I dreamt I was in Washington, DC. I think I was visiting Carmel; but regardless of my own activities, that is where she was practicing law. I went to her website, and was disappointed. there was so much there, arguing. with what? it finally occurred to me that every interest posted on all teh pages, she felt compelled to argue the merits of her interests. perhaps she needed to take a break.

I went to the Mall and was viewing this strange art. I think it was supposed to be a prickly cactus. but it was sized and shaped like the lid to a commode. it was on a stand about waist high, surrounded by white marble. as I watched either Haydn or Moussourgsky was playing in the background, and it slowly rotated. it got to about a 45-degree angle to my perspective and the cactus split down the middle. the thin middle, so it looked like two commode-lid-shaped petals.

I woke up reminded of a Mad Magazine cartoon I saw as a child, titled "the Marquis de Sade's commode," which showed a toiled seat covered with big tacks.

I dreamt that we were visiting Karine's friend Steve down in Westwood. he was moving, for some reason that troubled Karine.

I was standing at a door of dark wood, with a brass doorknob. I called up Elena on the phone to see if she was busy, and it turned out she was leaving. I said, well, of course you are, you know months ago you shouldn't be with Alex anymore. after a couple of exchanges, I realized, o wait, Elena isn't with Alex anymore. she's married to Colin!

I was sad to hear Elena wasn't working out but it occurred to me I could prevent this guy Steve from a financial setback if Elena sublet his apartment in Westwood. so I suggested that.

my dreams have been fading out so badly lately. last night's dreams did too, but part of it managed to stick...

I was in the back yard of my mom's house, except as it is now, well except much bigger. I don't remember the situation leading up to it but we were going to try to get these dragons to play volleyball, or maybe badminton, with something that looked like an irregular lump of a cross between foam rubber and a big cheese.

one of the dragons was littler than the other, and she took it and tossed it around. I realized that they were used to doing this, and I sort of had a memory of doing it before. anyhow the challenge was getting them to actually bat the cheese thing across the net, or toss it with their snouts, and neither burn it, nor eat it.

the bigger dragon took a big wedge of the stuff and laid down and started to tear it apart. I felt a disappointment... there were onlookers... they didn't know we'd played this game before, correctly, although I did. the big guy started to eat the cheese.

I woke up right then and realized that the "dragons" were bohdan and trillian really. it was weird.

my dream last night was so complex that even thinking about one portion of it caused other parts to fade.

it started out with my open-bowling at a big bowling alley with orange gutters. I was on lanes 3&4. a pin got stuck in the gutter and nobody came to fix it. muttering to mysefl I took a tall plastic container of spackling and tried to "bowl" it to clear the gutter. the pressure on the lid as it rolled on its side caused dried spackle to spray all over the lane and stick in the oil. the container itself came to a rest about 15 feet down the lane.

there was nobody to notice this yet at the desk becuase there were ceiling supports blocking the view. I thought about running down there and getting it before I got a you-should-know-better lecture. so I did, got caught, and had to go into one of the offices behind the desk for the you-should-know-better lecture.

I wanted to go on this envrionmental tour, that I had been on before. to go on it, first you had to enter the premises through this ramshackle storefront. there were a few people milling about who hadn't been, and were not quite believing this abandoned-looking place was the right address.

I assured them it was, and we went in. we had to walk back a dusty room, and then in the bright sunlight. and then I basically groped, half-blind, my way back down a hallway, where the boards were old and separated and the bright sunlight shone in between.

we got to the back and there was this overhang, that opened up on a yard to the right. if you faced the yard, then to your right were barns and you could tell they were used and had animals. to your left would be a covered walkway with metal poles holding up the overhang every 10 feet or so. it you kept facing back, so the yard was to your right, a door opened to a hall, that was much higher tech - metal doorframes, conduits, gray-painted walls, etc.

this part had three doors, which I showed to the people with me. they said what, is this monty hall? and I explained that tours were arranged in the middle door and as they could see the other two doors dealt with merchandise. the third door, looking through it looked like a Petco.

this morning I dreamed that the gecko tank was much larger, and that one of the little guys was crawling around hunting. I was looking straight down from above, watching him climb around a rock. but he was in a cone like the dog wears, so he had a problem trying to catch tings or drink.

out of a jumble of dreams, one took shape and solidified.

I was working in a generic cubeland, with blazing white overhead fluorescents and faceless generic cubes. a new person had started, and be all accounts he was a womanizer. and I could tell that was true, when we were introduced, by the look in his eye, and the slightly-too-long time he held my hand when we shook.

throughout the day, the people who already knew him were watching me, in that sort of spiteful careless curiousity, to see if I was going to cry sexual harassment; and they had a valid point, I was either putting up with or fending off uwanted... touches. he'd stroke my head, or if we were looking over a document together, put a hand on my forearm; once, he tried to stroke my breast, but I deflected that. he even tried to kiss me.

I handled it all with a surprising aplomb, but it was all complicated by the fact that I was attracted to him. he had light brown hair, curly but cut short and even; some freckles, and light brown eyes with a clear direct look. it was all I could do not to return his attention, but I mostly managed, becuase it was impossible for me to tell if he was attracted to me or simply always acted this way around women.

there was a big meeting towards the end of the day, one with folding chairs for seats; and he tried to kiss me again. people were there watching... I started to return it, and stopped.

there was only one scene in this dream. I was in a generic conference room at work - white walls, white board, white fluorescent lights, with three other people: Brian from work, Mo, and Heather. this was a younger Brian though. we were discussing some UI on an application.

I was presenting something or talking about something and Brian walked over behind me. he leaned over me and kissed me, and then, over me, balanced himself upside-down on his head on the table in front of me.

Mo and Heather did not react well to this. but then I woke up.

I had a dream about how the world was coming to an end and I was on a shuttle launch to fix it per the Return of the King and I was conspiring with Heather to do this illegally and I didn't have a copy of the book with me and I was afraid I was doing it wrong and I went back to our room in a terrific storm only to have her call on my cell and tell me I was being dumb. anyhow the plot was to pretend I had died which would then give me a greater freedom of action. I was musing on whether I wanted to go through with dying when the dogs bugged me and my dream changed.

Heather and I had a big aquarium in a dark room. maybe 55 gallons? more? it had all kinds of things in it including Jellies. I was looking at it, and thought that one of the pieces to the aerator was not right. so I adjusted it to be underwater and walked away.

the result was that the stream of water met another one and created a cyclonic flow. it caught one of the jellies and was so strong the jelly was going to break apart. this guy whom I guess we had in charge of the aquarium fixed it, and rebuked me. he told me I had to watch it, the combination of the two streams could create a vortex up to 70 mph. chastised, I apologised.

we chitchatted some more and got onto the topic of water levels. how do we add water, this and that. Heather joined us and told us how she added tap water without needing to dechlorinate it...

I don't remember much of this dream. but in part of it, I ended up in a really small town. I was staying at some sort of farm or home for 'lost' children or teens.

I ended up chaperoning a couple on a date. I was in the back of the car and they couldn't really see me - one way glass or something. I think the guy was Simon. then I realized it was really a horse and buggy, and the farm was also a sanctuary for deformed animals. the horse pushing the buggy had its back legs all twistied up and useless and balanced on its forelegs. I marvelled at this and wondered how it managed. then I wondered if it was really right not only to keep it alive, but to force it into such a difficult work.

it was a nice morning in pacifica. I had to take the trash out or something like that. when I did, I left the garage door open, and bohdan got out. he went to the neighbours house to the north, and Demo (the golden retriever) was there. I was afraid Bohdan would attack him, but instead there was an open door into a garage, and Bohdan lay down in that facing in.

I came to get him - he wasn't wearing his collar, and looked in the garage. Stacy was there doing something workshop-like. she didn't mind Bohdan at all. I got him and guided him back to our house.

we were almost in our door when another neighbour came out with that dog Bohdan hates, and three women, including Stacy met with her in the middle of the street and they started talking. Bohdan charged and I followed behind. at a loss, I just held onto his tail. this worked but then I was stuck, becuase I couldn't let go.

I went across the street and a coupple doors down. there was a house with a screen door in the side. I looked in an it was all dark wood.

bohdan was lying there, next to a guy with blond surfer hair. I was very surprised. then bodhan started to nuzzle him and wag his tail. the guy loved and and started to play with him.

I was sure bohdan would snap at him any time, but he didn't, he was really into the guy.

I dreamt that I was in the top floor, or maybe the second down, in a tall building. it was well-air-conditioned. I was talking to my boss, Maria, and found to my surprise that she played AD&D. after talking to some other co-workers, we thought maybe we would get a game together. I realized that all the characters I had rolled up lo so many years ago, and sat on and never played, were all specialists of one sort or another, and that maybe I should roll up a generalist.

I ended up on the roof of the building. it was flat with that gravelly covering big tall buildings often have. people from my burning man camp were there like Mike and Meli. we were talking and about to leave when we saw a really BIG tornado off in the distance. well, not so far off. well, some folks thought it was far and interesting to watch from the roof. it was very dark against the bright hazy afternoon sky. I and a couple other people decided to hide in the stairwell. it was close enough to be very windy by the time I walked across the the stairwell doors. Mike went and hid in his hotel room. the three of us went down half a flight of stairs as the wind howled. I was afraid my friends on the roof would blow away, or be impaled by straws, or something like that.

so, I was at work, and it was crazy busy. not sure what was going on. my boss had me stuffing envelopes. after a while I realized it was the paperwork from reviews and salary raises. I was a bit surprised that she trusted me so much. at one point I noticed her salary, the raise, the new salary. the new salary was $30K and change. I suddenly realized how priviledged I was.

I don't remember everything leading up to this, but I was at a party in a co-op like building. I was hanging out with Elena and we decided to clear off the air hockey table and play. I scored first but that was just because Elena wasn't paying attention. then she got all these goals past me and won.

since this was our air hockey table we started playing another game. she scored one, then I started scoring. I started to think if I keep scoring then she won't want to play anymore. she started to make noises along those lines, and suddenly my foot tickled.

I looked and there folded up at my feet was a small asian woman with glasses. she said she was going to give me a gentle foot massage while I play, and was that OK? I started to say yes, then realized, "gentle" = "tickles". so I said only if it's not as gentle as she started.

I turned back to the air hockey game and this sales type guy tried to sell Elena and I these different paddles for the air hockey game. they looked sort of liek gelatinous frisbees. we weren't terribly interested but we took a pair of samples just to make him go away. at this point I looked at the paddles we were using. they were flat, with a teardrop-shaped hole in them so one could have extra momentum hitting the disk.

anyhow the game was interrupted and Elena didn't want to play anymore. she stuffed the disk, two paddles all in her goal. the machine accepted them and said "storing" in a feminine mechanical voice. I thought it was neat it all fit and Elena said well how do you think it stores its stuff? I put the two paddles into my goal and it did the same thing. I bent over and peered in the slot and it had all these rail mechanisms. in the side of the table was a little bracket. that held the disk so someone else could start a new game.

I was living in some house on the street on which I grew up, with two housemates. it was not my mom's house, and we were renting it from some guy named McGowan. one of my housemates was Art, who had recently moved in.

it was late at night and three drunk people from a couple houses down - that was a Death Guild house - came by. they were all women, and they were really mad at McGowan. "we'll get you" they declared loudly in slurred voices. to my horror, they produced like a gallon of tequila and dumped it on my lawn. they were about to light it on fire when I came out to talk to them.

they were initially unfriendly, but it's not hard even with unfriendly drunk strangers to get them to talk to you. turned out they thought mcGowan had moved back into his house, they thought it was Art. the Death Guild house was also rented from him, and they hated him.

in the first dream I remember in a long time, I was watering terraced gardens, and there was a springy ground cover in them, with little leaves. (I see it a lot around Pacifica but don't know what it is called.) anyhow it was brown instead of green, gone too long without water. I could tell the ground was dry and the water was very good, but the plants stayed brown. I wondered how long it would take them before they turned green again, or if they ever would.

the first part of he dream faded but involved a motorcycle race across fields in north-central alaska. the second part... starts with a motorcycle race across the southern part of alaska. I can see the dirt getting kicked up... it's three bikes. my perspective is aerial.

hmm, it's fading too. anyhow I am walking along the side of a field, late in the evening near sunset, and talking to someone, maybe on the phone but not in my ifeld of vision. I'm not sure the conversation is important... I get to a little ridge in the dirt road, and there's some water from irrigation gathered in the depression. and a cantaloupe... except the skin is more like a coral. I talk, and slowly roll the cantaloupe into the water, and watch the water get inbetweem all the ridges, then roll it to the dry part, and waych the water drain back off as if by magic. it's neat; I do this a couple times.

it was Heather's birt'day. I was sitting with her and Ingrid, in seats that were like the waiting area in an airport. look Heather says, damon sent me a birt'day card. I look and it was a very formal birt'day card, and inside was a copy of his Citibank bill. just paid off.

Heather was displeased and took it to be his boasting about his financial situation being better than hers. she wanted to toss it and Karine agreed. I grabbed it out of the trash. no no, I said, now we can find something out about him now. I looked at the bill and it was for some city on Oahu. I asked Ingrid if she ever saw Damon and she said no. the bill looked weird and I couldn't figure it out. [well actually it was two levels of weird. what seemed normal in the dream but was weird was that it looked like an AT&T bill.] then I realized that Oahu was in the address as if it was the state. the city was some really long name like Halekalannini but that's not really it.

Heather still didn't care, but Ingrid didn't recognize the town name and was curious. then I woke up.

this was war, damnit.

the three of us raced through the bunker. he held the quad launcher, it was too heavy for him to do anything but point and shoot. she held the ammo, and I loaded it. it was a big bunker. we had to worry about people emerging from all kinds of passageways.

we got to this part that was either a locker room or bathroom or something like that, near the deep end of the bunker. realizing it was hopeless, we started stuffing all the ordnance into one of the lockers. he looked at me. go, go he said. she said, what happens next will be very hard for you. I ran further into the bunker, back to where I knew there was a wall protecting the injured folks. I got there and there was one woman in a bed who looked at me curiously. I found a couple candies on a counter and started to eat one, and then the world came apart as all our ordnance exploded in the other room.

I don't know if I am remembering two separate dreams or not... I was visiting home, not sure if it was supposed to be my immediate family. I think I was visiting because I was doing some work consulting.

I didn't like these people. the father type was distant, and was a lot like Enrique from work. he was married to a woman none of us liked... I didn't know her very well, but the siblings were vicious about her. the brother worked at QA at Apple, but it wasn't set up like anything I knew. you got little grades like military awards, and he wa one short of having them all/getting the top one. I was his equivalent from the far past but old computer knowledge is not terribly useful. I think the sister type was in law school.

the family was in south, maybe central Berkeley, which in my dream was a much larger place, and the Apple/consulting place was there. I was in a meeting with other QA engineers, which my brother ditched and I found they were all fearful of him and amazed I was not, which got me wondering. I found myself walking up Shattuck on a sunny afternoon. I came across some Jesus freak selling newspapers... the one I bought was a gossip rag talking about the various affairs the wife was having.

I was riding the bus with Jen Yee. I was wearing my bulky gap hoodie, and it was dark out, recently dark, like right after twilight. her stop was the second to last before the bus reached the end of the line and turned around. we were talking the way one always talks with friends on the bus.

we got to her stop and she made as if to go. there weren't very many people on the bus. we both stood up to hug goodbye. but somehow that turned into a kiss which in turn became... intense and passionate. we ended up on one of the bus seats sort of reclined back and by the time we came back up for air, the bus was past her stop... going the other way.

it was pretty realistic, even down to the normal self-doubt I initially experience in such situations and how that melts away. intense. after, we had that sort of harmony that comes from a singleness of purpose between two people whose evening plans had suddenly made that particular kind of absolute change. we couldn't go back to my place, we couldn't go to her place. we can go to my grandparents' place, she said. they are out of town playing golf and it's totally empty. that was what we decided as we sort of lay there on the reclined bus seat. I started considering in my own head where I got the capacity to do this... I thought it had been burned out of me long ago...

Jen asked me, do you have any more of those candies? (those candies being the weird Japanese rock candies like Ingrid brought back from Japan.) I laughed and said I did. if you tell me where to get them, I'll [unprintable] she said, very quietly. I gave her a wry look and told her that was not necessary, and pointed out a local shop that carried them.

and then, to my amazed disappointment, I woke up. oh... this was a dream. but I am left considering, that maybe parts of my psyche I thought were burned out of me forever... weren't really.

the family was a clan of sorts, of some eastern culture. we had a big house and lots of cousins and were fairly self-sufficient.

one young woman had a mascot-like role. she was to somehow be on display with a physical binding to the god, like a fairly large piercing hole and a cable through it. the guy who does this is older and somewhat mad which makes everyone think he is god-touched but really he's just arbitrary.

the woman ran away after the first time. it was uncomfortable and boring. they found her and brought her back. she wasn't concerned; this is what she was supposed to do. but the second time the guy put tht cable in her nose, through one of her teeth, and decided to make it emerge from the middle of her left jaw and bind her to her spot. I asked the guy if this was the word of the god. he said no not really he thought it was artistic.

my cousin had just become some sort of blessed warrior type and he reassured me. it will be OK, he said. but I couldn't watch them inflict that pain on her. I went travelling, wandering.

in this dream, I am not sure what I was doing, but it was some sort of rendering project with Weezy and Leyla. I was about to do the first pass and then test it by driving up sharp park road. the guy in charge asked me if I wanted to turn on the natural lighting of the building silhouettes, and I thought maybe I did not, but couldn't figure out why not. so I said yes.

I drove up sharp park and looking off to the left where the building should be there was nothing but gre. that will never do, I thought, and realized why I should be using the older way to render the buildings: so the viewer could see them.

I made it back and Leyla was upset I had messed it up. but since the fix was known, I wasn't too worried.

I dreamed that I was talking to my boss, and we were supposed to go on some sort of recreational pasttime. nobody had any suggestions, so I gave in and said I would show her how to bowl properly. she had no idea I knew.

we went to the bowling lane, and I said let's start with showing you how to pick out a bowling ball with a proper fit. we started looking at the house balls, and I was sort of showing her backwards (putting the thumb in and seeing where the fingers fell, instead of vice versa). then I realized, none of the balls would fit, becuase her right hand ring finger was all stumpy and deformed, not like it had been cut off or something, but like it had grown thick and short instead of proportional to the rest of her fingers.

I was getting prepared for a voyage and was with a couple shipmates. we needed to take care of some things before leaving and went to the back part of oxnard. now this back-part is only in my dream-land but I revisit it from time to time. I was looking for something but now do not remember what it was. I had to ride my bike up a couple side streets, and went into on that was sort of a cul-de-sac becuase it abutted next to some concrete thing that was like a raised freeway.

I told this lady what I wanted and she told me where to find it and how to get it without getting my bike stolen. I came out and had my friends wait while went.

after that it was time to leave. we needed to find port hueneme road. we road slowly as I was no longer sure where the turn was. but the others didn't go through to the water. once we found it we turned and started down it.

I dreamt that I had some sort of bug bite at the base of my left thumb. there was a red dot and it was turning black like a bruise underneath it. the dot was about half an inch outward of the carpal tunnel. there was another red dot on the outside of my wrist near that bump which is the end of the bone.

I showed Karine and she was sympathetic. I could hardly bend my thumb. we went somewhere and were talking to people and Karine said, o yah, look at Shari's wrist and I showed them my left hand. everything but the thumb was covered in red bumps - not like a rash, but like boils upon boils, it looked like alien skin and not human skin. the fingernails were purple turning black, even on my thumb which was otherwise normal down to the red dot at its base. I stared at my hand, horrified.

then I woke up. my right thumb is super swollen from my slamming it in the dog door yesterday. ow ow ow.

I dreamed an entire episode of witch hunter robin except the plot was out of my own head. well I dreamed it as something that happened and in three dimensions, I didn't dream I was watching an anime. unfortunately the details have been fading in and out all day. the basic plat though was that robin finds some homeless guys and she gets really suspicious. she tracks down her suspicions to some sort of towing/car impound place surrounded by an 8' chain link fence. where apparently they have managed to turn the homeless into some sort of cheap / slave labour force.

parallel to her own story line is the story of the homeless people involved in the towing lot. some leaders have emerged and they are going to rebel, basically, and break free of the lot full of cars where they have been held.

naturally the two plot lines come together and there is pandemonium as robin arrives just when a group of 50 of the homeless guys start trading shots with the others. at one point a bunch of them are riding around on a tow truck with guys with guns perched on the top tow thing.

I was in washington DC in some institute. there was a small public area that was museum like and behind that various corridors. I wasn't supposed to, but I went exploring. some of them went on stairways and then would branch off before a full flight into weird little dead ends. everything was painted a distateful yellow.

at one point I saw the president. I guess his wife was pushing for funding of this institute. he was walking along the corridor, seemingly unprotected. I ran into a little girl who apparently knew the whole layout like it was her own personal playground. she said he comes here often, which suprised me becuase I didn't really think intellectual anything was his bag.

I dreamed of yeast infection. no, not having one, but of all the details on the cellular level, with the little microorganisms and how different bacteria an immune responses fight it out. my brain was trcking the population of the little yeasties and the bacteria (something-phages?) and all that.

of course I did not sleep well until I shut off the damned alarm. then I dreamed...

I was in Frazier park in the afternoon. it was sunny and the sun came through the big pine trees. various people in groups were doing their thing around the little picnic tables. there had been bear warnings but nobody really cared. the brown bears were fairly friendly even if a little agressive about food.

I saw a dog running up the hill, away from me, a white guy with lots of brown. a polar bear was chasing him and caught him, rolled him over, and raked him belly to throat with those bear claws. the dog didn't even cry as he lay there dying.

a bear had come and was sort of tracking me. I went to this family I knew, a mexican family with 4 or 5 kids. they were in a picnic area that was in a little cutout, and we all sat with our backs to the cutout, with me sandwiched between the kids. the bear came - it was a brown bear. it whuffled and it smelled all of us. all I could think was euw, and of the dog I had just seen. something distracted it though - I thought it was Karine come looking for me? and the bear lumbered off.

I was in the dentist's office, and we were discussing drilling out one of the amalgam fillings and replacing it with a percelain one. he wanted to take a new set of xrays to be sure it was advisable.

we took the xrays, and when they were developed, they said that my teeth were much worse off than had been thought. they showed me the two with the amalgam, and one of my lower left ones, and on the films it was just a white outline of a very black hollow space. basically three teeth had been eaten from the inside out leaving just a thin shell.

we couldn't figure out how I even managed to chew, in that state.

I dreamed I was in some sort of southern california beachside hotel suite. I was staying with a friend, and I guess we were putting on some sort of sham, we were going to fuck these two guys and get something (money? influence?) out of it.

the guys were out of the room and I had been sleeping (or pretending to). I got up and we were talking about this and that. I had felt weird sleeping on the bed, like the dog was there, but it wasn't...

the guys were coming back and my friend told me I had to lay back down again. I looked at where my head had been. (the bed sheets were dark blue.) outlined where my face had been was a lot of bird guano. like, euw. my friend geestured at me to lie down quick. but I was very hesitant. was my face really in bird guano? what was this all about, anyhow? I tried to remember, but I could not.

I dreamed that Mike and Maggie were setting up a really big party. we lived in tract housing at the end of the street; they lived two streets down at the end of the street. the party was sort of going to be split between our two houses. I went inside and it turned out that there was a large hall-sized living room space that stretched between the two houses. I was inside that space more towards my own house and talking to Mike, who had no shirt on, really long hair, and was doing whippets.

the alarm went off and when I went back to sleep I was now at work. the Marketing folks were bugging me about CVS. Carlin and Matt HH had it all wrong and I was showing them WinCVS. everyone sat in these weird island stations, where four people sat together in a shared space like a cross or a +; i.e. each person had two walls and they all sat facing the inside corner of it all. it was sort of like Lina's office setup in Bubblegum Crisis 2040. anyhow Carlin got it and then I had to show Matt but he was doing something weird with his files. and in the back of my mind I was alarmed that Marketing was getting access to source control.

I dreamed that I had signed up for a class, but everything else going on in my life prevented me from attending at all. I figured, though, that really I knew everything in the class and even what I didn't, I could derive from what I did know when I took the final.

I showed up to the final and sat near the back of the class. the professor, an overweight man with male pattern baldness and a not-quite-handlebar moustache, noticed my presence and came back there to sit next to me as I started the final.

the questions were mostly multiple choice, and I looked at the test with growing dismay as I realized they dealt with physical units I had never heard of. a couple of them were asking about what units to use at deep-sea pressures. one of the units was fnarl, I remember that. as I flipped through the test I realized I was not ready for it at all, and this was a mathematical physics class.

I turned to the professor. I am sorry to say, I am not prepared for this at all, I said. he sort of shrugged; of course this was no surprise to him since I had not attended class. I asked him what I could do and he told me at this point, not much. I was going to fail the class. I left, with some vague notion that I could try to withdraw from the class, but thinking they wouldn't let me because I had showed to the final.

I was on the Olympic cycling team. early on in the games, we had taken the silver in a relay event. my silver medal was hanging in my display case on one of those mannequin necks that is often used by department stores to display jewelry. the display case was very crowded with awards and memorabilia.

I was working with someone on the computer as the olympics were drawing to a close. the screen has the intense blue background I associate with DOS applications. it has these clear plastic keys that were more like cylindrical buttons with rounded tops. I could take these keys and cut and paste them but was having difficulty selecting the right subset to address a memo.

just for grins I loaded the last bike race to watch realtime what was happening. it was a text printout of who was in the lead and what their average speed was. to my surprise, I was in third with a speed of 37. I'm guessing that's km/hr. I show it to the young woman I'm working with in Marketing. hey look, I say, if I can hold there it will be my personal best. I watch the numbers tick away like a stopwatch, fascinated.

I dreamt I was living in an older suburban house, like the kind one finds in west LA or the older parts of the Valley, with Karine, Heather, and Elena. we were going to throw a party and were scrambling to get the house ready.

I was outside dealing with the lawn and stuff. there was a tarp and a hose and other shite on the part of the lawn near the driveway, leading back to the backyard. I wanted to get that all picked up so someone didn't hurt themselved tripping over the hose or whatever in the dark. Heather came to ask me what I was doing dorking around outside when there was so much other cleanup to do. I told her this was important too and it would also be good if we all could move our cars down the street so folks had a place to park.

Elena moved her car while I coiled up the hose. I think we were going to hook up Xmas lights to the faucet to give it a nice effect. anyhow I discovered that we had three or four spiders on that part of the lawn that were similar to the one I have now in a tank. I called for help and got a cookie jar to pick them up. we talked about whether they would kill each other if we had more than one together.

the backyard was almost clean and other people were getting the spiders. it was all almost ready and I had to move my own cars. I think the first early birds were showing up and I wasn't ready personally but that always happens. but at that point I woke up with a guy at the door.

this is sort of disjointed, I am typing it long after the fact... I dreamt I was living with amity and one other person - heather? in some sort of school-sponsored housing. it was like a generic apartment with a couple bedrooms.

it was early evening and in the basement was a large computer room like from the early 90s. or from a movie... I found that if one believed enough, and went into the basement, then the outside would would change into this new place, lit with brightly coloured lights and very friendly. Amity knew about it too... I can't tell if the world changed, or we shifted to somewhere else...

we were preparing either to have people over or to go out, and I just wanted to have that change thing happen one more time... I snuck off to try to make it happen, but was too distracted by the upcoming events. that did not really deter me, I knew I could do it...

I dreamed of mo. I hadn't seen her for a while, and then suddenly she was back, as if nothing happened. nothing probably did.

we had to go somewhere, mo and karine and heather and I, and so we were there and hanging out. the place made me think of a studio lot. I was sitting next to mo on the pavement (she was to my right) and we were chatting about nothing in particular. part of my mind toyed with the incongruity of that, but whatever. to our left, maybe 15 feet away, was a chainlink fence, with that sort of green stuff that made it opaque to prevent passerby from looking through to the other side. anyhow we started laughing and both fell back to the pavement, and I realized that the physical click had happened.

mo rolled over me, to the other side of me and we were still talking. she was lying to my left, on her side facing me with her head propped up by her hand. a few yards away karine was watching, and shaking her head. I tried not to become too physically familiar, since nothing material had changed, but was fighting both that tendency and an incredible sense of deja vù.

then I woke up.

I can't remember the details on this one too well. I was in some generic urban bad neighbourhood of the down town variety, and it was after dark. I was there with a couple friends and we were visiting a campus, or a hospital, to find something out, or resuce a person trapped in the hospital... don't remember. the grounds were old in the sense that they had mature trees and walls with iron bars that were not always straight. the crime rate in the area was a concern.

we wandered around, vaguely lost, not sure what we were looking for. ran into a couple of people who pointed us in the right direction. I don't recall what happened next but it was not good and we had to get out of there.

I don't remember this dream too well either, but it started out on a little girl's birt'day in a far land. there was a white arch or arbour made of metal. she had a mentor who was entrusted with some important papers... a stack like 18 inches high.

something went wrong and they got thrown out. in my dream they and a couple others were travelling, keeping the arch and the papers. they were not prepared to travel, and in the course of their adventures both the papers and the arch took a beating. every place we went, the arch had to be set up. at one point the entire stack of papers ended up in the ocean and we all tried to rescue what we could. all the frilly parts of the arch evenutally broke off leaving the poles and cross piece.

I was going with Karine to some business in downtown Ventura. we pulled into a sunny lot and went into a whitewashed adobe building. while we were walking towards the buidling she told me she'd found a bowling alley there, but it was weird becuase it would not allow bowlers to use their own bowling balls.

she went upstairs ahead of me, but when I got to the second floor hallway, she wasn't to be seen. I went around a corner and heard bowling. I approached the place and there was a broad carpeted scale one had to stand on before entering. a lady was at the desk nearby. I looked around, and realized that the reason for all this was that they were pushing the limits of what the second storey could hold. if too many bowlers had their own bowling balls, that woudl be heavy and the building might not support it. the lady confirmed this for me, but said since business was light and nobody else had them, I could bowl with my own bowling balls this time.

I was on some street corner with other people in a line. I think it was some sort of line for temp work or something. around the corner out of an alley comes a shopping cart, but with no child-seat. in the shopping cart is heather's legless torso, upright; it's like she had become a cyborg except the robot part was the shopping cart.

her hair was perfect. she wheeled around and was apparently responsible for organizing the line or whatever. I wanted to ask her why but I didn't.

my dream was long and rambly. for once, the personalities of all the real people were, actually, their personalities...

we were on mars, which was getting terraformed. the rockets used to transport cargo were these strange reverse-conical things with dual-cylinder launch pads. the time & place of the dream was about 3 years after the terraforming started.

I was working with Ingrid on a dockfront business building, which was mostly glass. these scenes shifted back and forth between present and 2-years-ago flash backs, when I worked on installing the glass, was always worried about oxygen, and had a supervisor who used a switch on my legs to exact obedience. the present was just Ingrid and I having lunch and discussing our next contract; Ingrid was sort of a confident mercenary type.

the landscaping and water and dock were all new in the last year and it was quite pleasant. we went on a small powered boat... small for a yacht, big for anything else, maybe pontoon-sized. I noted some dark suits on a much larger nearby boat, that wasn't docked. I asked Ingrid can you hold your breath? and she said yes of course and we jumped into the water... went down down down maybe 20 feet. I started to panick at the depth when our boat started up and realized if I was any higher I would have been caught in the screws.

we went onto the shore and into the glass buildings.

I was camping with a group of people. it was some organized medium-sized trip - a few hundred folks takiong over the campground. the campground was typical SoCal Los Padres type, deserty scrub...

the group I was with, we set something up with one of the picnic tables and coolers and stuff. it was getting towards eevening and two women arrived who I thought woudl be cool to camp with. they were well known. what happened though was they were very bitchy becuase we hadn't hooked up the running water yet (there was a hookup near the picnic table, and a drain pipe too). I got a lot of lecturing on letting it go. but really, we weren't ready to do that - were missing a cooler or something.

elena was there with her husband and they had brought this ancient mid-sized RV. it was packed full of stuff and it was dusty and the interior was cracked and crumbly with age. I was rummaging through it and it had spiderwebs.

there was a place in the center of the campground where one could go and play "desert games". like drop a ring on a piece of wood stuck in a cactus. one ofthem involved a snake handling, I really wanted to do that. before you could you had to drop the rings. I found I was able to win that game.

this dream has faded out but I was involved with a guy who was doing human experiementation out in a big ranch-like house in the Mojave. he had a baby and took out the baby's skull and messed with it quite a bit. I remember looking at the screaming child on the table as the doctors messed with its head and hoping I would never need to experience what it was feeling.

but then an ambiguity was introduced becuase maybe I had. the dream lept forward and the child was older, and had no skull still. I was younger, and was now maybe in my late teens, and I was missing most of my skull, and we were both being watched over by this guy.

I had to run an errand and she offered to ride a motorcycle to do it. I said no way becuase she had no skull, it was really dangerous. she got on a bicycle and rode around, defiant.

there was more to it but it's really faded. maybe later.

I was camping with Karine and Darrel and Frank. it was a campout like chillits but was at a site other than camp & sons. on one side of us were Rachel and Darren, on the other a family with kids. our space had some low bushes and the family had hung kid-sized hammocks. Crosby was with us.

it was Sunday morning and Darrel was sort of agitated to get going. I wanted to hang around a bit more - Crosby was curled up sleeping in one of the kids' hammocks, and it was so cute. but Darrel insisted - so we packed up - Crosby climbed out of the hammock and the people next to us were breaking down too.

we walked back to our car past the Ryder truck Rachel had brought. below us, to our left, there were a lot of campsites in various states of teardown. Darrel said, I told you I smelled fire and Rachel said yah, a lot of people brought fish.

I needed to transport myself pretty far, on my bike. I think we were moving or migrating or something like that. the path was like a dirt road, through a field, towards a mountain pass in the distance, so it was a challenge to ride. some friends had gone before, because I had been dubious I could do it.

I finally decided why not, it's not like a race, I could just go at my own pace and it was all good. I was going on an older bike with two friends, who were experienced trail riders. they were married. there were other people too, I think becuase it was a general migration.

we started out, and my pair of friends were behind me 15-20 feet. the ground was relatively flat, but not hard packed dirt. it was really hard to pedal through. after about half a mile I started to suspect the difficulty wasn't the ground, and was twisting around to see if my back tire was flat. finally the woman (she had dark long hair) called out yah, it was flat.

I was in the kitchen in a house with Elena and Karine. this was a different kitchen from my real one but the pink tile was still there. Elena and I were doing laundry and having some difficulty with the washer, which was a front loader.

we got it to work, and just as I was about to relax, it stopped. we messed with it some to get it working again, and then, it overflowed. the overflow came out the top part where the soap went in. instead of being all soapy like washer overflow normally is, it was full of multi-coloured bath beads of varying sizes. theu were all primary colours, except weird pastel-ly tones like bath beads are. the sizes went up to about 3 inches.

they were everywhere, as washing machine overflow usually is. the overflow went into the hall and living room, and some of the beads collapsed, staining the carpet. I started to try to pick then up, giving Karine a sheepish look about it, although I'm not sure what I would have done differently.

I don't remember much of the detail on this, but I and diverse others were going on a road trip. we were living in Oregon and it was late summer; we were going to go to some campout in Northern California.

Rachel was riding with me, and there was some delay getting out shit together. we left in the early afternoon, and the only other thing I remember is that we were looking for an exit named "Hardding".

I don't remember the start of this dream, and there are a lot of holes in the below... but I was in some sort of forced labour situation and had to get out. I was new and with many others. we worked for some organization that was spread out across a lot of otherwise empty territory. field and fields of some sort of grain separate these cylindical stone work towers inside which was apparently customer service call centers. each one was specilized. workers came and went in helicopters and jeeps under the watchful eyes of armed guards.

I decided to go talk to the guys in the field about stuff. one of them was louis. I decided that to get out I needed to make my way up to the main house. I ran over to the edge of a field where a woman and some others were planting ground cover. it was prickly, and I was barefoot. as I got there I stepped on it once, trying to jump across the ditch at the edge of the field, and it squished. and I decided I didn't want to wreck her efforts, so I walked on the edges. jumped, rather: I was bouncing like I was walking on the moon. the woman still didn't appreciate my squishing her plants.

I don't really know any of the songs from paul's boutique. I dreamt that I put the CD on, and recognized the first song. it was not rap, but rather rock, and I thought, yah, the beastie boys went through this genre too. now I remember.

I looked at the back of the CD case and there was a b&w headshot of the three of them.

I woke up to "Time for Livin'" stuck in my head. I think. I don't know the names of their songs too well either.

I dreamt that ramon came by; he had ridden his bicycle. he was a bit unconcerned about the need to be careful around bohdan. because his bike kept the front door from latching, bohdan got out. it took a minute or two to notice.

bohdan took off. the house was like my mom's near a park. I went after him, thinking about all the havoc and damage. I took his gentle leader with me. when I got to the park it wasn't as bad as I thought, but he was chasing a couple kids. and people wanted to pet him. it was not hard to get himn and put his gentle leader on him, but he really wanted to be with the people. and it was too crowded to really stop it. a lady came up wanting to befriend him. I was cautious but she was able to do so and he was very happy about it.

it occurred to me that in this whole episode he ran twoards the people and was enjoying himself. I thought maybe he's better. that didn't stop me from taking him home.

while cleaning the garage, I found a homemade crossbow. neat. it had a trigger, so once it was wound up you aimed it as a rifle and then pulled the trigger. I put it on the mantle. I had some notion of giving it to a younger male relative.

days later, we were cleaning and found a pigeon feather. I asked Karine if I could glue it to the crossbow. she said sure. I put the feather on a paper towel, and put glue in three places. I went to the crossbow and started looking for where it would fit and be aesthetically pleasing. that led to my examining it more closely. I held it like to crank it, and then to fire; it seemed there was nowhere on it a feather would fit that would not look stupid, or get crushed.

the crossbow had a pistol grip. I hadn't thought much about it but when trying out holding it I realized, that there was no reason for the pistol grip. you never held it there to fire the crossbow... wait. I looked again. there were two triggers, too.

I was with some largish group in the desert. for lack of a better way to descibe it I'd have to call it a paramilitary hippie community. we all lived in some semi-permament encampment around an outcropping that I presume had water.

I was part of the operations part, we helped administer things. Maria was part of this, a younger Maria than my boss is now. I'm not sure if she was my boss or not but her boss was this colonel dude who looked like Dr Phil. he lived in a big military tent.

it was Saturday night and everyone was partying or whatever. I was with Elena, I think, and we were doing acid. Maria was with us too. we were in the back of some Jeep-like military vehicle and someone else was driving; we were going arount eh edge of the encampment. what a beautiful night. Elena and I faced backwards and Maria sat in the back facing us (forwards). Maria was fucked up, and basically had her head in her lap.

we were looking around thoroughly enjoying the experience, the sights, the sounds, the feel of the breeze. I gently shook Maria's arm to see if she was alright, and to admonish her to appreciate the feel of the breeze. she lifted up her head and looked at me, and started "well on the planet I'm on..." I looked at her and her pupils were sooooo dilated. I laughed and reminded her to look around and appreciate the breeze.

so I dreamt that karine started working at my work. she was responsible for testing some parts of the server tools that were in house, not the customer applications. we were all there working late, and I had a mild concern she was in over her head.

she ended up finding a bug where if one user was using the tools on one machine, he would freeze up when another user accessed the same tool set. she chased it down to a certain model of compter used, called a "volcano". she was having a lot of fun despite the hour.

I was downstairs talking to Matt and Sandy about other project issues when she reported the problem. they sort of rolled their eyes like they do until she explained how she had isolated it. then they realized they'd been having those problems in previous rev's too. they were very impressed.

we had been talking about other reported problems and trying to prioritize fixes. the project was that part of the tools could be dropped because the volcano boxes had that portion built-in. however things were pretty fucked on solaris as a result. I pointed out that if we merely forbid use of the solaris boxes on that net, problem solved.

a lot of the troubleshooting was done with a monochrome amber monitor looking at obscure logs.

I was in a conference room, like the eworld conference room we used to have daily status meetings in. beige, with the curtains always drawn. there was a meeting I was attending, and my boss maria, and 6 or 7 others.

I threatened to quit, and she got really mad at me for doing so in front of other people. however it had gone past the time of being discreet, and she grabbed my arm and chewed me out in front of those same people. they sort of just sat there looking on.

I was seated at a round table, in a rather dim room. there was a light over the table, hanging form the ceiling. at the table with me were cynsa and mo. cynsa said to me, wouldn't it be neat, if the way [some unremembered work problem solution] it could be extended, was to have the numbers be fully imaginary? that would be so fucking cool. mo was not impressed. I could tell where cynsa was coming from, and understood her fascination, or rather the reason behind it, her lack of understanding of higher math and why someone missing that knowledge would be think that the attribute of coolness would belong to inmaginary numbers. it was spoken like a true science fiction fan.

I tried to think of a way to explain, and started out saying I studied imanginary numbers in college... and then I paused, thinking, this is not the correct terminology. I looked at mo, and just as I was about to corrrect myself and say it, she said, complex analysis. I went on to explain that no matter how you extend the numberline, you do not hit imaginary numbers.

I was staying in some hotel with a lot of royals. I don't know how I fell in with them, but I was formally a guest of theirs. their view of the world was interesting. at one point I looked at a panel that concealed a lot of different safes. each one had a 1/4" hole drilled in it. as if it was common for guests and servants to at least make the attempt. I waited until a good time, and tried it too, but all I succeeded in doing was clearing debris from the hole.

the floor below where we were staying had a gym. I really felt the need to work out, and a lot of the royals who were teens / 20s did too. I thought I would go to the gym and one of them mentioned how sad it was that it would not Do for them to be seen in a place where regular folk changed their clothes or were taking sauna.

at some point I left and was in an urban environment. I went to my loft, which I shared with one other person. there was a storefront too. when we got there the store front had been taken over by images and advertising for star wars III - all this stuff with darth vader and a volcano and weird heavy space-like mechanics and posters.

I was in my living room, but it was much more sparesely furnished than it is now. I had a friend there. he was very young, and filipino, and had a bandana around his head. he was sitting at the end out the couch towards the door. there was a lot of street work going on outside.

I went outside and spoke to one of the men, then came back in. the queen is coming, I told my friend. she is coming to visit, and to personally thank you for your contribution. as I said it I realized that most of the streetwork was tv crews laying the yellow-and-black cables necessary to accomodate their uplinks.

my friend was alarmed, in the way clandestine operatives get alarmed by official acknowledgement. I will be ineffective if people know who I am, he said. it will be ok I replied... although with the TV crews I was startiing to have my doubts.

I was living in a big house, with plaster walls and panelling that came halfway up. I forgot what that sort of decor is called. old. anyhow the plaster part of the walls was textured, and much painted.

I was there with karine and mo, and this part of the house was dark, ill-lit, with no windows. there was a hallway with yellowy lights, that led back from the front rooms and then took a left turn. it almost had a hotel-like feeling. I got it in my head that I was painting the plaster part.

I got all the paint together and a roller with a long handle. I had to paint the ceiling first and got the roller wet before I remembered something. I leaned the roller against the moulding at the bottom of the plaster part (I REALLY can't remember the name of it, it bugs me) and it left a pink mark.

mo had cautioned me on the paint colour - I guess the big house was jointly owned by a bunch of us - and now I saw it on the wall, she was right. it was a pink slightly darker than pepto-bismol. I was sure I wanted the walls that colour, still, but seeing it on the moulding pissed me off (I wanted it creme) and also made me wonder if perhaps painting the ceiling that colour was a bad idea.

the first part of the dream is very badly faded. I was living in a coastal town and working with people who had beeen mindwiped. I was trying to get them to overcome the wipe. one of the guys had been a punter in college, and he intimidated me. his post-wipe name was something french like "reloux".

one of the other guys was someone I had worked with in the past, and I was sad this had happened. I dubbed him "redoux" but this didn't really jog his memory. there was a confrontation in front of a chain link fence during which I admitted the punter guy had always intimidated me.

afterwards we were supposed to go work in this house near the ocean. actually it was a house I had dreamed about before.

then in the second part of the dream I had to go to the doctor, and it didn't do any good. and the rest of the dream was far more clear.

we were arrayed inside a building, waiting for a raid. we could see them outside, preparing to come in the door. they were in suits. the building decor was mostly white. I was on the upper balcony, peering out through the front door from behind the bannisters. one guy, leading them but not in charge? I knew him, anyhow. he was thin, with dark hair and a skinny dark tie.

they were obviously ready to come in. I got tired of waiting. I grabbed a silver gun from the person next to me, and sighted, and fired. the result sort of spun lazily around. it was a flare gun but shot little flares. the guy laughed at me. disgusted, I got my own gun, sighted, and fired. the bullet punched through the glass without shattering, and hit him in the lower left side. he looked up at me, annoyed but apparently not wounded terribly. must have had a vest on.

it has totally faded out. I did not write it down quickly enough. but I was dreaming, about a gathering in a large house around a long rectangular table, and someone challenging me to a duel, and rapiers being involved. lighting... was like batman returns. that is the way my life is lit.

it was very tense, but relaxing at the same time, becuase it was so familiar. yes, this is a dream I have had many times, or the environment of the dream has recurred over and over. yes, yes, this is what happens. I wondered why I did not recall it before. I was happy I would get to write it here.

then I woke up and there were ants and dogs and humans.