems, or browser not looking forward problems. I could see that I would be regularly explaining to people that while looking into the past was going to be pretty accurate (under most circumstances) it wouldn't be possible to always move into the future, particularly if knowledge of the future would likely change the outcome of current events and decisions. Oddly, this sometimes meant that a person in location "A" would not be able to see the future of location "A" while a person in location "B" who was unconnected to the events of location "A" might be able to see some, or even all of what was to happen there. This, of course, led to a somewhat rare third type of call. Something is wrong with my time viewer, can you look into the past and zoom into the future of my current location.

That trick rarely worked.

I was working from a VR rig in the isolation suite (a sort of home away from home that was supposed to keep our own effects on the future to a minimum) when I got a call of the third type. I managed to make the connection to the person's time viewer, and was able to see their past altercation with a woman, who I assumed was their girlfriend. Silly argument, really, and the gentleman was very obviously in the wrong. Suddenly, I heard a sound in my front room. It was the caller, and he threw a gun into my small bedroom and then ran out, disconnecting the call. He shouldn't have even been able to get into the isolation suite. I reconnected, but he just laughed and told me to sit tight, the police were on the way. I took off the VR rig, and noticed that my bedroom now looked like the scene I had just witnessed, and there was the body of the woman lying along side the bed, obviously dead. How had I not noticed the smell before now? I set my rig to look into the past, and there was someone, looking a lot like me, now arguing with the woman, who was blaming the "not me" for something that hadn't happened yet. I checked to make sure my recordings were uploaded to the company, and then to my own cloud backup, even though that was technically a violation of my TOS with the company. I had the feeling things were about to get very weird. It seems my call had come from the past, I'm not sure how that was even possible, but I knew, despite the visual similarity, that the perpetrator wasn't me, as I wasn't even working for the company a week ago. I called the police to report someone dead in my Isolation Suite while using the internal communications software to notify my supervisor.

Punch'im in the Tan!

The dream started out depressingly normal, working in cubeland again, answering the phone for some sort of help desk application help line. Suddenly one of my coworkers decided to challenge the statement of another that he had a bald spot starting on the back of his head "like him" (said while pointing over the cube wall at me.

Balding guy and the rest of his friends headed over to the photo copier, so they could hold him upside down on top of the copier.

"Don't you people have phones?" asked one of the cube-women as they struggled with their load at the copier.

Suddenly they were all shouting, so loud it woke me up "Punch'im, in the tan."

I still have no idea what that means.

Fever Dreams with Robots and...

The fever dream started like any other dream, a nice normal seeming classroom of ten year olds taking my "Robotic Programming" class. I was working a two hour a day shift at a private elementary school, teaching the very fun class with robots and then supervising the playground in the afterschool hour while waiting for parents to come get their students. All in all a very good gig. It was paying the bills while I used my pension to make board games. It was one of those classes where I had as many parents in the room helping as I had kids.

One afternoon, as the classroom began to empty out, the Principal arrived to tell me that they were cutting the class. I pointed to the parents still straightening up the room and kids still excitedly reviewing what they'd accomplished. I didn't understand the decision. She reassured me it didn't have anything to do with my teaching or my class, it was that the board had decided to purchase a new turnkey curriculum and my course couldn't be fit into the new system. She handed me an envelope with my current pay and two weeks extra. I said thank you, but pointed out that I had a contract for the full school year that would have to be bought out. "Unless we can find you another position, which we're trying to do."

I was still mighty unhappy about the situation, but resolved to deal with it another day. I stuffed my anger down and went back to helping clear out my classroom. One of the moms was a labor attorney, she handed me her business card, "just in case you decide you need me." I thanked her and went out into the playground to fulfill my after school supervision. Kids eventually got picked up. Several of the other teachers had stayed behind and we all went into the school, having to duck between the movers who were packing up everyone's classroom in neatly labeled boxes, even taking apart the school's furniture. We watched in disbelief as box after box with our class names on them went out of the building to be loaded up on big trucks. The Principal arrived to let us know that the board had agreed to let us teachers go through the materials from our classrooms to keep what was ours and any thing else they weren't using before it was all sold at auction. A couple of my colleagues were shouting and upset that the movers were packing up their private stuff, including one who's purse and car keys (thus her way home) had already been packed. We managed to intercept the box from her room before it got put on the truck and rescued her personal belongings. I went to my room and grabbed my hat and coat as well as my computer bag, figuring I had the time to go get anything else later.

Saddened by the state of things, I asked why the Board hadn't retrained their current staff, and she started to tell me that there was no robotics... I cut her off, and asked about all of the basic education teachers, some who'd been at the school for decades, weren't re-trained.

"That doesn't concern you."

I put on my coat and hat and stepped out into the stormy afternoon. The weather had changed to match my mood, dark threatening clouds, hints of thunder in the distance, the thick smell of pent up rain. I walked out into the public park.

A row of Thundermen appeared and gathered in front of me, grey fedoras, beige trench-coats, black shoes with wide white spats, immaculately tied ties over white shirts. They stopped my progress. They lined up behind the leader, and a row of apparently meaningful gestures began to form behind him. While I couldn't make out what they were trying to signal I mimicked the gestures as best I could. My Beige trench-coat and fedora (green instead of grey) seemed to confuse them a bit. Finally, after exchanging some pleasantries, and commenting on the delightful lightning and thunder that had begun in the sky behind the school, the leader of the thundermen told me I could be locked in the bathroom until the storm passed, or I could re-enter the school through J-3. I had no desire to be locked in the public restrooms, so entered the classroom, which was still having its desks assembled, oddly, in the desks that were already put together, there were students, or some sort of simulacra of students already seated and working on their lessons. I had a very uneasy feeling, the teacher looked up from her planner and I apologized for the interruption, moving through the room into the schools central hallway. There I ran across the Principal who was beaming at how efficient and trouble free it was all going to be. I started to worry about what was going to happen to all of our students. Were they being replaced, too?

I made my way through the faculty room, and out onto the little patio that faced the open hillside behind the school. Lightning filled the sky, thunder rolled across the valley and shook the windows of the school, I could hear them rattling all down the length of the building. I looked out to see the fluffy pink bunnies and leaping unicorns lightning struck and suddenly come to life. The plastic cavorting turned into the real thing, accompanied by a tinkling and high pitched whistling music, they danced under the darkening sky until they seemed as one, to notice me watching. They lined up facing me, much in the same way as the lightning men. I started to make the same gestures and then stopped myself, speaking directly to the head unicorn instead.

She blinked. Obviously not expecting me to actually try to interact with them. At first she seemed to think I was a Thunder man, and wanted to run me through, but I somehow managed, by taking my hat off and bowing, I think, to convince her that I was just a former teacher who'd been replaced. This saddened her and she raced away, leaving me to watch her fluffy bunny and unicorn minions cavort to unearthly music. Eventually she returned, accompanied by a large pink and white dragon. The dragon had to be as big as the school she surveyed from end to end with a single sweep of her long neck. She settled over the hill and curled around her bunnies and unicorns, shielding them with one giant wing. She began to shoot the unicorn who'd spoken with me, jolt after jolt of pink lightning.

"Stop" I shouted. "She hasn't done anything wrong!"

"You live, Thunder man, that is not to be tolerated, I will get to you in a moment."

I don't know where the courage to do so came from but I stepped in front of the unicorn, letting my wet trench coat drag the lightning to the ground. I felt the tingle on my feet, but though painful, it wasn't in any way debilitating.

"If you kill her, how will she learn and become an even better leader for you?"

The dragon stopped mid breath. Her great head lowered down to my own, her eyes, as large as myself, took turns looking at me. I felt like I'd been put in a giant MRI or CAT scan machine.

"You are not a Thunder man."

"Thanks, I think."

With that she picked me up and flung me high in the air over the hill and above the clouds. I don't know how every bone in my body wasn't broken by ahd acceleration. I found myself cresting the top of my arc in the clear sky overlooking a vast ocean and a road, suspended in the air. There were small figures, moving, single file along the road as I flashed overhead. A rope was tossed to me and I managed to grab it as I dipped below the road. I crammed my hat on my head, and held on with both hands as the rope curved my fall into a pendulum swing just below the roadway. I pumped and at the crest of the next swing back, managed to grab the hands that were being offered down below the road edge. The large scaled arm pulled be up past the road and let me down on my feet.

It was an assortment of characters, I think from my own gaming past. The large spear toting Lizard Man, a pair of spindly hobbits in all black kit, and an elf of surprising beauty with two longswords on his (her?) hips. The only one I didn't recognize was a nearly topless scaled woman with short curled horns and long nails. Like the Lizard Man, she had a long tail, whip-like rather than trunk-like. They greeted me and one of the hobbits asked if I was a Thunder Man. The Lizard and Demon Girl looked like they were ready to throw me back off the skyway.

"No" was all I could manage to croak. I checked my bag, somehow it hadn't dumped anything. I took off my hat and bowed, that seemed to convince them. I surmised at that point that the hat was part of a thunder man, so they couldn't do that.

"Where are we going?"

"To the other end of the road!" chimed in the hobbit twins, getting disgruntled looks from their companions.

The elf spoke, explaining that they were on a quest and had traveled on the skyway for the better part of two days. They believed they were much closer to their destination than their beginning, which was, though civilization, nothing the matched what I knew. Plus I only had a muffin and a half bottle of water in my back, so didn't fancy going that way until I could replenish my supplies. The Hobbits were the only two in favor of letting me travel with them, but somehow they managed to convince the demon girl after the two women had a hurried conversation out of earshot of the rest of the group. They resumed travelling, single file, except for the hobbits who trotted ahead of the group hand in hand.

"They are a cute couple," I volunteered, trying to make conversation.

"They're twins." The Lizard man grunted, shouldered his spear and leaned forward to pull away from me. The elf had dropped back far behind us and only the demon girl stayed close enough to converse with until we met the end of the road.

I had to explain that I wasn't flying but falling, as I'd been thrown by the pink and white dragon. The hobbits looked at the elf and said "your prayer must have worked!"

"I doubt that." The Elf had barely spoken to me the whole trip, he seemed to have something against me from the very start, but never revealed what he was thinking or feeling.

It had been much easier to befriend the Lizard man, I taught him tic-tac-toe, and despite there not actually being toes in the game, he was quite taken by it.

The Hobbits seemed to love everyone equally, and the Demon Girl, seemed to be practicing sultry on the Elf, and not succeeding, ignoring the Lizard Man, who seemed all too interested. I had the impression that there was some history there best left lie. She would at least converse with me, explaining her own world and listening intently to tales of my own "crushingly boring" world, which the hobbits seemed to enjoy.

We sat at the end of the road, obviously not what any of us were expecting. I noticed that there was a large blue square with writing in it, but I couldn't make it out from where we were.

Soon I found myself being lowered on the end of the rope. "Press to Call" was what the writing said. I asked them to pull me up and we looked around, but didn't find a button like it in the covered bridge area, at least, not on the side we were on. One of the hobbits took the rope and tied it around her waist. The Lizard man tossed her over to the other side. She landed with a giggle, and found the button, but it had been smashed in and wasn't working. They hauled her back over, and I thought of an idea.

The rope wasn't long enough for me to swing over to the skyway support column, though. I then thought of another idea. We filled up my water bottle and unraveled the knitted border of my sweater to lower it towards the button, again not long enough, until they lowered me on the rope. The bottle landed on the four foot square button, and the elevator shot towards me. the team started pulling me up, but I still slammed into the platform. The bottle rolled off the button and the elevator slowed to a stop and began to fall. I managed to recover enough to pull the bottle back up and roll over to the button. Whoosh, the elevator slowed and then accelerated skyward.

It took a few tests to figure out how to raise and lower the platform smoothly enough not to launch me into the ceiling, or more importantly to land at less than terminal velocity. Apparently whatever controls were supposed to be in operation were no longer working. I drove the platform up to the team and they let me fly them back to the ground. The elf looked greener than usual after the trip down, but the hobbits wanted to stay and see how fast they could make the elevator go back up. As we left One of the hobbits had put a rock on the button I turned in time to see the elevator platform crash through the roof of the bridge structure at the top of the skyway, and then come fluttering, obviously no longer under control back to the ground. We all ran out of the range of the falling debris. When the Elf started to chastise the hobbits they just pointed at each other.

Somehow they convinced me to come with them rather than build a hundred foot ladder to climb back to the roadway. (Even though I was pretty sure the roadway didn't lead back to where I needed to go, I felt it was at least closer to home.) There was a short barrage of other travel stuff. Something to do with a big blue glowy thing, and a pretty wild celebration party that ended with an acrobatic naked tangled celebration between the Demon Girl, Hobbit Girl and myself. The team asked the pink dragon to send me home. Good thing I hadn't tried going back by the skyway.

There was a knock on the door. The police were looking for me, as I had gone missing. I explained that I had been playing a video game the whole time, and was right here. They looked dubious. I noticed the figures on the screen were the Lizard Man, Demon Girl, Elf and Hobbit Twins with a Long Coated stranger in a Green flat brimmed hat. They were waving good-bye as the stranger headed into a pink and white portal and the rest of the team, escorting a wagon with a strange blue glow coming from under a tarp, headed into town, they turned and waved, not at the portal, but at the screen. I was at my computer, but dressed in the clothing I'd been wearing since my "disappearance" including an adventure's worth of wear and tear. Not to mention a bag of gold coins and semi-precious stones that I might have some difficulty explaining.

Pointless, Mean Work.

I was working in cubeville, doing endless pointless, uninspiring and essentially mean work on the computer. (Designing stuff that was essentially mean to people.) I was retired from one job and had taken this job to refill my savings after making a rather impulsive purchase.

The manager of my part of the cube farm was even more uninspiring and mean, and I finally decided that I had enough. I went on a rant about the only way to keep us doing uninspiring, pointless and mean work was to pay us well and treat us well. And I don't have a complaint about how well we're paid.

The company boss came over and gave me the perfect bound quarter page sized booklet about how to "get along" the "Company Way." I pointed out that it was available on the company web site in PDF format, and I had read it. It was 64 quarter-pages about how to go along and get along with your bosses, and it was pointless and uninspired. I then took the book, slid the spine half off the table hold it firmly in place with one hand I whacked it the other, breaking the glued spine. I then tore it in half and gave it to my boss, who, flustered, wandered off in a huff. My co-workers just sort of kept their heads down and looked away while I went back to my work, which now consisted of labeling some of my assignments as "pointless," or, "Paint it whatever color you want, it doesn't really matter." And then I selected every part of the drawing and made it Primer colored.

At this point I figured they would either fire me or ignore me, but I figured they certainly wouldn't bother to try being less mean or uninteresting.

Missed the Boat, Movie Extra Extra

I dreamed I was wrapped up for winter, even though it was only a mildly chilly day, because I was going on a cruise to Alaska. Unfortunately, the traffic was stopped and my shuttle missed the sailing time by about 15 minutes. I managed to get to the ticketing office, and they switched my boarding to LA, but told me I had to get there on my own. I made my way over to the train station where they looked at me like I was crazy, but the ticketing agent just smiled and asked if I'd forgotten my sunglasses. I looked at her questioningly, and she laughed and said I looked like a spy from "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego" and that made me chuckle.

In the second dream of the morning I was an extra in a zombie movie, and at the same time performing with some friends in an art film using some of the other extras as their main performers. I was in a torn up tuxedo and my hands were made up so I could tear off bits of my own "flesh" and chew on them. It worked so well that the director of the movie I was an extra in decided to promote me to a "named" zombie and featured me in a couple of different scenes. This sort of threw off the filming of the other film a bit, but the directors' production assistants managed to work out a compromise, and at one point I was being whisked away in a cart with a makeup artist and a costumer going at me while I sat in the back. In the second movie there was a weird romantic tangle and I had a set of cheat cards with the character faces and names of my partners, because there was not going to be any other way to recognize them under all the makeup. Those cards were in plastic badge holders and kept popping out of my shirt. We finally got the idea to rubber band them together and safety pin them to my t-shirt.

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.)

Elementary Independence Day Pageant

I had loaded six POE switches onto the back deck of my Little Red car and headed out to an elementary school to replace some of the older switches. (Putting in some new wireless and expanding the phone system as well.) When I got to the school, there was traffic control. I was directed away from the back parking lot, then told I had to wait until they had a white car and a blue car to go with me. They were having their Independence Day pageant, and wanted me to drive in their parade, because there was a shortage of red cars. I asked where the non red white and blue cars were parking, and the person indicated they were using the lot across the street. I didn't really want to lug six switches all the way across the street so decided to play along.

As I was waiting, two lines of moms went by, each in white with red stars halter tops,  blue and white striped shorts, and cork-bottomed platform clogs like the '70s. There were close to 150 of them, all with slender, nicely curved figures. Waiting suddenly did't seem like that bad of an idea. I wondered how they'd found so many good looking moms, but then remembered there were over 600 families at the school, so there were lots to pick from. There were a half dozen dads thrown in, they were in white shirts, red and blue suspenders and similar blue and white striped shorts. The dads weren't in platforms, but red and white boating shoes with one red sock and one blue sock. The men weren't uniformly attractive like the women.

We followed the parade into the main parking lot and were directed to park in our red, white, and blue order. I got out and opened up the hatch so I could carry in my switches. When I turned to head into the school, I noticed the people in costume were walking along a makeshift runway, constructed of boards and chairs, people had to step from chair to chair to make their way to the stage. I felt sorry for the women in their platform clogs, but it was quite the bouncy and shimmying spectacle. I waited for the procession to go into the school quad and then followed on with half my load of switches.

As I passed by the quad I noticed the principal trying to convince an older woman in a bright green and pink sari to move out of the front row - so that she could have people dressed in red white and blue sit there. I just shook my head, knowing that might not end well.

I swapped out the switches and decided to pop into the quad to see more of the patriotic display, the moms were waiving sparklers or pom-poms, dancing four to five on raised platforms around the quad. The principal was speaking on the center stage, and then a Sousa March started playing and the principal was marching through a number that culminated with her being lifted up by the six dads while simultaneously changing into a liberty hat and sparkling torch.

When I got back to the office I was telling J about the display with the older women and she mentioned that the principal and performers there were way out of our class, so likely wouldn't even have a second thought about asking grandma to move.

Hello Nurse, Recording Job

I was sitting in a hospital bed (for flea bites, pretty sure) when a nurse came into the room. She was slender with little curve, but with shiny black short hair and bright red lipstick as well as full eye makeup.  She greeted me, and then threw a tennis ball at my head as hard as she could. The throw was wide, and because I'd propped myself up in a corner, the ball bounced right back to her, and hit her square in the zipper of her very tight white pants. I remember thinking that the "O" she made with her bright red lips was actually quite sexy. I refrained from asking if I could kiss it to make it better, but I could tell she knew I was thinking it.

Earlier, I had been asked to get six copies of a recording made, but was having trouble meeting the time deadline, so the person who needed the copies brought me six recorders which I connected together in a chain and then started recording simultaneously on them, thus reducing the time to make the copies to three hours, rather then 18 hours. My client indicated that the cost was worth it to make his deadline, and told me to keep the recorders when I was done. I wasn't convinced that I needed seven Flash/DVD recorders, but figured I could get something for them used. On the other hand, I liked the speed at which they allowed me to burn copies, and the stack of six was actually cheaper than a multi-bay burner, by several hundred dollars, in fact. (A burner, of course, would have let me make the copies in less than thirty minutes, but the client wasn't willing to buy something that expensive.) While the recordings were going on; in the back of my car, I started planning out how to build a rack for them so they wouldn't take up the whole deck space.

Stage

For some reason, the sound system controls were in the podium, on the stage. I presume the assumption was that the setup would be done once, and then no one would have to monitor the audio setup. That was probably true, if there was only one speaker.

I had to run the sound for a series of six speakers, however, and that meant I had to keep going out on stage to adjust the sound for each new person. I wondered why no one had invented an expert system to take over the sound board operator's job, it seemed like a perfect place for automation. After the speakers were done, there was a student group coming in to use the space. I stayed to help clear the stage in preparation for that event.

Unfortunately, one of the props from the previous presentation was a large safe. The people who'd placed the safe (with a forklift) were long gone. We tried lifting the safe with a half dozen burly men, but that wasn't particularly successful. I got the idea to use a couple of four by fours to use as levers to lift the safe and pivot it on one point at a time to move it upstage behind the curtain line so it was out of the way. A couple of the engineering students smacked their heads, wondering why they hadn't thought of that.

The students invited me to stay at their party, and I did for a bit, helping line up the comfy chairs for their presenters and then adjusting the sound for their music. As the crowd filed in, I noticed there were a lot of very affectionate couples, and that got me to missing J, so I excused myself and headed home.

On the way off the stage, I remembered the title of the dream from last week (which I told the folks at Pizza Night, then promptly forgot it.) "Destiny Dog."

Not Safe For Work

Dreamed I was going back to work at one of my old job sites. There was a big difference, however, and it involved a large number of people with an extraordinary amount of skin showing. The were engaged in very non-work like activities. It turns out I was supposed to be fixing the script, acting coach, and doubling up on lights and sound as the budget had been cut and the producer was unable to afford a full crew.

The director was an old classmate of mine who had a history of film experience, but on the other side of the camera, showing her then extraordinary skin and flexible talents. I would have to say that, in this dream, neither of us had aged well since then.

We had a very strict schedule to keep, as we only had the rooms for a few hours and had to be out and completely cleaned up before sunrise. The pressure made this all a lot less fun than the theme would otherwise indicate.

On Location: Forested Plains

I was working on a movie, helping move set pieces and vehicles around. At one point the director asked several of us to step in as extras, as were were on location in a remote area, and he didn't want to wait for people to be bused in from several hundred miles away.

We shot a fairly large number of scenes, and the writer and director liked what they saw and wrote even more for us to do, telling us it might all end up on the cutting room floor, but since we were here...

Several days later, we were wrangling the vehicles and animals onto large rail cars to be taken back to the border, where we would load them on trucks for a short hop to the next set of trains. It was getting cold and everyone was looking forward to getting back to California. I wondered how I had gone from driving vehicles to leading cows and horses, and a bear around.

Time jumped ahead, and we were in a San Diego theater for the premier party, when we arrived, there were several dozen reporters gathered around the cast and director. S, G and I were about to go by when we were spotted and dragged into the cast photos. At first I wondered why, but then saw that the image that they were using to promote the film was from one of our location shots. There S and I were, me with an ax over my shoulder, offering a quilted jacket with the other hand, S with a chain saw and G sitting on a log opening up a  steaming steel thermos, the rest of the cast huddled around a small fire looking up at us. The blue light of the Canadian dawn cast very dramatic light across our features. The funny part of this was, I knew this was an non-acting production shot, we were actually in camp trying to get our cast warmed up on a very cold morning.

When they showed the movie, that scene was part of a very touching montage (as they had no actual audio to go with the story) and it blended into the film so nicely that we were the only ones who knew that it hadn't been shot for the film. The way the film was edited, they had to have used nearly every scene they shot with our hastily written dialogue and our ad-libs as well. When it was done, there were a ton of questions from the director; about whether or not there would be a follow up to tell the story of the three woodsmen.

It was not what I was expecting. The director turned to us and asked (in front of the reporters) if we might be up for a prequel.

I looked at S and G, then back at the main cast, who were all nodding and saying things like "go for it!"

One of the reporters, a little grey-haired woman, said "please, it would be so nice to see a film with people our ages, no offence to you youngsters." She smiled over at the very twenty something main cast of our film.

It was a little weird that we were getting more press activity than the main cast, and I was thinking that wasn't really a good sign for the film.

When they unveiled the giant movie poster. Our three pictures had been added to the cast's photos along the bottom of the image. The producer and a couple of lawyers rounded us up after the photo session at the end of the night and told us they were going to offer us a slightly improved contract, as we'd taken on a slightly larger role in the film after it was all said and done. The money was nice, it was a few thousand dollars each. The offer of a new contract with us in starring roles was the real surprise.

I really didn't want to wake up from this dream.

Dreamlands Zigzag

Particularly convoluted would be two words to describe this morning's dream. Started in the Hill House, reconstruction appears, for now, to be finished. The house is much smaller than it was, though it is still three stories tall. It also appears to be far less haunted, and the carriage house is much more modern, with electric lights and charging stations for vehicles as well as a three hundred gallon gasoline tank. (Elevated and behind a bunker.) The various ghosts and other haunts seem of a much milder variety than in previous years.

I rolled out the electric car, pushing it out of the carriage house rather than driving it. The vehicle had very narrow tires, and a steering bar, or tiller, that thrust out from under the nose of the vehicle. I folded the tiller up and disengaged it before climbing up into the driver's seat, releasing the hand brake, and then rolling down the hill, topping off the high-speed capacitors all the way to the bottom of the hill. I could see the gauge that showed the capacitors charging and then discharging as I accelerated up the little ramp that took me onto the elevated "Overway" that crossed most of the valley before breaking into a series of little off ramps all over the Dream City. I took the off ramp to work.

There I found that my office had been moved back to the old District Offices. I had a box of my few personal possessions and arrived at my old desk. I opened the drawers and discovered that I had left some things behind eleven years ago when I moved to the new offices. We'd only been allowed to put up two personal items in the new offices, as any more would break the illusion of "efficient conformity" that was one of the goals of the new administration.

As I opened the various drawers I found several articles of clothing that I had long forgotten. One of the denim shirts and a pair of genes were turned inside out, and had alterations marked in chalk. The alterations would have turned the the items into something much smaller, and cut in such a way as to flatter a feminine form. I wondered if they would fit my new girlfriend, so folded them neatly on top of the desk to take home. I also found about a half dozen toys I'd somehow collected over the years and immediately set them out on the desk and nearby book case, as there would certainly be plenty of room for them now. I did unbox my inbox, and sorted through the mail. All advertisements, only a couple of which even pertained to my new job. I tossed them into the shredder, then bagged the shreddings to take home to the composter/pelletizer. I wondered how many more mailing lists I'd have to be on if I'd had the Hill House fully restored to its former size. (Apparently the house was powered by a combination of solar and a pellet burning furnace. There was a gasoline generator for emergencies, but it was only used once a month or so to power up party night, and to make sure it stayed in working condition.)

At the end of my re-decorating, I headed out of town and up the ramp out of the dreamlands.

I was then visiting my parent's house. Mom and Dad had been clearing out the garage and had come across a number of papers in some foreign language. I agreed to look them over, figuring that they were likely my sister's old homework, as she is the polylingual one of us. The pages, however were not homework. They looked like some sort of immigration forms, or applications and they seemed to be filled out in Latin rather than German.

The handwriting was unfamiliar, and wildly different. Some of the newer forms had even been typed onto directly, I could feel the texture of the letter strikes on the back of the form. I sat down on the end of the couch best lit by the light from the sliding glass window.I tried to make out the words, "Hodi Doxi" were the only things I could make out, as they were in a box much larger than the rest of the text, when the light failed, becoming almost pitch black. A large raven flew into the sliding glass door with a thump, Then cawed and came in through the cat door. That made me wonder why the door had been unsealed. Mom and Dad haven't had cats in several years now, and Mom is terrified of birds, so certainly wouldn't have opened up the door for the raven.

At that moment I realized there'd been a big black raven in last night's dream as well. That, of course tipped off that I was dreaming and I struggled awake.

The Latin looks like it could be today(currently) "hodi" is technically an adverb (just looked it up, it can also be an adjective) but I didn't see a verb. Doxi  is less certain as it is not a form I have ever seen. There is a "doxa/ae" so perhaps: Decoration (Adornment/Glory?) The root is also used for "doxologia" or a hymn. However, it is more likely just random words my brain tried to fit on the page. Glory Today, perhaps.

Bring Your Cats to Work Day

I dreamed I was returning to work (which I am) and it was "Bring Your Cat to Work" day. Fawn Lynn was the only one who wanted to go in with me. She sat quietly on the passenger seat and let me carry her into the building. She found a nice comfortable spot on my lumbar pillow and settled in on my desk.

I met my new boss, who seemed like a nice fellow. I then discovered that N had started to work for the District as well. She had brought Ginger Muffin in. Ginger and Fawn seemed to recognize one another and were exchanging head-bonks and face washings. N walked away without speaking to me at all.

Ghost Adjuster

Dream City, some nights are as long as four nights. It had been days since I'd been to the office, the boss was probably angry. She needed to fuss like a cat needs cream. Sure it tastes good, but then it all turns to....

Where is that music coming from? Tempo change, sudden tonal drop, it's happening. Time to go to work.

I noted my surroundings, and then, bamf! I was two blocks closer to the trouble, the music changed as I walked in a circle getting my next bearing.

Bamf!

I heard the crumple of car metal, the plastic tick-tac of lens screens bouncing on pavement and the screams, the lovely screams. I went to work.

I appeared in the back seat of a nearby car as it was lifted into the air. The driver and his passenger were, of course, screaming. Scrumptious.

Bamf! The three of us stood in a sidewalk cafe three blocks away. The surprised waiter didn't react when I told him to get his customers inside. I faded away, a thin tendril of smoke and then appeared behind him. "Now would be a good time." I said.

He jumped, and the emotion was delicious.

Bamf!

Bamf!

Bamf!

There was now a beat up fellow in a spider man costume and the levitating villain above him was monologuing and adjusting his stubby winged hovercraft. It appeared to have been damaged in the fight and wobbled unsteadily. A thin trail of smoke trickled into the nearby air, pooling like blood in water. He wasn't my concern, as he didn't have a policy with us.

He spotted me, though and stopped. "What are you..."

"Public Damage Mitigation Adjuster. Just doing my job."

"Well you're going to have to do it in the afterlife." He wove around to me and unleashed a fusillade of tiny fleshettes. The metal razors lashed their way through my coat and hat.

"I really liked that hat."

"You're dead!" The villain screeched at me.

"Yes, that's generally the idea with a Ghost Adjuster."

I walked over to him and reached into his sputtering hover-board, then yanked on a bunch of wires and cables I found inside. They fell to the ground with two distinct thumps, one hard and ringing, the other flapping and wet.

"I thought you weren't supposed to interfere," the Spiderman figure huffed at me.

"I really liked that coat, too, it took a long time to find a ghost trench that fit. Think of it as a paid damage claim that won't affect your premiums." I drifted down into the rubble pile, pulling out the injured and delivered them to the ambulances that were pulled up by the dozens outside the nearby cafe.

When I got back to the rubble pile, my boss was there, helping assess the damage to the building. Our Spider Man and his villain were being loaded into separate ambulances. She glared at me. "I expect to see you in the office after this. Today!"

Her anger fueled me, reminded me why I still worked there. I resisted the urge to feed, I wanted that anger fully stoked for when we were at the office later.

I headed back to the office, there would be forms to fill out, depositions to arrange. Hurt feelings to sooth over and delicious delicious anger. I drifted through the locked front door and hung my battered hat up on a peg in the entry hall. I made my way over to my cube, returning the greetings of my co-workers, a singularly emotionless lot, as gray as the cubes they worked in. No wonder I hate coming here. My cube was empty. Seriously, no chair, no desk, no file cabinet (it was empty anyway, I figured if someone needed paperwork, they should keep it, I sure as heck didn't need it.)

My boss slammed in shortly after I arrived.

"Wondering where your desk is? Well they promoted you, over my objections...of course. You're in the West office now." She pointed to an office between her corner office and the kitchen, and sauntered towards it, not waiting for me to follow. I hung back, enjoying the hypnotic sway of her curves. I sipped her seething cup of anger and detected a taste of something else...pride, envy, affection? Interesting, unexpected.

"Nice." I wondered what the heck I got with a promotion other than an office. I wondered what I'd done to even deserve a promotion. I was rarely in the office; there was so much to do out in the field.

"I don't know why they bothered to move your desk, the only thing in it was an unopened company manual and these." There was a key ring hanging from a hook on the edge of the desk. I recognized them, they were the office keys. The front door, the file room and several file cabinet keys. I'd wondered where I'd left them.

"These were locked in the bottom of your file cabinet. I don't even want to know how." She picked the keys up and threw them at me. Instinct, I suppose, but I faded just before they hit and the keys sailed through me and out into the hall, jangled to a stop at the base of a cube.

I drank from her anger, calming her, feeding me. This was going to be a good office location, I might even come in to the office more, I thought.

"Get your ass in here tomorrow, we need to take depositions. Use your damned keys! That's how corporate knows you're here. For god's sake, get a new coat, that one looks like shit." She brushed past me on her way out, scowling, but I could feel her smile after she passed me.

I was thinking, "I might just come to work on time tomorrow." (And knew I was kidding myself.)

Use These

I dreamed I was going back to teaching in a "one to one" environment. (I had retired and was going to work for a small Reservation school, teaching part time and IT part time.) I wondered how a school district so poor was going to afford a "one to one" setting.

When I got to my classroom, I found out. There was a pile of Apple GS's sitting in the corner of the room, one for each of my fifteen student desks. I pointed out that getting monitors, keyboards and mice for them would be more expensive than replacing them wholesale, not to mention that they likely didn't have a way to network them to the school's network. The principal seemed quite shocked that there were parts "missing" from them, they had been donated as "working." I had to explain that they might be working, but that didn't mean that they would be useful.

The children arrived. I asked them if they had smart phones, all of them did. I then checked to see if they had HDMI and Bluetooth, they all did. I made the principal a new list. 15 good monitors and 15 Bluetooth keyboard/mouse setups one wireless access point. The students already had their one to one devices I just needed to make them usable in the classroom. The kids were very interested in the pile of Apple computers, so I made them the promise that if they were caught up with their work in class, we would work on making them work again. Oddly, that seemed to excite them. The principal wanted to know how those little things could possible be as good as the big computers he'd found for us. I explained that our students were carrying, in their pockets, more computing power than it took to send us to the moon.

"We never went to the moon!" the principal stated. "Use these." The principal then started directing the students to put one of the huge computers on their little desks. I watched in horror as the principal struggled to figure out how to make the things work. It appears that they didn't come with power cords, either.

I realized I had a long year ahead of me.

Movie Making

I dreamed that I was working with a film company on an erotic romantic comedy. The comedy took place at a school, in fact, my old middle school. The projectors and white boards had been removed and we'd reinstalled the old green boards that I remembered from my own childhood. The production company had wanted all wooden desks, but I had pointed out that not only would that be over our budget, but it wouldn't actually match the chromed steal desks with laminated tops that we'd actually used as students. The desks with the unmanageable wire book management trays. The ones where large books got tangled, and small ones always seemed to spill out and end up under foot. The ones where the wires got bent into a hook that was just the right height to catch and untie shoelaces, or pop open three ring binders.

It was the middle of summer and the condemned school was empty except for the film crew, most of whom, because there was no air conditioning, and the extra lights were powerfully hot, had stripped down to shorts and t-shirts for the men, and shorts and halter tops for the women. We were filming a scene between the four protagonists where they were essentially playing truth or dare in the classroom after school.

The scene was getting pretty racy and soon there would be enough nudity to get us our "R" rating, but in the process, things were going a decidedly NC-17 direction, as everyone was horsing around and the crew had started to play along with the actors behind the scenes. I commented to the director that the "Making of" documentary was going to rated "X" at the rate we were going.

We decided to take a break, and the water truck was pulled up next to the abandoned buildings and set up to spray the little planter area, which we dubbed our "Water Park". Everyone ran out and got soaked so we could take a long lunch break. One of the nearly naked actresses made sure to stay close by me, asking all sorts of questions about what the school had been like when I had gone there. Somehow it had come out that I had actually dated a teacher a few years my senior shortly after I had graduated and come back to work at the place.

I pointed out that the teacher was still quite young, and had not been there when I was a student, but she insisted on portraying it as the scandal upon which our own movie was based to anyone who would listen. By the end of the break nearly every woman had invited me back to the hotel after the shoot, because "you won't have to drive all that way in the heat," and "we have a pool, air conditioning, and a bar tab."

The nearly naked actress smiled at me as we went back to work, "you can thank me later, sweetie."