my dreams this morning we all woven into a long tapestry. I don't remember how they were all connected together but here's a shot at it

I was in an house or an apartment where the master bedroom had hardwood floors. it was like my parents' bedroom but oriented in the opposite direction and totally empty. we were in there discussing plans, and drawing in chalk on the hardwood floors something that looked like a rectangular baseball field.

there was an alien invasion being launched. it would come up America's traditional vulnerable spot, up the great plains. the aliens were from a Star Trek or LeGuin universe - i.e. close enough to humans to be hard to distinguish. they were trying to recover an artifact...

our house was just too small. especially the bathroom. so while Karine was at work, I went in search of a solution. I drove down this street that was like Mission in Santa Cruz except it was part of some generic city. at a corner with an asphalt lot there was a low building that had a for lease sign. an apartment was available on the bottom floor. I took it.

the bathroom was huge. the cabinets and stuff were like that veneered pressboard shit you see like in the Home Depot remodelling section. they were the same pink as our current kitchen floor. all this pink.

I was in a loft in the city - I think really it was new york city. there were lots of windows that cantilevered open. I had to clean them.

I'm not sure why I had to clean them, it was like Karine already had, but I guess the edged of the panes on them weren't quite clean, so I had to redo it all. I went through the task methodically.

the scene switched and I was in my mother's bedroom. still cleaning the windows. the big window is one that slides, and the side that faced the screen, away from the room, hadn't been cleaned at all. to get to it, the sliding part had to be removed. I did so, and discovered that Karine hadn't cleaned it becuase it was shattered safety glass, held together by like the gummy part of masking tape. cleaning it would remove the gunny part and the window would fall apart.

I tried to lower the piece to the bed carefully, but some of the little pieces fell out. I decided I should just leave it. I was starting to put it back into the groove when I woke up.

what I dreamt was really disjointed. I think I was in the middle of some space-opera type thing. there were aliens over in one sector and two factions of humans at war elsewhere. I was with some team gone to see the alien ships but recognized where we travelled as a place where there had been some dogfighting a couple weeks earlier.

the ships were all funnylooking, all looked like they had been made of brown gunmetal. one was really long with fans, sort of, out of the rear fifth. there were various sizes and shapes.

we got to the sector with the aliens and they had troubles with the negotiations. the aliens reacted in (to us) an unpredictable manner and nobody knew what to do. this guy who was a major was supposed to go talk to them. however he had been recently a victim of a murder attempt. his shirt was like Captain Kirk's ugly yellow one. at the bottom of his sternum you could see the butt end of a shiny bullet casing. he insisted he go an talk to them anyhow but I thought, how will they react to that bullet?

so this is the bit I remember from a much longer dream

I was part of a group that was travelling through hostile country. I was in an advance team that was supposed to, I dunno, make it OK for the rest to follow. I think the other person was karine but I dunno, it was just my brain grabbing a convenient phenotype anyhow.

it was late night an we were in some sort of urban environment. it was multi-layered, which is what I associate with an old city. think Brazil if you want a visual reference. we descended this building, until we got to these air ducts that let out to a ledge. from the ledge there was a stone building-to-building ped crossing that was far above the abyss below. it was mostly forgotten.

I don't really remember what I was dreaming at all. other than it was definitely not about work.

then someone wheeled in one of those rolling white boards to prove a point. right in the middle of my dream! this was so disturbing and disruptive that I woke up.

karine and I were at my mom's house. the little porch behind the living room was like it was befor my dad tried to panel it.

I went out there and there was a freezer there. it had a door that was maybe the top 1/3 of the thing. the lower door was further out than the top door, as if it was two stacked enclosures, the top one being not-as-deep.

anyhow I noticed a little bit of ice on the top edge of the lower door. I opened the top door and decided maybe it needed defrosting. I wondered when I would do it. I went to karine in the kitchen and she asked me to get something out of this freezer.

I took two clean towels and folded/rolled them as if to put them away, and put them in this top enclosure instead. that's when I realized there was a lot of water in there too; its leaking was why I had seen the ice on the door. when I stuckthe rolled up towels in the enclosure, they immediately soaked full of water. I called out to karine I would be coming through with dripping towels, but woke up before I had the displeasure of actually handling sopping towels full of freezing cold water.

so some fluke of nature or awry experiment apparently moved me into the far future. I was in some urban setting not dissimilar to that in the end of the Thirteenth Floor.

I ended up involved in some ball game that was an intramural sport. it was like our sports having evolved after a couple hundred years. there was a field that was a cross between american football field and a soccer field. each team defend a soccer-sized goal. the ball was a little bit larger than a baseball but not as large as a softball, but sewn the same.

there were 12 people on each team... each team tried to move the ball down the field with plays like american football. then they try to pitch it into the goal. now get this. 1-4 of the people on each team were like little boys. 8-10 years old. they were the goalies and they had bats, of course, to hit the ball far into the field. I only found out about this when the other team pushed us back towards our goal.

it turned out that the captain of one of the teams was my coworker Mark. how he got there I dunno. he had been in that time longer than I and explained the logic of the little boys to me, it helped integrate them more into a society by having them participate on an even keep with the adults, or somesuch rot.

so I was so tired after work I took a nap. and dreamt...

that I was staying in some nondescript hotel in east asia. all the floors and furniture and decor was in dark hardwood. I was with a group of people, maybe as many as a dozen, and we had several rooms, or possibly a suite, except this hotel wasn't composed of suites. the room I was in had a desk and a small old colour television. it was small and felt very close with the clime and the dark woods.

this group of friend had some internal tension/politics. I wasn't really on top of it but it involved Jack, his wife Shannon, possibly me (wasn't clear in the dream), Elena, and I think a couple others.

there had just been an Incident over the waters of the bay and it was all over the news. a plane got buzzed, and the air acrobatics brought one of the fighters fangerously close to a hydroplane/ferry thing with lots of commuters. one of them even skimmed the blue blue waters of the bay. everyone was trying to get to the bottom of why it had happened.

stupid dog, woke me up, now I only remember the tail ends of both dreams.

in the first one a team of people, including me, inadvertently discovered a gladiator setup owned by the SF city government. you had to go through a tunnel to get to it. the tunnel entrance was in a brick wall, but the setup itself was in a trailer-like thing with a shade structure/dome at one end. never, ever, would guess what it was from the outside, but that was the idea. lots of people were poised to be in lots of trouble, big scandal.

in the second dream it was night, and these people were leaving in a boat in the prescribed lane. I think it was on the east coast south of New York. they were illegal or criminals or something dangerous and violent, and they were getting away with something bad that has faded from my memory. I was with someone in a boat that from the inside was like riding in a pickup truck, and we were in the inbound traffic lane leading into the harbour. suddenly I saw police boats racing to cut them off. a bunch were coming up behind and two were racing the wrong way down the opposite lane, behind us, out to a buoy and turning around so they were ahead of the bad people.

both these dreams had a good sense about them, that whole sense of things don't stay as bad as they appear.

I am typing this later, but the dream was earlier than the animal one, and may even be all part of the same dream-sleep. we were at some conference, or perhaps some seminar or training. it was in a low building with all dun colours. I think it was in Santa Cruz, and I don't know exactly what it was about, but it was something to do with computers.

we were at a lunch break and I was trying to catalog my setup for Eric and Louis. I think I was supposed to hand over the admin of wonderland to Eric, but I dunno if that was a permament thing or in order for him to illustrate a point or project in the afternoon session. I was doing this cataloging on something that looked like a cross between a Palm and one of those old TI handhelds from the early 80's that could print. Eric needed a hard copy. I was listing ports that were open, and why. as I did so, there were a lot where the answer was "I dunno why but Louis asked" or "I dunno why but I remember it had to do with <fillintheuser>".

I kept working on it but didn't have a good connection/ui from the palmtop thingy to wonderland, so it was time consuming to figure it out. after a while the break was over and I gave Eric what I had, on this paper that was vaguely wider than a receipt, and we were off to the afternoon sessions.

karine and I were walking along a street in Santa Cruz. I think it might have been Soquel, near the safeway. not sure there.

as we were walking we came across this weird wild animal that looked like a kid's toy. my first thought was that it looked so weird it was aussie. the fur was tan and curly and it had a face like a wombat. it looked to be about 35 lbs. anyhow we went past it becuase karine said we shouldn't handle it even though it was cute.

a little further and we were stopped for some reason. while we were there a black bear cub came, and sat on my feet. I said o my god how cute. I picked it up and it hugged me. its claws were ow-ey. I said to karine, how can you resist this. she gave me some spiel about feral grown bears. then she grabbed the cub becuase it was irresistably cute.