kismetism

Dream!

I was at some sort of small reunion… it didn’t seem any bigger than maybe ten or so people, and all of the SC were there, but only Kim featured strongly and this guy I knew from elementary school and didn’t really interact with in high school.

I don’t know what got us started, but we were trying to solve a math problem. Not a terribly difficult one… it was a word problem involving two people and a set of twins living together, how much was their accumulated rent? Or something like that. And we were using a nice TI graphing calculator to arrive at the answer, but…

… Well, you kind of have to know how the TI-89 calculator works, like you can type in a calculation and it will give you an answer that is accurate, but not totally simplified.

So we were using this calculator to try and solve this four step problem, but each time we solved a part of the problem, the calculator would give us the answer for that step and it’d be accurate, but there would be a little bit of “extra stuff” in it. So as we kept going, the solution just got more and more convoluted with stuff and we could never make out what the final answer should have been.

That’s it. Yeah, not very long or complicated or eventful, but I thought the problem of looking for an answer and having your incremental step solutions be too complicated was a fascinating metaphor.

But for what in my life, I am not totally sure. XP

Dream! I’ve already forgotten a TON of the details, but there was this one neat element that I have to talk about cause it was amazing and awesome and … — mmph. ::stops herself from making dumb DDR reference::

I was in some sort of cave/bunker complex with someone else, not sure who, and we were staying there for the night… I think as refugees, or at least the circumstances were not entirely safe and secure.

At any rate, there were these two wooden box/board-like things that were enchanted for playing board games and I was totally enthralled by them. At first I thought it could only do like two or three abstract strategy games and its surface would melt and change whenever we wanted to try something else. And it responded to voice or touch commands. But then I found out, by accident, that it actually knew up to a list of … I don’t know, seventeen games, including Monopoly. >_>

… But then after sleeping and waking up the next day, I rolled over on my bed to interact with my board and talked to it to get it to show me something and when it started shifting, I realized that I was talking to my messenger bag rather than the board… but my messenger bag was the one responding and I got all freaked out and it turns out that (my board, at least) had been possessed by some sort of creature or person and it had moved to my bag at night cause it liked me.

And I asked if it was because it liked me or if it intended to get close enough to possess me later when my guard was down. And guiltily it said yeah, it intended to take over me. >:|

But of course since I found it out, it was just going to sit quietly and be a friendly companion cause I’m so smart. >_>

… And then we ended up using the board a little bit for subterfuge, because it apparently could show us past events, so we were reviewing the events leading up to us discovering the cave system in the first place… which included something about a pair of earrings that I apparently stole and started wearing just before this and that was at least part of the reason we were on the run. (except i don’t have my ears pierced irl, lol?, and clip-ons hurt like hell).

And I woke up sometime after that. I think the device was influenced by all my playing around with my Kindle. :P But it was much more advanced than that, of course… basically a Microsoft Surface + iPad + Minority Report + Star Trek level technology mashup.

It was cool, though, except for the possession part. :(

Dream!

In which my parents and I were traveling around with Loki and he was super intelligent and could TALK … though in retrospect he never actually said anything and dream logic determined that his intelligence manifested itself by being able to understand everything that humans were saying and then … I don’t know, maybe it was an inexplicit sort of telepathy where the information could be communicated directly to a recipient.

In any case, we were driving around in LA (which was for some reason located on the East Coast) and I accidentally let word slip about my super intelligent dog … and someone then decided to KIDNAP him. D: When we woke up and found him missing, we were freaking out for a bit but then Loki apparently was able to communicate his kidnapper’s destination to another dog, which resulted in this sort of 101 Dalmations Twilight Bark effect (only less noisy) as dogs and cats communicated the news.

And then my old cat Lucky randomly appeared in the dream as a pet that we’ve had all along and was also traveling with us (lol dream logic) and he was ALSO telepathic or whatever and was able to tell… maybe it was just me? … that Loki was being taken to Michigan. OKAY, MICHIGAN, LET’S GO and we drove there and Lucky napped on my lap the entire time. (i miss my kitty. qq.)

When we got there, we somehow knew to go to some random school building like place to find Loki and the kidnapper. And we went one of those rooms that has, like, a wall immediately in front of the door and you have to walk maybe five or six steps before you enter the main part of the room. We did this and it seemed to be devoid of any people, just had a podium and some desks.

But for some reason I got suspicious and turned around immediately to face the door and the kidnapper was there! with a video camera that she was filming us with (and instinctively I understood that this was for some kind of framing evidence) and she was trying to leave quietly and close the door behind her but I caught it before she could trap us inside.

…. … Hmm, it gets really muddled around here. There was a confrontation with lots of people and the kidnapper tried to claim that we were the ones kidnapping her dog. For whatever reason, the animals were no longer telepathically talking to people (maybe they were doing it to cover up their extraordinariness) … but we were able to prove that it wasn’t the case because Loki would obediently follow our directions and not the dognapper. So then we all lived happily ever after, or something.

I suppose it may or may not be pertinent that the dognapper was actually someone I knew, from USC… one of my instructors, she taught the world-building course that I took. >_>

And… I have no idea where any of that came from. Some of the crime/framing things might be Phoenix Wright influence, but I haven’t played it since I finished the third game some time ago. Hrrmmm, oh well. I’ve also never been to Michigan. ::shruuug::

Dream! Not sure what triggered this, but it must have something to do with having met Spark’s grandmother a couple weeks ago. >_>

I don’t remember much, but I know at least Kim and Manda were there, and there was at least one other but I’m not sure who… get the feeling it was another SC. And they were all sitting at a table in the room I was in and I was sleeping.

And I woke up really slowly and hazily and heard them talking quietly. And I felt like, as I was waking, that my mind was strangely clearer than usual. And near my bedside there was a sheaf of papers, which I thumbed through. They were pages of the manga … nonexistent pages, mind you, that haven’t been drawn yet (in real life or the dream) … and I scanned them with interest.

Then I got up and shuffled over to the girls at the table and … hm, well, I broke down crying in Kim’s arms, saying something about how I missed them and wished my mind was not messed up so that I could be “present” with them all the time, rather than … only really there in body. And I had been on the verge of asking what I was like when I wasn’t having a moment of clarity when I woke up.

I suppose, somewhere, this is what I have decided dementia must be like… where most of the time your mind is in a fuzzy, dreamy haze and you don’t live in the moment anymore. I said a while back, while Spark was talking to Lloyd about his grandmother, that I wouldn’t want to live like that. >_>

Anyway! Happy fourth. XP

Had an overload of dreaming last night / this morning, all clearly borne from my deeply embedded and only sometimes acknowledged anxiety of not being prepared to teach this summer.

There was no particular timeline, but all the basic fears were represented… coming in day one and having nearly none of my TAs arriving on time or at all. Worse, having a couple actually show and all they would do was goof off in a corner. My co-instructors completely missing in action.

I didn’t have TIC groups prepared so couldn’t seat people immediately… tried making them on the fly and students grumbled at having to move. AIC students hating me for my lack of planning. Students who were bored. Students who were bored and playing games already.

Even the lab itself was completely reorganized, as well as relatively disorganized… tables and computers moved in a totally new formation that was completely non-conducive to our “groups” mentality… some computers not working, spacing uneven so people were cramped, and the overhead lighting not working in some places and flickering.

My subconscious is so dramatic.

Man. Had two incredibly convoluted and complicated dreams last night of “epic movie” proportions. At first I thought they were combined stories, but in retrospect I think they were two separate ones. Unfortunately most of the details are totally lost on me and all I remember are the main themes.

The first one was something like… me and several other people (no one I knew) were training to become the apprentices of the … some kind of group of people who controls the aspects of the world, I guess (like the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony).

All I really remember was that I got assigned to be the apprentice for Death, which I totally balked at and didn’t want anything to do with, but then Death started going through these creepy intriguing passion speeches about why his job was essential and how it was tied up with all these interesting morality issues that I apparently secretly enjoy dealing with. (Maybe it should be noted that in the aforementioned Incarnations of Immortality series, I did like the first book the best, which was about the incarnation of Death.) Though shortly after it was revealed that Death had some kind of alternate agenda for recruiting specifically me.

The second dream was basically a regurgitation of Public Enemies to some degree… that is, the primary conflict was one good guy and one bad guy, and I was on bad guy’s “side” helping him manage his heists, though in the dream they were less about heists and more about doing things that the law enforcement would disapprove of, but for a really good cause. And for whatever reason, I was bantering with someone else who was on the “good” side and basically swaying her to our side, because she was starting to realize that we weren’t really bad people.

Strange that both of these dreams were about moral ambiguity, at least in part. What have I been doing recently that involves that… ::puzzling::

Took a nap and had some kind of whack dream. It was unusual because I never identified as one of the people in the dream, rather than just experiencing the narrative as an omniscient other. Dream logic ftw.

—

It was about a little girl who lived next door to a really eccentric couple and it wasn’t totally clear why at first. But they frequently asked the little girl to come over and house sit for them. And they kept their home spotlessly clean.

(it should be noted that I never really understood the concept of house sitting. giving the keys to the neighbor so they can come feed your cat, sure, … maybe water the plants. But house sitting? notsomuch.)

Anyway, one night the girl is going home after the adults come back and they pat her on the head as she goes, and she finds another kid who lives on the street coming up to the house and she asks what he’s doing. And they’re friends, and he tells her that the couple asked him to house sit tonight, too.

And the little girl’s like, huh?, because she just got done with house sitting and they’re back already, so why’s he gotta do it too?

And it turns out that the two people who live in the house are like… pirates. Or some kind of seafaring guardian type thing (cause… pirates are guardians… O.o ) … and apparently it was getting to that time of year where they needed to sacrifice a kid in order to strengthen the spell that … protected the area from sea serpents and kept their house so clean. (that’s a nice bonus.)

And they were going to sacrifice the boy, cause they liked the girl too much to consider doing that to her. (and the kid from across the street was a brat.) But in the midst of figuring all this out, this mermaid comes and admonishes the couple for what they’re doing… because sacrificing a little kid for the good of many still is bad… and the couple has been neglecting/cheating their guardianship duty (UR DOIN IT RONG) in their effort to appear normal and blend in with the rest of the modern world.

And the little girl in the meantime decides to go swimming in the couple’s pool, which boggles them for some reason and somehow that inspires the couple to do the right thing.

And then I woke up.

—

Honestly, I think if you tweaked some of the elements, it could make an awesome children’s book. Can we say Hayao Miyazaki? >_>