I dreamed that I was attending a party in some penthouse. there was a mix of people there, some dressed extremely casually in co-op style shorts, tshirts, etc, some looking like they lived and breathed in formal wear. like guys in dress shirts and waistcoats, but with the tie hanging undone. I think I was in the former group, but was a little uncomfortable. there were children around, and some of them were "special" as in special olympics. the party spilled out of the penthouse and onto the roof outside, in the bright sun.

Elena's mom was there and she was pretty old. she was in charge of watching one or two of the kids. she wasn't, really. I was concerned, becuase there were drugs present, and the kids wouldn't know any better. I went looking for her. I found her sitting in the bottom of this closet-type space that reminded me of the closets in the back of my junior high school rooms, but narrower. she was staring into space, her eyes unnaturally wide. I realized she was on some designer drug like some of the formal-wear people were taking at the party. then I left and went outside. I was in a camp area near the Black Point Forest faire site. the oak trees dappled the ground in the sun. some folks were wandering around who were also participants in the party.

a good mix of distorted reality hit this dream, as I dreamed that my boss, Maria, was organizing some family event via email. like her big extended catholic family. she was also sort of the treasurer and was in change of everyone's investments and finances.

she was going to travel to this event with Mark, one of our techleads. Mark was her first cousin, which was hard to figure since he is Asian and Maria is east-coast Italian. they were having a discussion in email about what to do with the investments since the Market sucked so hard. Mark found this deal where gold ingots could be bought for $0.38 each. Maria ended up dumping a lot of the stocks and buying the gold ingots. I didn't trust that it seemed weird to me, but now the family money was in gold, and I didn't care terribly much since after all it's not my family.

this morning the puppy woke me up by fussing next to my head. I was having a fairly coherent dream but it shattered and I don't remember it. but the puppy was not as powerful as my sleepiness and I dropped right back into it...

and I was walking down a street, and the MOMA was across the street. the sky was that late-afternoon wintry blue, and the sun was at an angle that it was right on the edge of the building. I looked up at it, and realized that the architecture was very different. the roof had a distinctive curve, and was tiled, and there was a lot of detail stonework under the eaves, with some green-painted wood in front. very fancy, very nice. I realized after thinking about it, it was Chinese.

but I know the MOMA, I thought. it doesn't look like this, it's all ugly and "modern" in a way that's already totally dated.

I looked at it some more and decided that I must have been mistaken, this really was the MOMA.

I was in my SUV, which was parked across the street from my mom's house. the street was a dead-end like it was when I was a child, and I was parked facing away from it. I thought I saw a rainbow, but when I looked it was a contrail.

a fighter plane flew over in a fairly tight circle. I wondered what was going on, when I noticed a red colour followed it, like it was painting the red stripe of the rainbow. I started to watch as a fighter appeared, over and over again, painting red, then blue, then purple colours. I couldn't figure out what they were doing. they were normal fighters like from the air base near by; not fancy ones like the Blue Angels were.

Heather and Tim showed up. Heather came to talk to me and asked what I was doing. I told her. she told me Tim said it was the Thunderbirds (the Air Force equivalent of the Blue Angels). I wondered how Tim knew, if there was an air base near Phoenix. we went eastward to the other side of Oxnard. many of the fields along Las Posas Road were fallow, and were getting dug up. we realized they were expanding the military facilities. there was a barracks, there was a battlements, there was a practice range, etc.

so I fell back asleep, and I dreamt that Zenia came to visit, and she stayed the night. we were supposed to do something in the morning, and she got up while I was still asleep and was wandering around in pajamas that look like Karine's. she came in my room, and the windows in my room were like our living room's instead of like they are in real life. she started to clean the leftmost pane, while I was still asleep. I woke up somewhat, probably from the window cleaner smell, and complained she was a guest and shouldn't do that. she just smiled and kept going.

I dreamed that instead of my nice tent, all I could find was this little puptent that was thin plastic, and red white and blue. it was rolled up in that way little disposable plastic rain hats were, and stuck in the back of my SUV.

we were packing for burning man and I did not have my shit together. I decided, fuckit, and I drove out to the playa with this guy Kevin whom I am supposed to give a ride to. he was a little wondering at my just going out there with no provisioning, his shit was all together and didn't take up that much space either in my car. I said it would be OK becuase there was enough infrastructure for me to get what I need.

we got there and went to the camp Bob had set up. there was this big shaded area that looked like an army tent where the sides could roll up. it was maybe 100' long and 30' wide. one of the narrow ends was sunward and that side was not rolled up. a low embankment ran behind it, along one length of it; the "road" ran in front of it. tables ran along the middle and people with smaller tents pitched them in this bigger tent behind the tables, so they were nice and shady.

I checked out if there was space for my puptent while Bob and Kevin were talking. there was. I pulled it out of my car and considered how irritated I was, I couldn't even sit up inside the tent, and it would blow apart in a wind. then I realized I didn't bring water, either, and there wasn't enough infrastructure for that kind of oversight. I decided the playa wasn't that long a drive from civilization after all and decided to go back and get my stuff.

so my dream last night was sort of a work-dream. we were trying to warehouse the ads that displayed with red and yellow LEDs on the left-hand passenger window of taxi cabs. it was hard because whenever the taxis pulled up to the taxi queue in front of the building, Netscape would capture the URL and then convert it to some heinous long URL wrapped in their own search engine syntax so they could track it. the long URL broke over 4-5 lines. not onkly did we not want the Netscape-munged URL, when Netscape did this they changed the ad randomly.

we were trying to figure out how to solve this, by standing on the porch of a house facing the street where the taxis queued up. the house was a typical San Francisco Edwardian. we would be myself, Matt G, and Natasha. Matt had all these ideas on how to do it. he was just standing there leaning against the wall, watching and speculating.

so this morning I had a dream that made sense at the time but I found was all
tumbled together. it started at Karine's house, or perhaps her parents'.
myself and a few mutual friends wer over there and she was explaining that
she was too busy to do anything becuase of the river turtles. they
were breeding and she was trying to help keep the eggs or whatever
from getting all smashed. I think they were totally rare/near extinction.

of course with a story like that duckie and I volunteered to help. the
backyard had like an overhang from the house so part was in sun and
part was in shade. at one point I bent over to pick something up and from a
trap door in the overhang an egg fell and smashed across the small of my bare
back; my shirt was short enough that it would ride up my back if I bent over.
I did not appreciate egg on my back but they were mad that I wasn't more
careful.

then it was time and a female turtle dug this long trench at an angle but
pretty much across the entire back yard and extending into the neighbours'.
she laid lots and lots and lots of eggs along the trench as she dug. the
eggs in the trench were sort of covered by dirt from the digging in the
next part of the trench. there were not enough of us to prevent predators
from getting to some of the eggs, which were not fully covered.

wow it's early I am tring not to let this fase buit don't feel like typing it

some sort of military academy, like a space force
mew method of database information
domed lecture hall with 360 degree view of space or whatever information
learning how to use new db in shifts
early reveleation of technology
some anime-like woman commander responsible
data displayed on dome in big grid. grid is white-on-black. technology is not the grid but is the ability to display images in each cell
students (cadets?) held responsible for knowing about technology or (?) revealing it
break into big hallway that goes in a wide arc. also view of space like under all-emcompassing glass dome
standing in line for cafeteria talking about accuracy/unfairness of it all
someone needs to prove that some information, possibly on drugs, is correct, or a bunch of students get in trouble.
cageteria is to right, outside of arc; a bunch of workstations/eating area farther up ar to left.
the second to last workstation is big (physically) can can handle the search and pring out on big 4' wide paper
I go there and start searching

that's all I can remember the other details are faded

since the start of this month, the dreams that keep dissipating all seem to conclude on a certain style of imagery. it is sort of like medieval chinese drawings, except not coloured in, it's all line drawings black on white. the only color is a bunch of red accents.

when I am dreaming these images mean something in the context of the dream but I can hold on to neither the detail of the image nor the dream on waking up. I am only left with a fading impression of these line drawings with red in them.

I had lots of dreams last night which rapidly dissipated whenever I woke up from a dog demanding attention. but one little dream stuck with me. I was in the backyard of my mom's house on a Sunday afternoon and decided right then that I would switch the telephone into my name instead of hers. so I called the phone company and asked them if it could be done without changing the phone number. I was on a cordless phone talking to them while watering the big part of the yard.

I got a lot of unhelpful people and they set me up to meet with some repair dude on the following Tuesday morning. but I won't be there, I said, why can't I just switch it to me name? finally I got a kindly lady on the phone who said the way to do it was to add me to the phone bill, it was OK because we have the same last names, and then after a month I could just switch with no fuss and no charge.

I went back to sleep, and overslept and had another dream!

in this dream I was travelling with a bunch o geeks to Las Vegas. well, it was an admixture of geeks and ex-Netcentives coworkers. we went in separate vehicles. we did this on a regular basis and usually stayed in some cheap off-strip hotel with bad 70's green-and-wood decor. everyone loved the cheesiness of it.

I didn't make the actual reservation for my car and we ended up in some hotel clear across the other side of town. I was pretty annoyed that we had been put there - was this a hint? the people with me did not get it. I guess we were supposed to go cafe-hopping starting from the cheesy place, and I pulled out a map to show that one could not have found an hotel that was farther away.

so we got in our vehicle and drove to the cheesy place. ok, it actually wasn't that cheesy, it was still pretty nice in that Las-Vegas-Hotel way. it was late afternoon and the hopping was starting of course with a cafe right next door, a little to the north.

it got dark and when we walked outside there seemed to be a convention at the hotel. the parking lot to the hotel was sunk in with a grassy embankment between it and the sidewalk. as I was walking to my vehicle I looked up and on top of the embankment there were many many men standing around, with drinks, talking. they were all dressed in parti-coloured suits with tophats and cravats, all in either lamé or chequered or harlequin colours. many (all?) of the men were built like William from faire. I looked at them for a while and then decided it was all a part of going to Las Vegas, you could dress all funny and still be comfortable and fit in.

in the first part of the dream, I dreamed of a complex situation with lots of people. what the situation was is not important, but I was able to adjust events in a minor way. the end result was always the same, showing that the time paradoxes just don't hold; nature or perhaps fate took care of everything turning out the way it was supposed to. I am sure this portion of the dream was the result of my watching Boogiepop Phantom the night before.

as events progressed I emerged from the complexity and went travelling to London. I think it was a futuristic London. I didn't recognize the skyline as resembling any London in real life. I was staying in some hotel across the river from the main town, and met up with a friend who was living there. I had never been, so there were all these plans to go exploring.