All of my dreams last night were in Thai and PHP. I don’t speak much Thai so I exhausted it all on a woman in a restaurant. She told me all I know and some things I didn’t. While this was happening, I was coding and re-coding the experience. They say you can’t read in your dreams but I think that’s not true. I’ve read before and I distinctly remember lines of code, characters and pages, all overlain upon reality.

I’m at a basketball game, which is odd because I’m not into sports of any kind. I’m sitting out as part of the team, watching my side get humiliated. The opposition is way better and they are trying to make us look foolish and weak. I crouch down next to a teammate and express my frustration. “They’re at least 3 times better than we are. Look at the way they are attacking, they just wait with that huge guy and we can’t do anything about it. Then they play around a bit to show that we are inferior.” My teammate explains how wrong I am and tells me that we are about to win.
I don’t really follow what he’s saying. It’s sports talk and I never understood the rules well enough to follow.
There’s a very pretty girl in the crowd, next to me.
I walk out of the building and realize I’m at a University. It seems to be in some other country; the architecture is like nothing around here. The school museum has a giant circular garden in the front, raised up in a concrete cylinder. The plants in the garden are appearing and disappearing to make patterns. At one point they show a graph representing the successful implementation of a drinking fountain placed outside of the local amphitheater.
I’m fascinated by the plants existing and not existing at will and only the girl from the game breaks my concentration. She looks a little like Anne Hathaway only younger and prettier. We began walking together and she mentioned that I would get in trouble if I took her home because she was under 21. I thought that was a strange thing to say, since she was obviously over 18. I explained to her my open marriage and that it wasn’t a problem. My wife isn’t the jealous type.
She became quite strange then and started opening up all kinds of personal firewalls. She told me how her friends would hate her if she ever got involved with a married man, open or not and that she couldn’t deal with her own life. I talked her down from hysteria, explaining that her friends didn’t control her life and if she felt so insecure around them, she needed knew friends. Again she opened up more and started talking about how downloading blog themes that related to suicide was a certain equivalent to a cry for help and she had already done that. She alluded that if she were to go home and be alone, she might not be around tomorrow.
I didn’t realize she would be such a broken friend but I took her home to see my wife and brother (Silas lived with us in a large house in this world).
On the way there I tried to get the girl to use Skype. It’s wonderful, encrypted chat and phone calls, you can call me any time on it. Later in the house, I was carrying a little cup of half salt, half water. It was somehow a replacement for my phone but because of it’s lack of keys, I could only hear the other person–I couldn’t talk back…

Last night, I took a two stage release Melatonin tablet at 23:00. Melatonin, is a neural transmitter produced in the pineal gland, used by the brain to regulate sleep cycles. This particular tablet releases .25mg 30 minutes after ingestion and then dispenses the remaining .75mg 3-4 hours later. Even though I went to bed at 00:20, I didn’t fall asleep until after 03:00. Even after the initial series of tossing and turning, it seemed I didn’t sleep at all. And yet, I feel quite well rested and I remember several vivid dreams.

The Dreams

Falling from a plane is not a good time when you don’t have a parachute. This I learned with 3 other army guys who all got shot up with something and shoved in the cargo bay of a high flying helicopter. After the machine began it’s long descent, we slipped out an opening and came to consciousness just as our gear belts caught on the railing. As we screamed at one another, against the furious force of the wind, a radio began to emit the cries of a friend. A friend was telling us that we might not die. There are parachutes behind the passenger seat. We just need to climb back up into the cockpit and retrieve them. And by the way, you only have 10,000ft before you go splat.
Upon reaching the cockpit, without a moment to spare, we discover that our assailants stripped the cockpit of anything useful. No shoots. No chance. What were we to do but ride out the fall? And we did, until we landed at a peculiar angle on the freeway. Going about the pace of traffic, we slid in and started to drive with it. Even in a traffic jam though, we couldn’t shake the feeling of inertia mixed with vertigo.

I’m walking through Ballard, only it’s not Ballard but some place I’ve never been. I’m exploring since I have no way of getting home and I decide to get lunch. Our kitten, Cassiopeia, is nestled upside down in the fold of my shirt, just around my waist. She looks up at me as I walk but is not disturbed by the motions. As I round into a pizza place, I pick Cassy out of her pouch and she becomes a baby. Suddenly much heavier and clothed, I sit at a counter stool next to a fairly attractive girl who’s ordering a vegan pizza. I too order a vegan pizza, with mushrooms, olives and bell peppers. Everyone loves the baby and wants to hold it. While I’m eating, the girl next to me asks if the baby is safe with that stranger over there. The stranger in question is a makeshift midget. His legs are severed below the knee and he wears shoes to cover the stumps. He’s slowly rolling the baby toward the door every time my eyes appear not to follow him.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m watching.”
I walk over, crouched down, I extend my foot to keep the door closed, just as a patron tries to enter. That time, the door would have smacked the baby on the head. I reprimand the short man and return to the counter with the baby.

There’s quite a bit more, but I need to eat breakfast. After my shower, I half ejected a bit of morning bile. I managed to subdue it for the moment. I suspect some of my trouble sleeping last night was from dehydration. I suffered a bout of shortened breath and heat exhaustion from about 02:00-03:00. We’ll see how waking up at 06:30 works tomorrow.

I couldn’t sleep well last night. I think it has something to do with the home made blackberry/cherry/grape wine.
I just wrote my first dead letter (a letter to a friend in case of my death). I was planning on writing several but then I thought, “Hey, why not take a bunch of videos. They will be more entertaining while making it easier for the recipients to claim legal holding over my assets.”
Now, I just have to do it.
The letter was shorter than I wanted–but what do you say in a letter you hope nobody will ever have to read.

There was this old church that had the bottom floor turned into a community center. There were dozens of floors above us that were still the original building. I was talking to this group of adolescent guys I didn’t know. They said they were graffiti artists. I saw one of them sparing with another and they said that was their thing. They all liked to spar but they all had their own styles. I said I’d like to try out my hand against one of them. They weren’t hitting each other hard–it was just playful whacking.

In the main room, a couple of them stood up and said they would challenge anyone with their Gung-Fu style. A slightly larger group stood up and posed in a horse stance with their fingers pointed out, “We will beat you with our Pointing Style.”

Another larger group leaped off the ground and hovered in unison, all in lotus position with nothing but their index fingers holding them off the ground. “Feather Touch will destroy you all!”.

The groups grew larger and more specialized and when everyone had set up for the fight, I realized I should get involved.

I came crashing through the ceiling with a mighty afro hair style–somewhat mangled from going through the ceiling. I looked like I put my finger in a light socket. “Wild Hair Style!”

Everyone began and somehow I managed to get through the mass unscathed.

An earthquake suddenly hit and I was the only one left on the bottom floor. Someone said falling through the ceiling was a good approach to death at this point because if you died outside you would have no chance at eternal life. We were somehow all evil but forgiven if having died in a church. I decided to go outside.

Hills shook and people lost balance but the quake subsided fairly quickly.

There’s much more but I can’t spend all day writing. I’ve got some errands to run. Maybe later I’ll finish up the story. Here are some reminder notes:

Police force, tapping phone lines. The mole. The secretary with a secret crush. Spearmint posing as peppermint but calling himself outright the “Kandy Kid”.

So, I was late for class and I was supposed to immediately get the principal to notify my instructor before I set foot in the classroom. This was a strange university, I thought–I was only 8 minutes late. I lied to the principal, telling him I was a whole 5 minutes late and I thought the instructor would put me in a box. The principal looked concerned for my well being. He was a ragged man, appearing almost as a vagrant on the steps in one of the hallways. He ushered me to sit and told me to write a page about why I was late while he went to make excuses for me. I agreed and wrote about missing the bus. While writing, I reflected on what really happened.

I was staying over at someone’s house, someone I didn’t know. We needed supplies for a full night of no sleep. We couldn’t sleep. We needed to fight off death. One of them had a special incantation for permanently warding off death but it involved never eating again for the rest of your life (which would be a long time). So we needed to go to the supermarket and buy munchies. We were going to enjoy our last meals.

At the supermarket, there were thousands of people. It was like everyone wanted to have a last meal at once. There was an old woman about to eat a cracker at a sample station and I recognized her as being a past recipient of the death-ward. I tried to warn her that a cracker was not worth her life, but death swiveled through the biomass and aged her into extinction before I could even reach shouting distance.

I was in a bank talking to an acquaintance of mine, a hacker that I had only met briefly at some convention or party. Somehow the topic of Python (the programming language) came up. I told him that I was intending to learn it since everyone I knew said it was the greatest thing since sliced perl modules. He disagreed:

“Python isn’t that great. I took 3 undergrad classes on it.”

“You never found a use for it?” I queried.

“Well, the blood key is a bit slow, you know. You should see the rendering, it’s just not that great.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant but I knew I needed to get back to class. I had a betrayal to enact and I needed to do it soon or it would be too late.

In the class room, we all sat in a circle on the floor. Everyone was either drugged up or spiritually hallucinating–unless there really was a holographic head sitting next to me. Everyone acted like zombies anyway–except for the Head, which was strangely coherent and commanding. It was the Head I was to betray.

There was a game of sorts for which I was supposed to have a correct number of chits. Part of my subversive plan was that I had a pocket full of chits. I had all of them in fact. I laid out 24 of them and the Head looked around the room as people fished for theirs. He came back to me and began counting my chits.

“You don’t have enough…”

In my frantic worry about pulling off my plan, I had forgotten how many chits I was supposed to have. I needed to add more but not too many. I couldn’t reveal that I had so many in my pocket. I pulled out one and I could hear the clicking of the chit horde mixing in my pocket. Worried that someone else would hear, I pulled out a handful of chit parts. I had halves and quarters, thirds and bits. It was chaos. The Head freaked but it was too late. I had delivered my message clear and his downfall was imminent. *that part didn’t make sense to me in the dream or in real life but it worked*

I’m going to make a real effort to document my dreams again. I was reviewing my ancient online journal (from the days before I started using a real blogging system) and found a couple of dreams that I remember so vividly. Here’s one from October 14, 2004: