Grab Bag o' Dreams

4-3-2003: Three union posters, viewed in succession.

The first shows a picket line of workers, on strike for higher wages. Written above and across the image, the caption "Protecting ... Our Livelihood!"

The second shows the shop steward standing up to an abusive foreman. The caption reads, "Protecting ... Our Self-Respect!"

The final poster shows a worker kneeling as he works on an open machine. He's wearing kneepads. The caption: "Protecting ... Our Knees!"

The ironic contrast between livelihood and self-respect on one hand and knees on the other seemed to be at least part of the point of the dream.

4-6-2003: Nice hand, sir

I'm playing a hand of eight-or-better seven card stud (that's a high-low split game, with an eight qualifier for the low). I've got a four and a deuce down and an ace for my door card; my fourth-street card is a six. My opponent shows the deuce and four of spades. My hand is high, I act first. I bet, and he calls.

Fifth street brings him an offsuit five, and a trey for me. I now have a 64 — "number two" — the second nut low hand. I bet, and my opponent calls. I think that my hand is goddamn good, and that if he had a wheel he would certainly raise me; I conclude that my low hand is a lock.

Sixth street gives me a nine (a blank, basically) and my opponent the jack of spades. I bet my hand, he calls. I get another blank as my last card, dealt face-down. My opponent has three chips left (we're playing 2-4). If he's made a wheel, I have to call him anyway, and if he hasn't then I'm getting my money back; and he can't raise me. I bet one more time, and he calls all-in.

We turn our hands over. My opponent has a wheel and an ace-high flush in spades, scooping. He'd made the wheel on fifth street and the flush on sixth, and he passively called my bets.

(My thought in the dream was that my opponent had misplayed his hand, but upon waking reflection I think that this was not the case. Usually, when a player does this to me in real life, I think that he or she has played the hand badly, by not raising me and taking control of the betting. I have a hand that I basically have to take to the river at whatever price I'm getting. I should have lost a lot more chips than I actually did ... except that my opponent was short-stacked. He won as many chips from me as he possibly could, and if I had happened to have slackened in my betting, he could take it up and bet at any point, and earned exactly the same amount as he did.)

4-8-2003: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

I'm in the Oval Office, in front of the desk of President Bush. On his desk is an ornamental cigar holder, presenting a fan of cigars in a shape like a peacock's tail. I take one of the cigars. The President isn't pleased at this, but it would be rude for him to stop me. I take the cigar home with me.

(I remember having a cigar box in my room at home, containing cigar butts and ends, broken, torn or half-smoked; but the cigar I've just brought home is whole.)

I trim the ends of the cigar, light it, and smoke it in my bedroom, savoring its taste. Then I realize that my roommate, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, will be very annoyed by the reek of cigar smoke filling the apartment. But it's too late, the house is already filled with smoke, so I finish the cigar, not putting it out until it is done.

(Awake, journaling this dream, I remember the sense that the apartment was my apartment in Pasadena in 1987, where I was concerned not with the smoke not of cigars but cigarettes, and my roommate was Mike Lewis, a chemistry grad student. I haven't been Patrick's roommate since 1980.)

4-9-2003: Abducted by aliens!

We've been abducted by aliens! In their space ship, orbiting far above the Earth's surface, we are subjected to rude and unpleasant experiments and probings. Something is growing in the belly of one of the other abductees, a young woman. It seems she is about to give birth to something, and she is placed in an alien maternity harness. This is a tight coil of rope or cable, and someone must be wound up with her, holding her spoon-fashion from behind, while she goes through labor. That someone is me, and the cabling is wound tightly around us. With a groan and a shudder, the woman expells the thing inside her: a dark sphere with a rough and mottled surface, covered with slime. The aliens take this thing away, prizing it highly.