Invulnerable!
July 30th, 2005 by Adrian Sampson; no comments
I am in a touristy town with my family that has an expensive exhibit lining one street that is essentially a very long, deep swimming pool in which swim all sorts of interesting species of fish and such. This loops around both sides of the street. On the right side is the ocean, and on the left side is a bay. On the other side of the bay is a city that is like Seattle. It is a bright, sunny day, and comfortably warm.
There is a tank sunk into the ground in the middle of the street that has a whale in it. Something possesses me to leap into it and take hold of the whale. I realize then that there’s some other sort of sea animal in there, and I grab hold of it, too. I know that they need to get to the ocean quickly or they will soon die. I look around for help, and my brother suggests that I try to get into the tourist trench, which probably empties somewhere into the ocean.
I manage an amazing, soaring leap from the tank to the trench on the back of the whale while carrying the other sea animal. The perimeter of the tourist trench is not well-protected, as I had noted earlier. The two sea animals and I swim along the trench and soon find a ramp exiting from the trench at a forty-five-degree angle. It’s a reasonable assumption that it will lead to the ocean, so I hold my breath and we dive.
Somehow, I lose the whale and other sea animal and find myself in an huge, elongated, high-tech, stationary submarine. I get it moving through the ocean rather quickly and find that Kevin is on board with me. We pilot it around the bay for a while. It’s got quite a bit of power and just swims through the water.
For some reason, it becomes necessary or amusing to move forward in the craft, shut a water-tight door behind me, and flood the previous section with water (something similar happens near the end of _Cryptonomicon_, which I have just finished reading). To do this, I insert a small plastic block with copper pins protruding from one side into a panel of holes on each door. The block is a key whose function it is to open and close hatches. I do this a few times, sealing off a bit more of the submarine at a time and making my and Kevin’s living space smaller. Eventually, we are confined to a spherical bulb that forms the helm at the front of the craft. Upon flooding the last section before the helm, the bulb leaps out of the bay and flies several hundred feet into the air. We can look out of some windows in the bulb to see the city far below us.
After we have travelled down for a minute or two, and we are about to strike the ground, I realize that, however interesting it is that we are suspended temporarily in the sky inside a metal sphere, there is a very real chance that we both might die very soon. I notice that we are, fortunately, now traveling more laterally along the ground than down toward it, and we are very near to landing on a little, deserted road that will act as a runway of sorts if we happen to move just a little to the right. I decide that we ought to find our way out of the craft nonetheless, and set out to open a hatch with the pin-block-key so that Kevin and I can escape. The bulb has been spinning a little, and I have become disoriented — I accidentally open the hatch that I had previously sealed and (poetically enough) water floods in.
I panic. We might well drown before we hit the ground. Frantically, I find the hatch on the opposite side and use the pin-block-key to open it. I am relieved to find that it opens to the air rushing by the bulb as we make our crash-landing. At the very last moment, Kevin and I leap from the hatch just before the helm finishes filling with water and goes bouncing down the road. We are thrown from the bulb and barely manage to grab onto the side of a building that is studded with ventilation slots that make it an ideal climbing surface.
Kevin remarks that his cognitive functions are momentarily suspended, replaced with a feeling of confidence and immortality. I say something to the effect of “me, too” as I swing around on the side of the building. The road that served as a runway, we can now see, is slowly chugging along like a moving sidewalk, making precisely the same forlorn clanking noise as an empty escalator.
(Later that morning…)
I begin working that at a store similar to Paper Products on the second level at the Winslow Mall. I show up and volunteer in the morning and am immediately put to work.
Things go well for a while, but eventually, the customers begin to filter out and all the employees, who number forty or fifty, are asked to begin shuffling around the perimeter of the room in an endless loop. The entire store is soon given over to this effort. As we, the employees, reach the policepeople stationed strategically around the room, we are required to affix one of their miniscule green stickers to our miniscule blue bracelets.
Kris is there, in line just ahead of me. We high-five each other occasionally. My brother is there. He is photographing the situation. When he decides to leave, he can’t find his second tripod.
There is all sorts of “morale-boosting” propaganda strewn about the store. Foolishly, I begin to believe them and try to remain strong. I tell myself that, no matter how pointless this may be, _I will not quit_. As I am ducking under some hazardously low-slung elements of construction, I catch a glimpse of yet another infuriating propaganda poster, and I come to an epiphany. I stand up, walk away from the shuffling line, and yell, “I quit!”
Immediately, I remember my bosses, who are two stereotypically stodgy, old-fashioned, and intolerant old people with bad hair and big glasses. “It’s not you guys,” I hastily add. “You’re just fine.”
“It’s the atmosphere,” the woman guesses. I acknowledge this as the truth and rip off my identifying buttons. I consider taking off the jacket that they’re affixed to, but I kind of like the jacket — it’s not store issue.
Achievement
July 29th, 2005 by Adrian Sampson; no comments
I am at some sort of peaceful institution, which may be a school with an expansive, green campus. Two good friends (who are actual good friends from real life, but I’ve forgotten who — they are probably male) and I decide to take a short day trip into the city just outside of the campus. It is actually night by the time we traverse the great fields around the institution. The city is well-lit in the pitch-black night and very active for such a time of day.
My friends and I go our separate ways to have adventures of our own in the city. After wandering around for a while, I somehow discover that one of my friends has decided to break a world record by dumping and astronomical amount of glitter onto an intersection as a political protest (the protest made poetic sense in the dream). Cars driving over the glitter make odd clattering noises.
As a few hours pass, I notice that the people in the city are truly taken by the glitter stunt. They are mesmerized, and every time I see my friend he has new stories to tell about his wildly increasing fame.
I talk to a well-known musician, who seems friendly to me because I am a friend of the man responsible for the glitter stunt. After we talk for a while, he slaps me on the shoulder and asks me to play some music with him.
It is by wandering the streets more and seeing posters that I learn that the Promiscuous Vegetarians (although they are not listed as such) are playing that very night with a widely recognized indie rock band. This is very exciting but also somewhat frightening — my band has never actually recorded or played a song before. I feel somewhat unqualified because I was not the one actually responsible for the glitter thing.
Unqualified
July 27th, 2005 by Adrian Sampson; no comments
I see a phone message for me scrawled in one of my brother’s messier scripts on the spiral notebook next to the telephone downstairs. It is from Harborview Hospital, and it informs me, excitedly, that guinea pigs may now be airlifted there for emergency treatment. (This is probably related to the news story that I read yesterday about a boy who fell off his bicycle and was airlifted to Harborview. He was not wearing a helmet.) Their first patients are in, and they ask me if I would be interested in helping mend three broken legs and something else.
I remember that, in my experience, a broken limb on a cavy usually puts them into a lethal level of shock and the cavy will probably not survive twenty-four hours (true). I try to imagine injecting anesthetic and setting a bone anyway, but I realize that I am not a surgeon and would be totally unqualified for the task.
Lucidity: Weather
July 26th, 2005 by Ariana Rose Taylor-Stanley; no comments
I was with Adrian and possibly Joel at unit 14, the cohousing house of Jeff, Roberta, and Dova. I don’t remember why, but it came to me that I was dreaming. I told this to my friend(s) and said look, it’s going to snow outside. I opened the door and it was indeed snowing. I went outside and played around in it. After coming back inside, I said now it’s going to be sunny, hot. And when I opened the door after a few seconds it stopped snowing and got warm. I told them they could do it too, and that they were dreaming (not true – they were figments of my dream). Somewhere in there I saw Kris down a hallway and floated over to get him.
Later on when I was less lucid…
I was at an airport or train station and trying to get tickets or my luggage and also keep track of a baby who was my sister and a puppy. It was very difficult to hold onto both at the same time and one or both kept getting misplaced. At one point I had lost the baby entirely and I had to yell “has anyone seen a lost baby?” and someone who might have been Susan Davis told me they had put her somewhere and I had to go there to get her back.
I was at some sort of gathering that Katie Allen was also at and I asked her about Nepal.
Something about an apartment…
Disneyland
July 24th, 2005 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
So I, my family, and my grandfather are all at disneyland. We want to get to this new little subdivision, so we start walking through this cave-tunnel thing. It’s full of rocks and dripping water, and is very bright, but there are no visible electric lights. It’s just how this cave rolls, I guess. Soon, we are on all fours crawling up a steep incline in a very small space. This transforms again into an unimaginably small space, only about one foot in diamater, that we are crawling through, and almost straight up. I can barely fit through, and I am the first in the long line of Skotheims going through this tunnel, and I can’t imagine how my grandfather, who must be at least half again as wide as I, is fitting through this hole. We come to a part in the tunnel (which is now completely verticle and even smaller than before, but still well lit) where there are roots or something blocking the way. I know that I can not fit through, but I also know that there is no way that I can turn back. My sister, who is right behind me (also significantly larger than I) just tells me to squeeze through the cracks, just to go ahead and push. I do just this and, to my amazement, I manage to break through and emerge from the other end of the cave. Pushing seems to have worked, and because I was in such tight quarters and couldn’t move my head, I couldn’t really witness the miracle, only feel it.
We are now in some residential part of california with a goregous view of the water. I realize that we have climbed a long way up and are now on the top of a great cliff, at the border of rolling hills covered in neatly trimmed lawns and identicle one-story white houses. There is a crowd gathering on the lawn we emerged from, all look like tourists admiring the view. After all of us emerge, my grandfather last, I notice how odd it is that we are all so clean.
Chain
July 24th, 2005 by Ariana Rose Taylor-Stanley; no comments
A while ago, after having the dream in which Theora and Jenny and I were taking care of children, I dreamed I saw Theora at a festival in Winslow, inside Deering Music, in its old location, where Gallery Fraga is now, and told her about the first dream.
A few nights later I dreamed I saw her on the lawn outside Room E at Hyla and told her about the second dream (in which I had told her about the first dream). I admitted that it was kind of weird I had had two separate dreams about her.
There was more to the Hyla dream though. We were performing a play, which might have been Twelfth Night. Back stage there were lots of reddish tones. The details have faded but I walked outside through the audience when it was done, talked to Theora I guess (the chronology is shaky), and went up the stairs. It was night and also the first day of school. I put my stuff in a cubby that was made out of cardboard or a similarly flimsy material that had my name on it that was only temporary until we could get into the buildings with the actual cubbies in them. I checked a schedule which was on a wall to find out what my clean crew would be that year (students never actually switch clean crews).
When I woke up I had to swim through time to figure out that I’m going to be a high school senior next year. This was an incredible strange experience.
The strangest part is yet to come
July 24th, 2005 by Joel Bombardier; no comments
My brother (Evan) and I were hanging out at some houe, in a brown room. I was very tired and feeling fairly apethetic. Evan had some plans to go to Seattle, and he needed me to drive there, but we had to call home first. We took out my mom’s cell phone and called home (which I had not done for hours) Idont really remember what she said but we drove onto the boat.
We had a very strange boat ride to Seattle, but when we arrived to the city it was not Seattle but as we got off the boat we were at a huge old castle. This castle was reminicent of the magical castle of Hogwarts. It was bohemoth and very old, lots of moss and such, all made out of stone.
I befriended some people and lost my brother somehow, though it wasnt important at the time. During the duration of my time there there was some girl who was very evil and she was poisioning people, not killing them, but brainwashing them. With injections.
My Mystery Friend (MMF) and I found this all out by creeping around and spying on what was going on (the brainwashing). We were peeking around a corner when we saw a group of adults, and the girl walking around, and we intuitivly knew they were on the prowl to brainwash people. As we came to that realization they looked in our direction and began to run at us. MMF and I turned and sprinted off in the opposite direction. We ran harder than humanly possible, but the creeps behind us kept a constant distance behind us, our legs were pumping and swelling in a very rediculos fasion. We tore off into a nearby bathroom, I dove behind a wall but MMF was hunched over in the middle of the floor, he had broken both his legs with effort. The people began to rush past, and almost missed us but saw MMF in the middle of the floor, and come into the bathroom. We began to freak out in fear, kicking and yelling. One of the adults grabed MMF and held him up as another adult prepared a needle for injection (to brainwash him) he bagan screaming and crying, another adult had grabbed me. The evil girl was watching. I was thinking about how Dumbledore was letting such terrible things happen in this castle (Hogwarts, remember). As MMF was being injected, I kicked out and broke free from my captor, and bolted for the door. I fell outside, it had begun to rain and I crawled across the warm stones crying.
(oddly enough I have had the second part of this dream before (the castle/brainwashing part), however I didnt remember until I drempt it again last night)
A new computer
July 22nd, 2005 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
I don’t want to leave the impression that all I dream about is electronic equipment, my dreams just happen to contain common periphrials.
I am sitting in waterfront park with Joel and his mom, who looks like Max Wagner’s mom, and his dad, who looks like my mom’s boyfriend, Gary Bonzon (a scary start). His mom just got a new 17 inch apple powerbook and we are exploring it. It has a ridiculus number of games on it, like the kind that are made for really small children, and we have to go through and delete them all. Also, on the dock, there are three little divisions instead of two. One is for applications, another for folders and the third is for URL’s, the trash, etc. All of a sudden his dad has to leave (did I mention we were sitting in a his car?) and he has to take the computer’s mouse with him. He tells me that there is a concert down the hill, but has a very difficult time understanding me when I try to ask him who’s playing. He says, “Leon Deon”, the band, formerly known as “The Almonds”. Joel and I head down the hill to check it out.
And then I get that wierd feeling that my dream would have gone on farther were it not for my alarm set for 8:20.
Ritual Greeting
July 17th, 2005 by Ariana Rose Taylor-Stanley; no comments
Adrian was home and a group of people were greeting him on something that was like the little walkway between a plane and an airport, but was more likely to have been attached to a boat. I greeted him with a sort of ritual. We hugged, then touched foreheads, then rubbed noses. After such a long separation, this was the only appropriate greeting. Later in the night, I dreamed I had woken up after this dream and practiced the ritual so I wouldn’t forget it.
I was caring for a group of children with some other people that included Theora Moench and Jenny Estill. We needed something (an art supply?) and the children were getting out of hand, so we went into Theora’s house which was were she used to live in cohousing, but was set a little ways back and much bigger. I found that I was accidentally wearing my Aikido gi (while in Bellingham yesterday I passed an Aikido dojo and thought about going back to it in college). Theora mentioned needing to call the police.
Finding my father
July 16th, 2005 by Adrian Sampson; no comments
I am at a tourist attraction in Alaska with my father. We go for a bit of a sightseeing expedition to a historical site of which I know nothing located along a river to the west. (I had this dream while traveling about in Europe. My main activity there was exploring historical sites.)
After we exit the trail that leads there, we find a gravel courtyard about six by six meters. It leads off to one attraction on the left and another on the right. In the courtyard, we see Gary Bristow (a longtime friend of my father’s and the current residents of my house’s apartment). We talk to him for some time and it becomes clear that my father and Gary have explored this site before and found it immensely powerful. Gary is glad that my father is bringing his son along to see it and tells me that I’ll most certainly enjoy it.
My father and I set off to the right on a slightly uphill gravel path. On our left, from foreground to background, are extremely rusty, mostly empty platforms with hitches on each end that were once part of a very important old train, a sparse row of trees, a sharp, rocky drop-off of about two meters into an expansive, wet, sandy riverbed with a small stream trickling through it, and distant mountains.
Occasionally, the platforms have some sort of metal sculpture/structure on top of them. Eventually, I lose my father ahead or behind while browsing the ancient, dismantled train and find one platform (I have forgotten the others) that holds my attention most. It consists of folded and intertwining hoops of metal that stack atop each other and create a two meter high confusion of these things. Each one of the hoops has an intricate metal design inside of it, so they remind me of dream-catchers (in fact, they look precisely like enormous dream-catchers cast in metal). I know that these hoops’ presence and configuration is a sure sign that many people died on this very platform in such a manner that makes me stand there and cry for four or five minutes. (This is probably connected to a conversation I had with Kevin the previous evening about grandparents’ deaths and not crying for them.)
At the end of the row of platforms, I meet my father again. We must make our way through the trees and climb down onto the rocky drop-off. We do so and begin clambering, hand-over-hand, across the sheer rock cliff back north toward the gravel courtyard. I am not as good a rock climber as my father (in reality, I don’t know the last time my father climbed a rock), so traversing the ledge is simple for hi and utterly nerve-racking for me. While I climb, I ponder formal logic, truth-values, and “this statement is false”.
Eventually, we reach a point where the rocks have a fur of skinny, long glass shards pointing directly outward toward the riverbed. We obviously cannot continue, so my father tells me to look out “there” and gestures west across the stream. Warily, I crane my neck to see. There is a train track (my primary mode of transportation in Europe was a large variety of trains) — ancient, rusty, and forlorn but still intact. I surmise that the platforms above and east of us must have at some point been on that track, which stretches in both directions into the hazy distance.
My father says that the track was the one used by Jesus to travel with his someones northward just before his death. I begin to understand why the cars are so emotionally charged. My father makes a point of the fact that Jesus’ someones were all vegetarians and that he required that they all be good, moral people in their own right, full of confidence and moral self-certainty (a topic I’ve done a fair amount of reading, thinking, speaking, and writing about recently). In a flash, I suddenly understand why these people and this place are so important to my father and Gary — the someones’ natures mesh perfectly with my father’s and Gary’s male existentialist outlook on life (the connection is much shakier in RL but made cosmic sense in the dream).
We are not so suddenly sanding in the gravel courtyard again, discussing logic with Gary and a woman about my age or a little younger. She asserts that, in the context of “this statement is false”, “this” and “statement” are defined differently so that the statement is not a paradox. I tell her that this is utter crap (it is — it doesn’t make any sense). She tries a different tactic: she says that all statements may be assigned truth-values _except_ for those that are self-referential — they have no truth-value or, in other words, are neither true nor false. I again show contempt for her theory (again, it’s not a full explanation: consider “this statement is not true” or “the following statement is true; the previous statement is false”). She becomes defensive and says that, by disagreeing with that logical analysis, I am calling Lorca full of crap (as far as I know, Gabriel Garcia Lorca was not a logician — the theory that she discussed is probably much older than Lorca).
We are none of us masters of logic, but I decide to outline what I believe (which is not actually what I believe; it is a weird perversion of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem A.N. Prior’s analysis):
The relevant statement is not, in fact, “this statement is false”. We should instead consider “this statement is _provably_ false”. That is, every statement, in addition to a truth-value, has a probability-value — whether the truth-value can be proven. I remember Alan Turing explaining all this to me in terms of epistemology (undoubtedly because I was heavily entrenched in _Cryptonomicon_).
As the others begin discussing this idea, I forget what provability-value should be assigned to any of the statements in question and, eventually, what provability means in the first place. I try asking but am mostly ignored.