Updates from the Dream Diary

6-1-2003

A bunch of us — me, Debbie, Mike Ford, Elise Matthesen, and others — are staying in a mountain chalet that has been converted into a hotel. The place is full. We're waiting for something to happen. There is a certain amount of clambering about the rooftop and eaves of the place.

While walking along a corridor on the top floor, I hear a sound: the chopping sound of helicopters. I look up through a skylight and see a helicopter gunship hovering above the chalet. It's Governor Jerry Brown and his military escort. [In waking life, Brown is the former governor of California, and is presently the mayor of the city of Oakland.]

Governor Brown has arrived for an important meeting with us, and we aren't pleased that he has brought a military force with him. Debbie complains to me "It is just like he had driven here in a tank."

The hotel manager is in a swivet: there is no room left in the hotel for Governor Brown, let alone his retinue. We discuss what we can do about this. I offer to share a room with some of our companions. The trouble is that the rooms have only one bed each. Who is willing to share a bed with me. Can I sleep on a sofa?

We walk the hotel corridors looking for the right room for the Governor. I discover that the hotel in fact has lots of empty rooms, completely unfinished — no furniture, no plaster on the walls, no plumbing, nothing but bare stone walls.

6-3-2003

A lot of dreams last night, all of them involving a trip to the World Science Fiction Convention being held [in this dream, at least] in Melbourne, in Australia.

First we arrive at the airport — broad, flat concrete, with a blocky terminal. We have to walk a ways from our airplane to the terminal. The sky is clear and the sun is hot; the weather feels tropical to me. I think that we must be near to the Great Barrier Reef.

Someone asks me if this is my first trip to Australia. I surprise Debbie (who is traveling with me) by saying "No." I had visited once before, traveling many hours for a visit that lasted less than a day. [I think I was remembering in this dream another dream that I had a year or so ago in which I did just that. Debbie shouldn't have been surprised, though, because she was with me in that dream, too.]

We get settled in our hotel, which turns out to have a casino in it. Debbie asks me if I mind being here and not being able to play poker (the implication being that we can change hotels if this is a problem). I say that it isn't an issue, and I walk through the clamorous casino floor, observing that they don't in fact have a poker room after all.

In a later dream that night I'm talking to Cynthia Gonsalves, who turns out to be chairing this Worldcon, having been runnning things from a distance until the day it opened. Then I'm walking through the hotel, which is now a sprawling, open series of small buildings connected by shaded walks. In one building is a restaurant, in another a gift shop, guest rooms in yet another, and so forth. I walk through a lot of hotel, but never actually get to the convention.

6-5-2003

It's the ending of a science fiction convention — perhaps Minicon. Steve Brust is selling books in the dealer's room. I buy a book that he's written. The price is $3.95. I hand him four $1 bills, and he gives me a nickel in change. Steve also gives me a dealers-room badge, so now I have access behind the scenes.

I go back to our hotel room to pack up our own stuff. Debbie is waiting for me, because I'm the only one who can unhook and put away our oscilloscope and other electronic equipment.

We wind up at Steve's house after the convention, and Steve has large quantities of books for sale, many many copies of individual books. In a large display of books I see stacks and stacks of Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, which I point out with delight, and next to them (completely out of character for Steve, it seemed to me) stacks of books by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

6-6-2003

For some peculiar reason having something to do with tax laws I have decided to go back to my high school, finish my senior year, and graduate. Apparently this will save me a great deal of money, and some foundation or other will cover my tuition. (I went to high school at a private boarding school in Hawaii.) All of the action of the dream takes place before the school year actually begins. I sort through my things to pick out what I'm going to take with me. I take my cat Rocky with me, and he comes back from a mandatory visit to the vet in Waimea with a dire diagnosis and promise of substantial veteranary bills to come. No matter — I can write a check for them right now!

I ponder the irony of a forty-four year old with a Master's degree in physics taking classes with a bunch of teenagers. The course work will be a cruise, and I'll have plenty of time to update my weblog.

Strangely enough, one of my roommates from my first year at Caltech turns up (can't remember his name — he was the guy working on an environmental engineering degree). We go jogging together. Later on, I wind up in a party in a bar for the current crop of graduating seniors. My eye is caught by a number of eighteen-year-old women in white cocktail dresses wearing leis around their necks and hibiscus in their hair.