Best. Poker Dream. Evar.

Alan Jaffray, in a Terrence Chan's LiveJournal, tells of a dream he had about playing a novel form of triple-draw lowball at the World Series of Poker:

I've never played live triple draw outsider of ARG events.

I had a nightmare about it, actually. I'd satellited into the $50K HORSE, but showed up a couple hours late, just in time for the triple draw round which had been added at the last minute. Instead of shuffling and dealing standard cards, the dealer gave each player a wooden box containing steamed buns over cabbage, the underside of the buns displaying the card value. I managed to use the provided spatula to peek at my bun-cards, but fumbled while preparing my discards - one of them broke open and my hand was declared dead. Then I woke up.

I'm reasonably sure this is not, in fact, a procedure commonly in use in live triple draw games.

(via Mason Kong)

Last Night's Dream: Of Death, Love, and Remembrance

I am walking outdoors, talking with Bill Gibson. Bill sees something on the ground, bends over to pick it up. It is the wrapper from a stick of gum that has been folded very small and tossed into the gutter. Time and the elements have polished it into a jewel-like state. Bill talks about his dead friend Lenny. Lenny would fold up chewing-gum wrappers like this and toss them away all the time, knowing that some of them would eventually become jewels like this. He would also throw soda and beer bottles into the sea, so that they would eventually be made into driftglass. Now, Bill said, Lenny is dead, but every so often Bill would find something beautiful that reminded him of Lenny. It is incumbent on us all, Bill told me, to do what Lenny did, so that, after we die, the people who loved us will be occasionally reminded of us, so that we can still be present in a way for them.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.

(William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene ii)

Return to Dreaming

I wandered away from posting my dreams last year. I even fell away from journaling them, after I had a really bad one that shook me up too much to write it down (although my therapist and I dissected it in some detail).

It's 2005, and I'm journaling my dreams again. Here are the latest:

1-2-2005 (1) I'm coming back to school, trying to find my dormitory. Last year, my dorm room was in Building 427. This year, according to the paperwork I have, it is in Building 463. I don't have a map of campus, but I remember where Building 427 is, so I go there and look around for my building. I find a building that I think is it, but it isn't a dormitory at all, but is instead filled with offices, classrooms, laboratories. I discover that the building is actually Building 2463, and that ivy on the wall had obscured the leading digit when I first saw it.

The dream segues into something about magic. I'm a student of Harry-Potter-style magic, and I have been captured by or somehow infiltrated the retinue of an evil wizard. In a room where the wizard's retinue is lounging about, a slender Asian woman wearing a leotard tempts me by posing suggestively in front of me, and then sitting in my lap. I worry that if she succeeds in seducing me I might fall under her sexual spell. I ask her if this is her intention, and she smiles at me, saying "Maybe...."

I notice C--------- in the room, lounging about suggestively, apparently trying to get the erotic attention of the evil wizard. "Is that wise?" I whisper to her. She shushes me, because she doesn't want either of us infiltrators to be caught and punished.

Another member of the retinue, an Asian man who resembles George Takei, tries to scare me, the newcomer, by telling me of the horrible things he has witnessed: babies impaled on swords, villages full of people slaughtered, and so on. I reply that I know about them, hinting (lyingly) that I've been hardened to that sort of thing.

(2) Amber dream: on a schoolbus, I say something that implies I know about Amber. Two big kids, one of them tall and fat, take exception, in a way that lets me know that they are Amberites, also. We are driving around a hill covered with townhouses and condominiums – and something changes! Someone on the bus is working shadow. But it's really hard to work with shadow this close to Amber.

Now I'm in an aircraft, passing over the landscape. We're flying over the Vale of Garnath. There is the chaotic landscape at the terminus of the Black Road ... and that long black streak through the forest is the Black Road itself.

Now I'm in some kind of confrontation with Brand, who starts out in the form of a manticore, but eventually shapeshifts into human form. I'm in trouble. I reach for a set of Trumps and pull out the first card I can find: Benedict's. I make mental contact. He won't know who I am, but he's my only hope for survival. "Mayday, mayday, mayday!" I say to him over and over again.

1-4-2005 I've been recruited to maintain a large, powerful laser system run by a secret government agency. It transpires that this laser is part of a starship, either part of its propulsion system, a weapon, or both. Lee Jones [the poker author and former programmer for SGI] walks by and warns me about being careful with high-voltage cables and connections.

I'm looking at a technical manual for the laser system. It's a high-powered infrared laser whose lasing medium is a solid [in waking life I think it might be an Nd-YAG or -glass laser]. The manual designates the laser as the BFL-768, and it's pretty clear that "BFL" is an acronym for "Big Fuckin' Laser". The technical manual has lots of illustrations showing plots of resonator designs and yield curves. I turn the pages and also find pictures of nebulae and galaxies.

I don't have a desk of my own, yet. I'm in the bare office space of the guy who is supposed to train me, but he isn't here. Overhead is the laser, festooned with electrical cables. I want to find my boss and my own office space. I want to put the manual down and go looking, but the manual is classified -- I don't want to leave it unattended, and I don't know the combination for any locks on the office filing cabinets. I carry it with me as I go looking.

The Man Who Unfolded Himself; Dreaming While Awake

I'm living in another timeline, one in which the Civil War never happened and slavery never ended. The US government is authoritarian and repressive. I am working to change things, working to free the slaves. A climactic battle approaches, and it looks as if my side, the anti-slavery revolutionaries are going to lose our final battle.

Somehow I have the ability to move along my own lifeline, and I move in time to a situation where I think I can do things differently and change things away from this defeat ... and it works! The slaves are freed, and America becomes a better place than it was.

But in doing so, I break open the gates between the alternate realities. I am now like Billy Pilgrim, only more so: unstuck in not just in time, but in all the possibilities encompassed by my lifespan.

I explore the amazing range of possibilities, moving from lifeline-thread to lifeline-thread quickly. Quick as those shifts are, when I arrive in a thread, I have a sense of the long duration of my life on that thread. The resulting experience has the sense of enormous amounts of detail quickly reviewed, but the detail is there to be examined when I choose to do so.

In the threads that involve defeating the slavers and freeing the slaves, I find myself married to a prominent midwife and natural-childbirth advocate

A bunch of threads pass through Austin, Texas. In some of these threads, the US is broken up into independent states and nations, and Austin is known as the Texas-stadt in some of them, and Texas-richt in others.

I find myself facing a group of tall, slender women wearing diaphanous gowns and silver filigree circlets on their foreheads. They are standing in a tight circle around one of their number. It is clear that they intend to do something sexual with the woman in the middle. They see me, and beckon me to join them. "But I'm a man," I say. One of them laughs, takes me by the hand, and pulls me into the circle. My body is now held close to those of the others, arms around me, my arms around them. One woman's face is particularly close to mine. "You may not touch yourself," she tells me. She smirks lustily when she adds, "You won't need to...." ("But I'm a man," I keep thinking. "Why am I welcome here?") [Later, and I can't recall if it was in the dream or not, I realized that it was possible that on that lifeline-thread, I wasn't a man, but a woman like them.]

Another thread finds me victorious and successful, and partnered with a man: [Omitted]. We sit together on a sofa in our livingroom, entertaining friends. [He] is vigorous and healthy, completely recovered from the effects of his waking-life surgery.

From here the scene segues into a peculiar homoerotic ritual of which I am the focus. There are a number of naked men, perched on ladders or hanging from ropes or swings. One man is tying his penis into a knot around a pretzel-shaped object. Men are singing and chanting. I look up, and a rain of semen falls on my face, my hair and my shoulders. I feel like I ought to be disgusted, but it is part of the ritual so everything is as it should be.

Next I am looking at Frodo Baggins and Gandalf facing each other, and somehow I know that in truth Gandalf is Frodo's grandfather.

At this point, I am awoken by the stirring of D. Potter in bed beside me. She is getting up to empty her bladder. I lay beside her as she gets out of bed, thinking of what I could recall of the dream, and realize that I'm not altogether awake, that it seems as if my REM state has persisted past the moment of my becoming aware of my surroundings. I'm thinking about the dream, feeling like it's particularly important, and wondering whether I should get up to try to write it down then and there, I am also having sudden rapid flashes of images (faces, pictures, landscapes) and sounds. I'm still dreaming, and at the same time I am awake. I decide that it is more important to be with the experience of dreaming while awake, and so I lay there, soaking in the experience of the quick flashes of images, sounds, thoughts.

D. returns to the bed and we snuggle close. "I've been having a really weird dream," I tell her, "but I don't know how to describe it. In fact, I think I'm still dreaming right now." The feeling of the solidity and warmth of her body has a different character from the ongoing dream flashes, and cuts through them, distracting me from them. They fade into normal wakefulness. Not long after that, I return to sleep.

Later in the night, in my dreaming, I find myself holding a book. It is a thick mass-market paperback: Slash, by David Vurt. I read the sales copy on the back cover. It is about a man, a social activist, who is married to a midwife and home-birthing advocate. I find myself disappointed that at least part of my earlier dream that seemed so important to me, should have been lifted wholesale from a book.

Dream Update: Bob Dylan, E-Book Typos, and the Last Stand of the Rohirrim

12-12-2003

Debbie and I are hurrying through the halls of a hotel and conference center, hoping we won't be late for the presentation, which we want to see because it features an appearance by Bob Dylan.

We make it to the function room, and discover to our relief that it hasn't begun and there are still seats. It begins, though, and we discover why the event isn't as popular as we anticipated. It turns out that Dylan is completely incoherent: unable to speak, barely able to sing.

12-15-2003

In the dealer's room of an SF convention, I'm looking at a portable electronic book reading device that (for some peculiar reason) has headphones. I unwind the headphone cable wrapped around the device, and look at its screen.

The text shown is of a vintage SF story from the 1930s, part of an anthology edited by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. The line of text has, to my surprise, what appear to be typographical errors. I look up at Teresa, who is standing there on the other side of the table. She shrugs.

It happens that there is a copy handy of the pulp magazine with the original version of the story. I open it up and find the relevant page. Yes, the typos are there in the original as well. Whoever transcribed it had transcribed it verbatim, errors and all. I would have thought that Teresa would have fixed it.

12-16-2003

I'm in Seattle, helping to deal with the aftermath of Deb's mother's death, cleaning her apartment and such. One morning I get up and set up to get dressed, sorting through clothes in our suitcase, picking out clean underwear and socks.

The house is nothing at all like the Notkin family house in waking life; instead it is a sprawling ranch house with lots of sliding glass doors, the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a development in Orange County.

Akiva [my nephew] comes into the room and tells me that if I want to check my email, I can use Windows. "That's okay," I answer, "I have my Macintosh with me; I can use it instead."

It's raining, and it's cold. As I look out of the window, the rain turns to snow. The snow comes down quite thickly.

I go upstairs and encounter my friend [Omitted]. She gives me a big, warm hug, and this evolves into a romantic clinch. She is giving me all the signs of wanting to make love to me, e.g., kissing my fingers, caressing my face, etc. I've wanted this for years, but doubt holds me back: Is this really what she wants for her own sake, or is she just doing this to comfort me for the dreadful times I've been going through? Is this right for her? Is it right for me?

The scene shifts, and I am inspecting my new guitar: I identify it at a Fender Stratocaster; but it bears no resemblance to a waking-life Strat. Its body is long and narrow, and it has a pebbled vinyl finish. I note quite proudly that it has a Floyd Rose locking tremolo bridge. I sling its strap around my shoulders and play a couple of chords. I'm ready to rock.

The scene shifts again, and I'm outdoors, in a grassy valley. It's time for me to join up with the Rohirrim, as the armies of the Enemy are approaching. It is sunset. I can see horses scattered among the trees at the edge of the valley, where the slopes of the hills end at the floodplain.

At the head of the valley, the riders of Rohan are gathering. Some are getting wood together to build a bonfire, around which we will make our stand. There is an opening in the rock wall behind us. I go through and find the secret shelter into which we would retreat if things go badly. Here the king is conferring with his advisors.

I encounter a friend, a fat femme dyke in flowing robes, with colored mylar foil strips and patches decorating her face. [She's nobody I know in waking life.] I'm very glad to see her, knowing that she's chosen to join this in our time of desperate need, on the eve of battle. She asks me how I'm doing. I tell her, to my own surprise at its truth, that I'm the happiest I've been in a long time, that the exhilaration and fear of the prospect of battle has supplanted the dark depression of the recent bad times. I'm at my best, I tell her.

Then I ask her: "Are you sure you want to be here? We're playing for keeps tonight, you know." "I'm sure," she answers.

There is a sound outside the shelter: it's the music of electric guitars! I tell everyone else to be quiet, and peer outside.

It isn't the attacking force of the Enemy as some might have feared. Instead, it is a battalion of soldiers, from the English Army. [It was very definitely "English", not "British", in the dream.] I hail them, and their commander identifies them as the such-and-such battallion of the umpteenth regiment, detailed to assist in the defense of Rohan. I reply that I'm an American, detatched to the First Eored of the Mark for liaison duty. "I hope you have plenty of ammunition for those rifles," I tell him. "We're going to need it." The prospects for our defense are now looking substantially brighter.

November Dreams, December Dreams

11-28-2003

I ride my bicycle downtown and lock it. I meet a woman for a date. It's our first date, so although it goes well, it doesn't go very far. I kiss her goodnight, and as we part ways, I muse on the "three date" rule and its implication for someone who is looking for a partner: Is it socially acceptable to interleave lots of first and second dates with lots of women before that crucial third date?

I return to my bicycle and unlock it. As I'm doing so, a car pulls up to the curb and men with guns get out and go into a building. It's a mob hit. The point of view shifts to an office foyer where the hitmen are firing submachineguns into an office door, and follows them out again.

Meanwhile, I have ducked into an alley and taken cover. The scene transforms. These aren't mafia hitmen; they are guerillas, and I am now a regular army officer. From my concealed position, I fire at the band of guerillas; they return fire and take cover.

The scene has entirely transformed into a rocky river valley, the ground covered with boulders and scree. I am now engaged in a prolonged firefight with enemy guerillas concealed among the boulders. I'm unsure how many opponents I'm facing, and I'm unsure of their locations. I am able to pick a couple of them off with single shots; then I engage in a prolonged exchange of fire with one guerilla, who has a large-caliber gun. I find myself staring down its barrel as I shoot at my opponent. But eventually I take him out.

Then, all is quiet. Are there any guerillas left? Maybe; but if there are, I'll just have to face their taking shots at me as I get out of there.

The setting is urban once again. A sergeant, who had been on guard detail, is wounded, having taken a bullet in his knee. I pick up his telephone and call headquarters to arrange for him to be picked up and taken to a hospital. The emergency room, I muse, is suddenly getting lots of experience handling gunshot wounds and similar trauma. My call gets transferred to my commanding officer, who chews me out for how I handled the firefight. "What do you expect from me? It's the first time I've seen fire in thirty years!"

11-29-2003

(1) I've just been hired for a new job at some kind of technology company. I'm unsure of how to do the job, or even whether I'm actually qualified for it. The nature of the job involved collating together various computer-generated weather reports and forecasts and generating a summary forecast, using my presumed weather knowledge and intuition, with the idea that this would be the best possible forecast. At my interview I promoted myself, saying that my physics degrees made me good for the job, that I had taken meteorology courses from experts, and so on. I've got my copy of Atmospheric Science by Wallace and Hobbs to put on my desk.

But I feel like I'm really unqualified. All I know about forecasting is that "persistence" is one of the best forecasting methods known ... but that it by definition is lousy at predicting changes in the weather.

On my first day on the job I fall asleep at my desk, and wake up late in the day. There are a bunch of full-color weather maps and satellite photos that need sorting, and I spend some time sorting them. But I realize that no one seems to care. My boss is nowhere to be found. I leave my desk and wander around the building. The ground floor is dark office cubicles and machine rooms. The upper floors are well lit, gleaming with chrome and plexiglass. I wander through a training area where customers learn to use the company's products. I talk with the CEO, who doesn't know who I am or who my boss is.

At last, for a relief, it's time to go home. It's a long way home, like a two-hour commute through the mountains. I hop onto my new motorcycle and get on the road. But it is beginning to rain, and I don't feel safe as a newly trained motorcyclist, so in the next town I pull over to wait for the rain to end. There is an older Indian casino there, and I go in, looking for the poker room. The interior of the casino is peculiarly dark and cramped. I find the poker room, but there are no games going (although they claim that a 1-5 stud game goes around the clock.)

(2) I'm spending lots of time in a hotel with a range of partying people. Some are very bourgeois, wealthy, materialist, and others are young hipster types. There is a rivalry going on between two older yuppie couples. The women in both couples seem to have taken a sexual interest in me, with the knowledge and consent of their male partners. But the rivalry is nasty. One couple is merely greedy and materialistic. The other couple, I'm sure, is a pair of scammers, perpetrating some kind of con. I suspect that they want to get me involved in some kind of rigged poker game, either to fleece me or to use my skills to fleece other rich people.

I get away from the yuppies and hang out with the younger people. I go to the communal bathing area and find a group of lesbians there, who invite me to join them. I'm minding my own business, getting clean, but they are engaging in sex play and without warning include me in their play: sensually caressing my arms and back. I reciprocate, but I'm wary of pushing boundaries: I caress arms, hands, and backs, but I stay away from obviously erotic touch.

One woman has had too much sun, and the sunburned back of her neck is peeling. I caress that, and brush away flakes of skin. At once, this is obviously a relief to her, and it is also painful. I try to be as careful as I can.

The materialistic yuppie couple comes in. The woman takes hold of me and holds my head between her breasts. She says we should spend some time alone together now. But then the other couple, the scammers come in. I break free, and the scammer woman takes me by the hand, leading me out of the room. There is a poker game going on, and they want me to play in it. Okay, it's the moment of truth: am I the one being conned here?

12-10-2003

(1) I'm in a political planning meeting with two of the characters from the play I saw last night. [The play was Continental Divide: Mothers Against, by David Edgar, mounted by Berkeley Rep.] The characters were Lorianne (the thin blonde [!] pundit) and Vincent (the black speechwriter). We are planning the campaign of the candidate, whom I really don't like (although I'm concealing this).

A beggar, a black man in ragged clothes, makes his way onto the estate where we are meeting, and accosts me: can I help him? He isn't asking for money or food. Instead, he wants me to help give him an injection. He proffers a hypodermic syringe filled with a clear yellow liquid. He explains that he is diabetic, and needs his insulin shot.

I realize that this is some kind of trap, a setup. The candidate has a hard line on drugs. I don't want to get involved in something that will tarnish my image in the campaign. I tell the beggar that I cannot help him. He drops the syringe on the ground in front of me and leaves. Now I know it's a setup – a real diabetic would have taken his insulin with him, and a real junkie wouldn't let his fix go to waste. It is imperative that I not get my fingerprints on the syringe.

I summon Lorianne and Vincent. I fear that one of them is responsible, having a knife out for me, and I want to let them know that I'm not that easy to knife. I show them the syringe and explain why I don't want to touch it. I don't explain that for the same reasons it would be unwise for either of them to pick it up, but they are both smart enough to figure that part out, and neither of them does. With them as witnesses, I call for one of the estate's security guards, and the three of us watch as the guard disposes of the syringe.

(2) There are five women, clones, who are involved in some covert scheme that might or might not involve world domination and might or might not involve travel to other worlds. They appear to be interested in me as a pawn for their scheme. I don't want to be a pawn.

One of the clones has a daughter, and it's not clear to me whether the daughter is her mother's womb-daughter or else is herself a clone.

The daughter seeks me out for conversation. She tells me that her mother and her clone-sisters are dying, that their scheme is failing. All their hopes rest in her, the daughter, and depend on her reproducing and building up the family's numbers. She wants me to father her children.

As she is explaining this to me, a cat appears and asks for attention. It is Rocky [who died, in waking life, last Sunday]. I pet him while we talk.

I explain my decision: that although I like her, I do not trust her mother and her clone-aunts, and I would not want my children to be part of their schemes.

(3) The city of London faces the conflict between the old and the new, between English tradition and American money. One of the great old townhouses has just been bought by an American oil company, and its tradition-laden name (something like Waterford House) has just been changed to that of the oil company: the Mobiltron Building.

While I am crossing Trafalgar Square, someone falls from a high window into the street below. It is a Hungarian aristocrat. Amazingly, he survives his fall. His body is stiff, as if made of plaster. I talk with him while waiting for an ambulance to arrive. He tells me that he did not jump, but slipped and fell from his balcony.

Later, I am riding a crouded trolley car, trying to get somewhere. One of those weird dream transitions takes place, and I lose the place in the book I'm reading about what is happening. I leaf through the pages of the book to find my place: the name change of the building – too early. Unrecognized, unremembered activity – too late. I try to find the page about riding on the crowded trolley.

12-11-2003

Debbie and I are hiking on a mountainside, roughing it, with camping gear in our packs. We are going downhill, and we are also trying not to be seen by others.

We descend down some tricky steep slopes and walk under tree cover. Then we pass through an open field. There are three sets of railroad tracks dividing the field, which is actually quite flat. Because of the traffic on the tracks, we need to choose the right moment to get across safely.

There is a pause between trains. I run across the field and cross the first track. I look to my right and see another train approaching. I crouch down between the tracks, but after a few moments the train isn't any closer. Debbie crosses the field and joins me. We decide to chance the rest of the crossing. We hop across the tracks and get to the other side of the field.

Here there is a mass of low, thick bushes growing in our way. It is the most formidable obstacle to our journey we have yet encountered. We start to make our way through it, pushing thickly leafed branches out of our way. I notice that the really thick shrubbery in front of us is really shrubs growing on a limestone brick wall. I follow the wall for a few paces and find a breach, which is quite easy to walk through.

We can hear traffic noises – cars driving on a street – below us. In front of us, at our feet, are the roofs of buildings lining that street. I turn around and look back, and notice how high the mountain rises above us. It appears that Debbie and I have descended a lot further than I had realized. There is a great waterfall flowing over a cliff. I hadn't noticed either the waterfall or the stream that ran down from it during our climb.

I think about how to get down to street level, and in a dream transition I am there, following the street back to the main highway. This is not the road we came in on to get to the mountain, but one further along the highway. I move along the highway, and see a sign: "28% grade ahead – steepest grade in Washington".

Having Come Unstuck in Time While Singing Gospel Karaoke, I Clean Up After Piglets and Battle Nazis

11-20-2003

Not much remembered from this dream, except singing: I'm singing with some other people in a gospel choir. I take a solo, and feel amateurish as I sing the notes around the notes of my song. The other people seem to think I'm doing okay, though. Perhaps it's gospel karaoke, and it's the trying that counts.

11-21-2003

Debbie and I are packing to get ready to go to Seattle. [In waking life, we really were going today.] We're discussing the pros and cons of where to stay. At David and Cathy's? With friends? I suggest to Deb that we rent a motel room. The estate (i.e. Isabel's) will pay for it. I turn to the real estate agent who is advising us, to see if the idea will work. I start to explain it; the realtor is distracted by someone else, and shouts a bit of conversation across the room. I start again; the realtor wanders away. I follow him, and tell him that I really want him to pay attention. Once again I explain my idea about the motel room. At that moment, the television over the bar starts showing an episode of The Simpsons, and the realtor is once again distracted.

11-22-2003

(1) Walking through a parking garage or something that gets lots of traffic coming through. There are crosswalks across the broad roadways. I have to wait for traffic lights to change before I cross.

(2) There's a parade, and it features farm produce and livestock. Here's a float with lots and lots of live, young pigs. Although they are scarcely more than piglets, they are already quite fat. I follow the float along. I think about taking one of the pigs away for myself. That would be stealing; but it would be very easy.

One of the smaller piglets is sealed into a fine plastic mesh bag, like something in which onions or potatoes would be sold. I pick up the piglet in its bag, and play with it some; it squeals and squirms. I could very easily take it away.... But I decide against it. I place the piglet in its bag back in its place in the display among the other pigs. As I'm doing so, the piglet coughs and vomits. At first I think that none of the vomit splashed me; but I get a cloth to wipe it up from the display; and as I as I am wiping it up I notice a few drops on my sleeve and a large splash of pig vomit on my trouser leg. I wipe these up as well, but there remains a dark, wet spot on my trousers.

(3) I travel some distance to find a comics store to buy a present for my friend Kimberly. At the end of a cul-de-sac, far from the center of town, I find "Spiderman Comics", lit up in lurid blue and red neon lights.

I go inside and begin to look at a graphic novel about a band comprised of young British rock musicians who think that the band Yes is the be-all and end-all of music. An opening splash page of the book shows the four of them, at four different concerts by Yes, being blown away by something about the music: one goes for Rick Wakeman's keyboard playing; another for Steve Howe's guitar work; and so on.

I hear Yes's music in my own mind, and my dream segues from me reading the graphic novel to its story line, and I'm fleeing the scene of some minor crime in an urban setting.

One of my companions is crippled, having difficulty walking. In a sequence I do not now remember, he shows himself to be quite untrustworthy. I talk about this to a friend on the telephone. The friend tells me, "You trusted him? I could have warned you! Elise won't have anything to do with him because of the things he did when she first met him."

Still liking my untrustworthy, crippled friend, I want to talk to Elise about it. I go looking in a mall for her storefront where she sells her jewelry.

11-25-2003

My father is dormant (but not dead), lying inside something that partakes of both a sarcophagus and a suit of armor. Suspended on a light chain around his neck, like a pendant, is a Ring of Power. When I know how to wield it myself, I will be a force to be reckoned with among my foes.

Numbering among those foes is a group of neo-Nazi skinheads, organized into a secret society. They know that my father and I possess the secret of wielding great power, but they have no clue about the details. In particular, they wouldn't recognize the ring as being its source unless someone told them.

Their plan is to kidnap my father and have him reveal the secret. (He is catatonic, and cannot reveal it, but they do not know this yet.)

Our own plans are to take part in a parade, to ride on a float whose passengers are clowns. I arrive with my inert father to the parade via balloon, and we descend to the float where we are to ride. My father is in his armor, and I am wearing a clown suit, with greasepaint and fright wig.

As the balloon descends, I watch as the Nazis, also disguised as clowns, climb onto the float and throw the legitimate passengers over the side into the crowd. I realize what is going on just as the balloon lands on the float. There is no time to rescue the Ring; and I know that if I am captured along with my father, the Nazis will be able to learn from me the secret of the Ring. I must escape, leaving my father and the Ring in the Nazi's hands. In the melee that ensues when the balloon touches down, I leap over the side and escape into the crowd.

The Nazis have my comatose father and the Ring, but they do not know the Ring for what it is. What they do have is the knowledge of the Ring's power: should they find out that the Ring is the thing they seek, they will be able to wield it. I know the Ring for what it is, but I do not know how to use it. Now I must rescue my father and recover the Ring. My best shot at doing this is to pose as a Nazi sympathizer and try to infiltrate the group. By doing so, I may be able to learn the secret of the Ring and be able to use it myself.

In the background is a doubt. Am I just posing as a Nazi, or am I joining them in earnest? Isn't there a risk that they will learn my half of the Ring's secret, and they will then use it for their evil purposes? And by "infiltrating" am I not proving that I am myself willing to further their evil purposes in pursuit of the Ring's power for myself?

There is a hotel in a bad part of town which is a front for the Nazi's organization. The basement of the hotel connects with the catacombs beneath the city, where the Nazis meet and conduct their nefarious schemes.

My friend Avedon and I go to check into a room in this hotel. While I am filling out forms at the front desk (and the front desk clerk is covertly checking me out for Nazi sympathies, and I am equally covertly indicating that I have them), a Nazi stormtrooper disguised as a bellhop takes Avedon back to our room. After a while she returns to the lobby, and we talk once I'm finished at the front desk. The stormtrooper attempted to molest her once they were alone in the hotel room. He didn't anticipate that Avedon was skilled in martial arts, however, and she quickly dispatched him. This poses a dilemma: will the stormtrooper tell what happened (this would jeopardize our mission) or will he be too ashamed to admit to other Nazis that a woman got the best of him?

We agree that Avedon should remain in the room to face any consequences on her own, and I should proceed with my mission. I descend into the basement and make my way into the catacombs, looking for the meeting that the desk clerk had hinted I should join.

While wandering in the catacombs the dream segues back to the scene at the parade. The capture of the float recapitulates – one of the clowns ejected from the float falls under its wheels and is killed. Do I want to even pretend that I am on the Nazis' side?

11-26-2003

In a cardroom or casino, I'm eager to get a high-stakes game going. The management calls down a game, and I sit down with one opponent. We agree to start playing in hopes that more players will show up and the game gets going well.

It's a stud game (high-low split stud, probably). In the very first hand I'm dealt, split fours with a six kicker. I come out raising, and my opponent calls me down. I bet every round and wind up taking a substantial pot with fours full of sixes. My opponent is suddenly much less interested in playing head-up with me, and leaves the game. The game has broken after just one hand. I'm disappointed, although the stakes were high enough that winning that one hand has given my bankroll a shot in the arm.

I talk some to the floorman about my skills at high-low split stud: that I'm pretty good but not great; that I'm good enough to have beat the must-move tables at that 50-100 game I played at this year's WSOP, how I really am somewhat predictable and by-the-book.

I change the chips I won into cash, and count my stake. It turns out that some of my $100 bills are improperly printed, with one side being faded. I wonder if the cage will exchange these for better looking bills before I leave.

11-27-2003

I've gotten unstuck in time. I have lost track of where and when I am. I have lived, or will live, for a long, long time; traveling, or will travel, to planets of other stars; helping to establish colonies there. The memory of my whole long life, from its beginning to its end, is with me, like Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and at any given moment I have difficulty knowing where and when it is along my worldline. The burden of my memory weighs heavily on me.

I find myself in a time that [in the waking world as I write this] is very close to now; but I am unsure of precisely when. Accompanying me is David Bratman's younger brother Kevin. He also has traveled, or will travel, to the stars; he also is unstuck in time. We talk about the many times and places where the skeins of our lives intersect, and share some of what happens to each of us between them. It seems that the span of my life is rather longer and larger than Kevin's.

At a table whose top surface is a map of Iraq and surrounding countries, a man is sitting. He is evidently explaining and justifying United States' actions and positions in the region. My doubt of when I am poses a difficulty for me: I don't want to reveal my status as a time-tripper or my knowledge of the future; but talking with him may inadvertently do so. I settle on asking him about recent developments, letting him talk about facts. A key question in my mind is whether the assassination of an important leader has taken place yet or not. From his answers to my questions, it becomes clear that it has not yet happened. And now I have a much better handle on when I am.

At a party, in a living-room filled with people, I can contain myself no longer; the burden of future memory becomes too much for me. "I am a traveler between the stars!" I say. "I am three hundred years old. Kevin here is seventy-nine. He evidently spent much more of his travels much closer to lightspeed than I." (These ages are our ages at our deaths, not at the moment, but the memories of our whole lives make us feel these ages all the time.) In an impassioned monologue, I tell it all: my life on Earth, my travel to the stars, my tribulations in various colonies, my death alone, many light-years away, thousands of years of Earth-time in the future.

Later, still time-tripping, I find myself in the balcony of a theater where students are about to mount a production of one of Shakespeare's plays, a comedy. The balcony is crowded, but, looking over the edge I observe that the main floor is almost empty. I contemplate whether it is reasonable to move downstairs to get a better seat before the performance begins.

Bust Steve Landrum? In Your Dreams ... !

[Debbie and I had Sabyl Cohen and Steve Landrum over for dinner last night, which probably explains why he turned up in my dreams.]

11-19-2003

I'm playing in a poker tournament, a seven-card stud tournament. It's been a while since I've played a hand, and my stack is dwindling from the drain of the increasing antes and bring-ins.

I am the bring-in with the diamond deuce showing and an unsuited ace and trey as my hole cards. Across the table, Steve Landrum, with another deuce as his doorcard, completes the bet. I decide my ace makes this a worthwhile hand to play, and call.

We both get deuces on fourth street. Steve is first to act, and he bets. I call all-in. We turn our cards face up: Steve has ace-deuce-four-five, and I've got ace-deuce-three-five. [In case you're wondering what happened to the pairs of deuces, things like this happen all the time in dream poker.]

We're both all-in, there's no more action. The dealer deals the cards. I pair up on fifth street; Steve pairs his ace on sixth, but I make two pair. On seventh street, Steve catches the last ace to make trip aces. Luckily for me, I catch a four to river a straight. I have busted Steve out of the tournament, pretty much by getting lucky. Steve shakes my hand.

The tournament director hands me a wad of money: apparently there was some kind of bounty on Steve. I riffle it, and put it in my pocket. Then I think: wait a minute: he had three aces, and we both had pairs of deuces on fourth street. If Steve had three aces, then he made a full house, and my wheel was no good. But I'm still in the tournament and Steve's out. [Things like this happen all the time in dream poker.]

Evicted From the House of Dreams

Last night's dream:

The household in which I'm living with Patti Beadles, Steve Landrum, J.P. Massar, and others is breaking up amicably. We've got to get all our stuff out by the deadline.

Packing is a tedious chore. I'm putting clothes into boxes and suitcases. I'm hungry, and it's time for a break. I go out to a restaurant with Patti. She gets served quickly, but it takes a long time for my meal to come. I wonder about the passage of time; there's too much more packing and cleaning to do. Eventually my order arrives: macaroni and cheese. The cheese is flavorless, and I don't eat much, just push my food around on my plate for a while.

It's coming down to the wire: Steve tells me we have to be completely packed and out of there by midnight. My clothes are all packed ... but I suddenly see that my desk (with drawers full of papers and kipple) is untouched. Oh, no! There's no time to pack it properly. I want neither to dump the drawer contents unsorted into boxes, nor to move the desk with the drawers full. And there's no time for proper sorting. To make things worse, I have the same trouble with my filing cabinet, and my chest of drawers....

I despair of getting it done in time.

The Sleep of Reason

11-8-2003

(1) I have a job, doing administrative and clerical support for a project where I once had been a researcher. I'm taking care of something in the machine room. I'm naked. It's early in the morning, and only one of the researchers is here. He doesn't seem to notice that I'm naked.

I get an opportunity to go to my office and get dressed. I do so hastily, because I see through the window another of my coworkers coming to work. [The layout of my office happens to be the same as the layout of the room where I stayed in my grandfather's house, with the walkway to the front door going right past my window.]

Dressed and feeling civilized, I emerge and talk about the project with the new arrival. Suddenly I notice that, after I had showered earlier, I hadn't paid attention and shaved. I now have much less of a beard than I had previously. [Perhaps my dreaming mind won't let me off the hook, exchanging one sort of nakedness for another.]

2) I'm talking with porn star Jamie Gillis [whom I know very slightly in waking life, having played cards with him]. He tells me, mockingly, "Sure you could have my job, no problem! It's easy now. With Viagra you never have to worry about getting wood on the set." I can tell from his ironic tone that, even though Viagra has eased one anxiety of working in porn, Gillis still thinks it's a lot tougher than people might think.

(3) I'm sitting in my car. A young woman is sitting next to me. We are talking about religion and spirituality; at the same time, she is leaning close to me, with her arm around me. "I know what you mean," she tells me. "I've read some of the entries on your blog." She moves her hand to the top of my thigh as she talks. I wonder how far she is going to push boundaries. I feel that she's being hypocritical somehow, using a high-toned conversation to conceal her physical approach. But I know what she's doing, and I'm not stopping it.

Her hand brushes my cock as she talks. I lean into her some more and caress her shoulder with my fingertips. She takes the hint, and takes hold of my cock in her hand.

11-9-2003

There is a chain of parties in a V-shaped line of banquet halls. Along one leg of the V are parties for a publishing company; the ones along the other line are being thrown by financiers who have connections to the Russian mafia.

There is some kind of misfeasance being done by some of the editors at the publishing company and it is my job to find out who they are and what precisely they are doing. There seems to be some kind of connection with the Russian mafia people in the other wing.

The people who hired me give me a briefing on one of the high-flying editors. He's young, he's hip, and he's making $143,000 per year. Nice work, if you can get it. As I'm going back to the party, the news breaks that the head Russian in the other wing has just been indicted on fraud and racketeering charges. It's only a matter of time before more indictments and arrests come along, and my high-flying editor is likely to be caught up in them.

I decide to check this out. I walk along the corridor on the floor just above the financiers' party floor, and listen to the sound below me. The party is going strong. Evidently the boss Russian hood hasn't told anyone of his difficulties yet, but I hear a note of desperation in his voice. I peer through a hole in the floor to the room below. Champagne corks are popping. One of them comes up through the hole in the floor and falls down again. Amazingly, it bounces on the floor below and comes up to the hole in my floor once more.

The scandal spreads into the publishing company. Another high-flyer, a woman, loses her high-paying job. She is said to be the lover of my high-flyer. Will he look after her? What will he do?

To guess what's going to happen, I do some research. I ask one of the record keepers how much each of them makes in a year, to try to figure out if my editor can support his lover in the style to which she has become accustomed. The records clerk can find information about her easily enough, but his salary information is obscured, hidden. Then I remember that I've been already been told. $143,000 per year is a lot of money -- but the woman has expensive tastes. And my editor lives large.

I tell the people I'm working with that I could probably maintain the woman in style for $143,000 per year, but I live modestly. My editor target, though, simply could not. Expect a break between the two of them soon.

"I could keep her" I repeat. I am talking to a slender woman with frizzy gray hair that hangs to the level of her shoulders. I think she's quite cute. "With $143,000 I'd keep you without a second's thought."

At this point I notice that I am wearing heavy white gloves on my hands.

11-10-2003

(1) I and some others are getting around in a building that is half hotel and half hospital. We use the stairs to get between floors. While leaving the stairwell at one floor, I have to use a seat suspended from a cable, a kind of pendulum seat, hoisted by a small crane, to get from the stairs to the hallway. I have no control over the motion of the crane, and it moves me quite close to where a middle-aged black man is working with some hospital equipment. He is wearing scrubs. He is balding, has a moustache, and his face is deeply lined.

He complains when I swing near him, and then the pendulum swing moves me even nearer, so he has to duck. I respond that he is being rude, that an employee of the hospital should not act so unkindly to visitors. We get into an argument, and I threaten to report his rudeness to his managers.

As I leave in a huff, I think to myself that this is the second time in one day that I have gotten into a confrontation over rude behavior with a black man. Is it happenstance, or is it something about me and my racism?

(2) I'm working in an office as an administrative assistant or secretary. One of my charges is Terri Windling. I'm updating her calendar, and notice that she is scheduled to go to Tuscon for a week to present a seminar, and then spend the following weekend at the World Fantasy Convention. [In waking life, Terri actually lives in Tucson; and this year's WFC just ended a week before.]

11-11-2003

A scandal has erupted among my graduating high school class. It seems that during our senior year [which in waking life I missed, having left early to go to college] one of the teachers did not properly file his grade reports. As a consequence, some of the students' diplomas are not valid, and they must return to school to clear up this difficulty.

Although only some of us are affected, all of us are there, talking about this. I try to get the attention of one of Lisa Solmssen, one of the affected students, so I can tell her that if the diploma situation doesn't get resolved she and the others would have grounds for legal action against the school. I can't get her attention, though – she's always talking to someone else.

(Later) It's after lights-out, and I'm outside of the dormitory. I need to get back into my room and in bed before I'm caught. It hardly adds anything to my situation that I'm naked, too.

I sneak in through the door into the common-room. There is a person there: a cleaning woman. She sees me ... but she doesn't care.

"Hey, wait a minute," I think. "I'm a grown-up. I don't have to worry about curfews any more...!"

Dreams: 10/29/2003 Through Last Night

10-29-2003

(1) I'm viewing a display, like a museum display, of the evolution of typesetting. First is a large Linotype machine. Then an IBM Compositor, looking like an oversized Selectric. Next in line is a Macintosh. Last in the row is a tiny PowerBook.

(2) I go down into a New York City subway station to wait for a train. It's an older station, kind of grimy. I note that although it is underground, the place isn't claustrophobic, because of the spacious arched ceilings. The sound of an approaching train grows slowly, from a distant rumble to a loud roar. As the sound increases, I walk to the forward end of the station, where the walls of the platform are shrouded in wooden scaffolding – some sort of construction work going on. A buzzer sounds, warning of the approaching train. It rushes through the station on the express track down the middle, without stopping. It's an M train.

Once the train has passed, I look down the tunnel after it. After it has gone, I see in the distance, dimly lit, two automobiles driving in the tunnel at a place where the trackway splits. One of the cars is a small car, like a Toyota sedan; the other is a police car.

(3) I'm eating gummy or jelly candies, round, about two inches across, a quarter inch thick. They come wrapped in cellophane. I take the wrapper off a red candy and bite into it. The candy has that "red" flavor.

I look up and see a fruit-bearing tree, an avocado tree. The fruits of the tree are not avocados, though, but artichokes.

I want to see a particular movie, and I wonder if there is time for me to get to the next showing. I get a copy of the East Bay Express to look up showtimes, but I discover that it is old. No, wait, it is a special edition printed for a film festival that takes place in June and in October, and it has both dates printed on the cover. It should be current. But when I open it up and look at the movie listings, they all seem to be from last June.

11-2-2003

I'm in Rivendell, helping in the preparations for the Fellowship of the Ring to depart on its quest. I've been doing lots of research in a library, and I've accumulated lots of stacks of books, files, and miscellaneous papers. I'm putting them away now that I'm done with them. I stack file folders on file folders, books on books, and papers on papers, getting ready to put each stack away separately.

I have some meetings with Gandalf and Elrond in Elrond's office; these meetings are grim in mood, but nothing gets accomplished. Later we discover that the "Gandalf" who is camped out in Elrond's office is a fake! It's an automaton, one of the deceits of the Enemy. One grows stupid in its presence and is led astray by it's instructions, until eventually one becomes enslaved by Sauron. The fake Gandalf's body is transparent under its robes, with evil runes written on its skin. Discovered, it collapses and dies.

The real Gandalf says, "There is no time to lose. The Fellowship must depart tomorrow."

The Elves throw a big party the night before the Fellowship departs. There is music and dancing in a crowded hall – it feels like a bar or nightclub to me. I join in the music making, playing a conga drum, working syncopations and surprises into the rhythm. The Elves (who are snobs about such things) are amazed at the quality of the contribution of a human.

As the party is breaking up, I encounter one of the Fellowship members. He asks me if I have decided to come along. I say, "Yes, I was always going to go." I explain that I had discussed it with Gandalf and Sam and Frodo, even if I hadn't mentioned it to the other members of the Fellowship. As I say this, I realize that I have been unfair, having been forthcoming only with the people who "counted". If our quest is to be successful, I need to open up to everyone equally.

11-4-2003

I and a group of people travel into the mountains along a tiny suspended railroad. We are testing the rather old tracks and our cars, which are small and hold one or two persons each.

The suspended tracks wind higher into the wooded mountains. The trackway is rickety – lightweight, made of aluminum – and supports are missing here and there. More and more supports are missing the higher and further we go along the way.

We come to the end of the line, where the tracks bend upwards, vertically. The plan is to come to the very end, and I am to hold on to the tracks for a moment, then let go, and our train will run back down the track freely, without stopping, as if it were a rollercoaster.

I am afraid to do my part. The track is unsafe, improperly supported, and I'm afraid that as we rush downward it will give way and we will fall.

The next thing I know, the incident is over. I'm in a room, talking with my companions. All went well, despite my fears. I apologize to them for my having let my fear get in our way.

11-5-2003

Two fragments:

(1) A polygraph of some kind: a strip-chart recorder that is recording all sorts of biometric data. It's the old-fashioned kind with needles that leave inkmarks on the unrolling sheet of graph paper. Some of the channels have multiplexed data: here's one that has both a slow signal (chest expansion in breathing) and something else that is very fast.

(2) A landscape filled with rockets, rocket launchers, and gantries. Here is a large construction surrounded with scaffolding. It takes a while for me to notice that it, too, is a rocket gantry, and the rocket is being built up under the scaffolding.

11-6-2003

I'm with a group of science fiction writers and editors. [They don't seem to be anyone I know in waking life.] We are talking and eating and drinking; it seems to be some kind of party or social function. One of them is a middle-aged man with unkempt curly brown hair shot with gray, and gray stubble growing on his chin. I join in the general laughter and merriment, but when I try to tell jokes or stories with the others, I find it difficult to get a word in edgewise. I feel like they don't take me seriously.

One of them does take me seriously – a visiting journalist from Japan. He asks me at one point if he can interview me. I agree, but I wonder why.

Later, the party seems to be continuing in some kind of moving vehicle, the interior of which is carpeted and furnished with a bar and with tables and chairs. We are on our way. The Japanese journalist corners me and says, "Is this a good time for an interview?" and I say yes.

He asks me how I started to read science fiction and what it meant to me when I did. I tell him what I remember about the first books I read, and talk about the sense of difference and amazement they brought me: things don't have to be this way. The dream moves away from the boozy party and towards a kind of philosophical disquisition on the meaning of SF for young boys, me in particular. [I don't remember any of the specifics of this disquisition, unfortunately.

Dreams 10/22-10/28-2003

10-22-2003

(1) In some complicated dream involving lots of people packing for a complicated departure, I notice that there are large animals to be packed. People are laying tigers down on the grownd and folding them neatly, like laundry. There is also a giraffe laid out on the ground, awaiting folding.

(2) A computer game is mentioned, written and distributed by "C. Haynes". I wonder if that is the same person as Charles Haynes.

(3) I'm witnessing a complicated sort of aerial recreation, a cross between hot-air ballooning and parasailing: A person in a harness is lifted by a hot-air balloon, and is tethered to a vehicle on the ground.

While this paraballoon is being towed over a cold, snowy landscape, the gasbag ruptures, and the paraballoonist begins to fall to the ground. Fortunately there are rescuers standing by (I seem to be one of them), who swoop in and snag the balloon, lowering it and the paraballoonist gently to the ground.

Once on the ground, it is no longer snowy, but dry and lumpy: the ground is solidly covered by carrots and potatoes. As we stow the balloon and get its passenger out of his harness, some of us are picking up these vegetables.

The paraballoonist mentions that he played football, as a running back, in high school.

There is a buzzing sound. I am gathering potatoes, and feel a vibration in one on the ground as I prepare to pick it up. The buzzing is the sound of bees, and this potato is very close to the entrance of an underground beehive. I hastily back away, fearing possible attack by a swarm of angry bees should I disturb their hive.

(4) I'm inside a wooden building, like an assembly hall, with a group of people. The interior of the building goes dark, and the walls are lit by firelight, as if they are themselves on fire (but they are actually not – this is some kind of illusion). Seen as silhouettes against the illusory flames are the shadows of dancing children, our enemies. The shadow-children dance in time to evil music that fills the hall.

This is a magical attack on us by our enemies, and if something isn't done quickly, they will defeat us. I counterattack by singing in a loud, bass voice, to a tune of my own: "THIS MU-SIC IS NOT GOOD MU-SIC; THIS MU-SIC IS <pause> CRUEL MU-SIC!" I sing the phrase over and over again. Will it drive our attackers away? I don't get to find out, because at that point I awaken.

10-23-2003

(1) All I remember of this lengthy and complicated dream is of being by the side of a lake that is surrounded by a high, thick wall. There are stairs on the inside of the wall, and I climb them to get to the top. I look around at the lake, at the surrounding countryside. Then I go down on the outside.

(2) I am preparing to return to school, to Caltech, to get another degree. I spend a lot of time wandering the Caltech campus trying to find the office of the program to which I want to apply. I remember it the office being in one of the library buildings [this dream-campus is nothing at all like the Caltech campus in the waking world], but when I go there I discover that the office is there no longer: it had been there only temporarily, while its permanent offices were being constructed. I never actually get to the program's offices.

I also spend some time thinking about precisely to which program I wish to apply. The program I've been thinking about is a humanities program. Maybe I don't want to get a Ph.D. Maybe I should get another masters instead. Or maybe I should apply as an undergraduate and get another bachelors. Maybe I should get another bachelors and another masters.

10-24-2003

For some task or purpose, it is necessary that I cut my hair and shave my beard. It is the first time my chin has been clean-shaven in many years. I see myself from an outside perspective. I don't recognize myself: my chin is prominent and pointed.

10-26-2003

(1) D. is about to finish a course in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. Unfortunately, NASA is undergoing a series of budget cuts and is not hiring any more. None of the graduating students will be able to get jobs. I ask D. about this, and she assures me that recently she has been taking classes in other subjects so that she is more employable in other fields.

(2) I arrive in Kwajelein to teach a class in health statistics at the local high school. School hasn't started yet. I run around getting errands done, and finish my errands unexpectedly early. I think about what I could do with my time. It's three o'clock, and I have to be at a meeting at five. Suddenly it occurs to me: this is a perfect time to go to the gym and work out.

The YMCA, I recall, is attached to the high school. I get on a bus and take it to the site of the school. I pull the chord to ring the bell as we approach the stop for the school. I see, though, as I get off the bus that at the site of the school there is now only one small building. A FedEx truck is parked there, making a delivery.

I discover that the rest of the school's buildings, including the gym, had burned down last month. No workout for me today! And the classroom for the class I am to teach, along with the other high school classes, has been relocated to another school.

Some people are indignant about some nuclear wastes that had been stored on campus unbeknownst to the community. Those nuclear materials had been consumed in the fire and gone up in smoke. The school's principal assures us that this is all for the best, and that the nuclear waste is now safely disposed of.

I have to sign a disclosure indicating that I have been made aware of the location change for my class. There is a small crowd of other teachers and student teaching aides around the table where the disclosure from is waiting. I wait for my chance and turn the form around to read it to find where I am to sign it. While I am reading it, a student aide snatches it away from me and signs it himself.

I take the form back and scan it for the place where I am to sign. I can't find it; there is no listing for "health statistics" or "statistical health" in the list of affected classes. I hope that this won't turn out to be a problem.

A rival teacher is gloating at me, expecting that I am going to look bad in front of the students. It is raining, and I am getting soaked. My rival starts taking photographs of me in hopes of using them to discredit me with my students. But he's wrong! He doesn't understand that those pictures of me standing in the rain will win their sympathy and increase their rapport with me. My rival is completely clueless! I laugh at him, mocking him, as he walks away.

I take out a flyer for a school event, something involving a visiting professional football team and its cheerleading squad. I begin to hatch a scheme to embarrass my rival, one that involves a famous supermodel, who happens to be married to one of the players on the team.

10-28-2003

There are mice in my room. They are funny-looking mice, with coarse gray-white fur, long, thin bodies, and knobby heads.

I hunch down in my bed with a high-powered rifle with a sniper scope. Against the far wall, miles, away is one of the mice. I set my sight on it, allow for range and windage, and squeeze the trigger. I can see the wake of the bullet leave ripples of distortion in the air between us. The bullet hits the mouse, which topples over, dead.

I take sight on another mouse. But as I am aiming I see more ripples in the air. The mouse is firing back! But because I can see the bullets coming, they are easy to dodge. I fire, and hit my target.

I cross the room to investigate further. There's another mouse, sticking its ugly head up. My cat Rocky suddenly appears and pounces. It's a perfect kill: Rocky grabs the mouse in his clawed paw and quickly brings it to his mouth, where he breaks its spine with a quick bite. Rocky plays with the body for a bit, then looks for more mice to kill.

There's another cat in the room, but it isn't our other cat, Chewie. It is a strange cat who must have come in through the cat door. Half of its fur is dark, but half is a shiny silver-blue color.

Dreams 10/15-10/21/2003

10-15-2003

(1) I'm waiting at an airport. It isn't clear whether I'm waiting to depart or waiting to meet someone arriving.

The terminal is a multiple-story affair, with gates on each of four floors. The building is also a parking garage.

A small crowd of people gathers at the next gate. As the plane arrives there I can see why the crowd is small: the arriving plane is small, also, being a short-fuselaged experimental-looking plane, with not much passenger capacity.

(2) I'm on a beach, at the seaside. The water recedes, and receds more. I wonder about this for a moment, then I realize, "tsunami!" I need to get inland, and fast. I hurry across the beach and up the slope of the ground behind it. I have no idea how far I have to go to be safe. I think, "If I knew how far down the water level had gone, I would know how far up I should go."

(3) I'm in a group of people milling around disorderedly. A woman shows up, and says, "My name is Marcie, and I'll be your drill sergeant for the afternoon." She gets us all marching in order. Surprisingly, Marcie isn't mean or overbearing, she just gets us walking together.

10-17-2003

I'm listening to a radio program, on KFOG. It's a special retrospective music program, hosted by Dave Morey (the station's morning show host), and it's running a long time. So long that it gets to be late at night, after midnight in fact.

Finally the show ends. I turn off the radio and walk into the kitchen. There I find a friend of mine who lives in the house, female, with very short dark hair. She, too, is a DJ at KFOG. She's just gotten home. She's exhausted.

I ask her how come she had to work so late, given that Dave Morey was hosting the special show. She explains to me that everyone at the station had to do extra work because of the show, and she in particular had been working on one of the station's Internet service channels.

10-19-2003

(1) I'm visiting some sort of boarding school. I put my things in a dormitory room set aside for my use, and go to the communal bathroom to take a shower. I take my clothes off and put them in a locker; but I don't have a lock. I cover them with a towel and hope no one notice them and thinks they might be valuable enough to steal.

Later, I'm wandering around a resevoir on a mountain top. There are dangerous creatures swimming in the water of the resevoir.

The aqueduct pipes from the resevoir are leaking. I follow them down the inside of the mountain. At the bottom is an industrial building with glass doors. The interior of the building is being flooded. I leave the building through the doors, and close them. But they burst open again, and a torrent of water pours out.

The village at the base of the mountain must be abandoned for the duration of the flood. I help organize the evacuation.

Two of the villagers are women who look remarkably alike: long dark hair, pale skin, lips emphasized with bright red lipstick. I know them both. One of them is someone with whom I want very much to be close but platonic friends. The other is my lover, she and I have a strong sexual thing going on. I talk for a few moments with the first woman, the friend. Then I turn to the other one. "We don't have to leave for a few minutes yet," the second woman says. "We've got time for a quickie."

We undress, and I climb on top of her to fuck her. I notice a bulge in her belly, about four inches across, protruding hemispherically outward. I ask her about it; she tells me that inside the bulge is a parasite she is carrying. It evidently will be born like a child through her womb.

(2) [Later, towards morning, after I've awoken once] I seem to awaken from another dream, now unremembered. I'm sitting at my desk, fully clothed. I fell asleep in my chair, evidently, and have been sleeping and dreaming since then. I am embarassed, and concerned about how Debbie is going to react when she discovers that I've not been to bed at all. [In reality, I spent the night asleep in bed next to Debbie; the experience of waking up in my chair was in fact a dream.]

Dreams 10/8-10/14/2003

10-8-2003

I'm talking to a soldier stationed in Iraq. "The thing is," he tells me, "the coffee here is the best I ever had." I'm holding a half-pound foil bag of whole beans. "It's from Gevalia," the soldier explains. "You only want to make a cup or two at a time, otherwise you have to share it with the whole platoon, and your ration is completely gone, just like that." I look at the trailer-home where the soldier's platoon is billeted. There are enough men living in the trailer that this half-pound bag of coffee would be used up at once.

10-9-2003

There's a strange sort of hostage situation in a multi-storey open building. We have been taken hostage by politically-motivated gunmen, and we basically support their cause. We're on their side, they are on ours. The building we are in is has no outside walls, just stone pillars supporting the floors above. The floors are arcades and galleries.

One of the other hostages, a slender woman with long, brown hair, has taken an interest in me, as I have in her. Every chance we get, when our captors aren't looking, we embrace, hugging and kissing. We are both intending to find a way we can have sex.

The police arrive, and warn the hostage-takers to release their captives. After warning them and getting no response, the police drive around the building in a jeep-like vehicle and cast a stream of material like shredded papier-maché into the air through a hose or cannon or blower or some such. I wonder whether this is supposed to release some sort of incapacitating gas, but it has no effect. The police seem impotent, in fact, unable to compel the hostage-takers to do anything.

Meanwhile my lady-friend and I are getting even more serious. She lies on the ground, and I climb on top of her, kissing her.

10-10-2003

I'm looking at myself in a mirror, examining my chin. It seems that I have a bald spot on my chin, my whiskers worn away by my habit of rubbing my chin. I notice specifically the smooth skin on the point of my chin, surrounded by a region of very short stubble. This bothers me, I want my beard to be full. I try to conceal the bald spot by combing it over with whiskers from higher up on my face.

10-11-2003

(1) I'm about to get inside a very small commercial jet aircraft – so small that the passenger entrance is a small hatch just behind the cockpit and right above one of the seats. There is a passenger already sitting in that seat, a caucasian man. He says something like "Surely you can squeeze your way in. ... yeah, I know, 'Don't call me Shirley!'" I step gingerly inside, standing on the armrest. "And don't call me Shirley," I repeat.

(2) I need to reprogram my mobile phone. Some of the speed dial settings have to be reset. I'm trying them out to see which ones are empty and which ones are currently programmed, and what numbers the programmed ones call. An interesting wrinkle is the "teleport" option – I can use the phone to dial a number and teleport me to the other end when the connection is made. Needless to say, doing this with an unfamiliar or wrong number can lead to embarrassment. I try some speed dial settings, and hang up when I get voice mail. I don't seem to be making any progress with the task.

10-12-2003

Dimly remembered fragment:

I'm crossing the Bay into San Francisco – on the Bay Bridge? On a boat? – and I can see the buildings appear to grow as I get closer. I notice in particular the Transamerica Pyramid.

I remember my mother and her death, and I'm filled with grief. I begin to weep. I cover my face in my hands, and bow my head.

I have an awareness that my grieving is right and proper, that I am doing myself good by letting it happen.

I look up again, self-possessed in my grief, and see the buildings of the city even nearer.

Dreams 10/1-10/7/2003

10-3-2003

As a treat, I've bought myself a fancy cigar, and I'm smoking it in my room. It's fairly large, and the nicotine starts to get to me as I reach the end. I wish that I had a container in which to keep the remainder for later. I put the cigar out and throw it away.

Then I realize that I do have a tube to store a cigar in, but it has a cigar in it already. I go find it, and discover that there are two: one which is unopened, and one which has a cigar butt saved in it. I open up the second, and observe that I had very carefully placed a scrap of tobacco leaf over the end, sealing it, to keep it fresh. (The cigar was white, and the tobacco scrap was a translucent pale sheet.)

I think about smoking the butt, but I am still feeling slightly nauseous from the first cigar.

10-4-2003

Debbie and I are in New Zealand, walking in the countryside. In the course of some unremembered dream hugger-mugger, we find an interesting rock formation that serves as natural shelter: It is a kind of table, a flat rock supported around its edges by other rocks. We climb under it and stay there for a little while.

Later we're walking along the edge of a small valley, its floor flat, covered with grass, its walls steep cliffs. I think that this place and the table-rock are just the sorts of things that Peter Jackson would want to know about for exterior settings for shooting THE LORD OF THE RINGS. A dialogue in my mind takes place between Jackson and I, Jackson explaining that yes, although shooting is over, he does want to know about such places.

Then we are captured by a monstrous creature: tall, grey-skinned, with long arms which it flails around in circles. I recognize it as a troll. The troll takes us to its camp, where there are a few other trolls, and many other smaller creatures, also manlike but short and squat. These are "mice".

We are afraid that the trolls wish to kill and eat us; but they have other plans. They want us to run an errand, to carry a message for them. The message is to be delivered to an address in New York City, in upper Manhattan. The location is at the intersection of 94th Street and Ocean Avenue. We use Yahoo! Maps to locate the precise address, and discover that on Ocean Avenue in that part of town there is a wide median strip where there are buildings, and the place we are to go, a bar, is on that median strip.

There is a stack of papers beside us. I look at it, and on the top there is an issue of The Nation with a full-color cover: a night-time street scene in black and blue, with a lurid neon sign. The sales copy on the cover promises an expose of strippers and scandal.

One of the mice sees me looking at the magazine and asks me if I want to take a copy. I tell him, "Thanks, but no."

10-5-2003

I have gotten involved in a magical, metaphysical, world-saving venture with two other people, a man and a woman, who are a married couple and also physics professors at Caltech, as well as being sorcerors. In the outward, worldly expression of our venture, they are the founders of a start-up company in Pasadena, and I am an employee.

The offices of this start-up are located quite close to the Caltech campus, right near what is labeled in my dream the Quantum Gate, one of the entrances to campus.

I find I need directions to get around, so I look at a map of campus in a university guide. Here is the Quantum Gate, here are the Physics Department buildings, here is the campus's Main Gate, and here (not shown on the map, but I know where they are) are the offices of our venture.

I walk along the arcade along the outside of the wall around the campus that faces the harbor. I think about my relationship with my two partners. They are equal partners in the magical venture, but to the outside world they are my superiors in the start-up.

I decide that what I need to do is re-enter the graduate program in the Physics Department and finish my PhD, so that I can be my partners' peer. I consider the relative advantages of working with one of them as my advisor (understanding of my magical duties relative to the degree program requirements) versus someone else (having one of my partners as an advisor would at least temporarily accentuate the difference in rank between us).

10-6-2003

Fragment #1: I've been playing no-limit hold'em against some tough opponents. One of them is a player who never loses big pots. But I've just doubled through him, and not by getting lucky, either.

Fragment #2: A best-seller list for software. The page shows the packages' weekly sales figures and ranks, as well as their desktop icons.

10-7-2003

(1) The dream is about some sort of SF convention, a Worldcon. Sometimes it seems like I'm involved in getting ready for it, sometimes helping tear it down, and sometimes while it's going on. There is a bunch of fanhistorical memorabilia, lots of it relating to the history of LASFS. (Is the convention being held in Los Angeles?)

(2) The convention dream segues into a dream recapitulation of the original Star Trek series episode about Zephraim Cochrane and his disembodied alien lover. We need the alien's assistance to repair our damaged shuttlecraft (whose cargo bay is loaded with fanhistorical memorabilia). Can we get it, while hiding from it our intention to escape with Cochrane?

(3) Late in the day I'm walking along 40th Street from the MacArthur BART station to the Oaks Club. Ahead of me, moving slowly, are two women, black, pushing large baby carriages. I catch up with them, and walk with them for a little while. I urge them to move faster, saying that the sun will go down soon, and when it does the street won't be safe.

September 2003 Dreams

9-2-2003

Fragments: (1) riding an elevator up in a skyscraping luxury apartment building; (2) going downstairs in the same building, fleeing, trying to avoid detection; (3) climbing those same stairs up from the basement or lower floors. In this third part there were dead bodies suspended inn alcoves, nude bodies of murdered women. The stairs were concrete, and littered with concrete rubble. Death was a presence through many of last night's dreams: my own death, the deaths of people I loved. There was also a sense that there were things that were more important than death to worry about.

9-6-2003

I'm working in a laboratory, at a desk doing theoretical work. I become suddenly aware that the consequence of my calculations is that the particle accelerator being build in the lab can be used to create wormholes. This is Really Important, and it seems certain that I'll receive recognition for this – possibly even a Nobel.

I walk around the large, circular room, looking over the components of the cyclotron under construction. I can hardly wait for it to be finished for my prediction to be borne out.

9-8-2003

I'm wearing my reading glasses, trying to read. When I look up, my view of the room around me is distorted. I slide the glasses down my nose to peer over the top of the frames. The room is still distorted. It seems as if wearing the glasses has permanently altered my vision.

9-10-2003

(1) Cthulhu Doom: Playing a "live action" game of Doom, where the level is filled with monsters and dangers that need to be traversed in a particular order. Here are soldiers to be shot, there are tentacled cthulhoids that must be zapped with the plasma gun.

By mistake i enter a room that I should have waited, clearing other parts of the level, before entering. There are lots of cthulhoids here.

I pump many zaps of the BFG-9000 into the room, and hope to survive the counterattack.

(2) Walking on my knees on a circular or oval track, like that around a football field. I'm lagging behind the others, and they are gradually coming around the track and catching up with me again.

(3) Eldritch horror invoked by the seaside. Tentacles in the waves beneath the water.

9-15-2003

(1) We are driving in a car in Alaska. I am a passenger. We pass by housing developments. The road slopes upward, into the foothills. The car passes a crossroads and a sign says that we are entering a wilderness area. we keep going. The pavement ends, and the road gets much steeper. There is no room to turn around.

Our car is not made for this, but we can't turn back.

We come to the crest of the road, which widens a little. Can we turn around? Maybe. ... but if we go off the road we might fall off the cliff.

(Later) Driving past more housing developments.

(2) Some kind of confrontation in the swamps. I get the jump on my opponent, and get my hands on his throat, squeezing, strangling him. His face turns purple.

His thrashing subsides, and I still hold on, fearing a trick. Eventually his body goes limp. I release him, now sure that he is dead.

(3) I'm a passenger in a small commercial jet plane. A few seats behind me, a woman (with long, wavy brown hair) is dying.

Out the window to my left, the sun is setting into a cloudbank. The colors are vivid reds, purples, and oranges; it's beautiful. The sun disappears.

The woman has died. I anticipate a great deal of difficulty – bureaucratic officialdom – when the plane lands.

We arrive at the airport. I make my way forward to the cockpit and get out of the plane through a small hatch in the ceiling. Once outside in the open air, I start to cough.

9-22-2003

I'm taking a public transit train to get somewhere by some specific time. Where I'm going is at 14th Street. The train goes underground and pulls into the station. I stay on it. At the next station, 12th Street, I get out.

Wandering around the station I come across an underground river, teeming with trout. There's half an hour before I have to be at my appointment. I decide to take some time to go fishing. I take out a rod and reel, and cast into the river.

Immediately there's resistance on the line, and I start playing it, letting it out, reeling it in.

I observe that it isn't a fish at all that I've hooked, but instead my cat Rocky. Now I have a problem: How do I get the hook out of his mouth? It's barbed, and I don't want to hurt him any more than I already have.

9-24-2003

I sit at a bar and order an ice cream dish. I ask how much it costs. The bartender tells me "One dollar." "Really?" I ask. "No. I'm just kidding." The actual price is more plausible.

I pay, and put the change loose in my pocket. I worry to myself about walking around carrying so much cash.

August 2003 Dreams

8-19-2003

(1) I'm walking through a casino, and I see Benny Behnen, the casino owner's son [so the casino must have been the Horseshoe in Las Vegas, but it seemed pretty generic in the dream]. I say, "Hey, how ya doin'!" and Benny nods in return. I muse to myself about the conceit of having a nodding acquaintance with casino owners.

(2) I'm supposed to meet people for lunch, so I sit down at a Japanese restaurant counter in a food court. The food is a little expensive, but I'm hungry. I order a shrimp combination plate.

Debbie and Liz Lynn join me, Deb sitting on my right and Liz on my left. Across the walkway at the left end of the counter, someone we know has sat down at another restaurant counter, and begins to talk loudly to a companion about some kind of spiritual experience she has just had. Liz covers her face in her hands in exasperation; she's completely fed up with this sort of thing.

(3) For the group picnic in the park, Debbie and I have spread our bedspread on the lawn right next to where David and Cathy (Deb's brother and sister-in-law) have spread theirs. I'm wandering around, seeing things. An unfamiliar woman approaches me and apologizes for encroaching on the family space. I tell her not to worry, it was nothing. Then I come back to our bedspreads and discover that the woman's pickup truck had backed up onto Deb's and my bedspread. The truck moves off again.

Continuing to wander around, I observe on the grassy ground that there are caterpilars – larval monarch butterflies – crossing the lawn. I also see candies scattered about on the ground. This immediately reminds me of the silly physicist who published a paper arguing on thermodynamic grounds that solar sails can't work [this really happened in waking life]. I think for a moment on what kind of analysis is needed to show the clueless git what he did wrong.

It's time to go, and everyone is packing up. Cathy Tuttle folds up their bedspread. I help out. Here is a stack of neatly folded T-shirts. They look like they could be mine, but they could be David's or Cathy's as well. Whose are they? I guess that they are mine. Then we fold up the bedspreads as well.

8-25-2003

(1) I'm driving in a small car through woods, the road narrowed and choked by banks of leaves. I come out of the woodsby a river. I look for a grocery store, walk across the shallows of the river into a grotto with tiled walls. Water runs across the tiled floor.

(2) Debbie and I are walking in a meadow at the bottom of a narrow mountain valley. Petroleum oil seeps out of cracks in the cliffside and flows down, the flow growing from slight trickles into more and more flow, and eventually becoming a solid sheet of oil flowing down the cliff.

It is beginning to rain. The ground begins to get wet. But parts of the ground are remaining dry – I notice that the dry spots make patterns, like crop circles. The patterns comprise a sort of evil writing that evokes Lovecraftian horror.

(3) A recapitulation of the delivery of fanzines to Richard Bergeron, except that it is I doing it rather than Gary Farber and Patrick Hayden. I get past the doorman and into Bergeron's apartment. He isn't there. The apartment is furnished like a Victorian men's club – dark atmosphere, teak and mahogany furniture, overstuffed chairs, oriental rugs, etc. I light a cigarette, and tip its ash into an ashtray. I find Bergeron's cigar humidor.

A woman is in the room! She sees me. She offers me a cigarete, but it's a Marlboro, too strong for me.

9-1-2003

(1) I'm talking with Delia Sherman. She is very drunk. Smiling at me, she leans over, collapses into my arms. I gently lower her to the floor.

She needs to be gotten to her hotel room. Where is Ellen Kushner? Here are some safety monitors to help. they take Delia and carry her to her room. One of them thanks me.

It must have been some party in the SFWA suite. Here's another woman passed out on the floor. She has blond shoulder-length hair, and she's built chunkily. I don't know her.

(2) While traveling through the woods in the snow, the young king's party meets an accident. The king is rescued by a bandit. The two travel through the woods to the king's castle. The bandit disappears into the woods.

The king now has a problem: The bandit knows him as he really is, and likes him. As king, nobody sees the real man who is king, and he's lonely. He wants to find the bandit again.

I, the dreaming self, think that this would make a good premise for a book, while I look at stumps and logs sticking out of the snow.

July 2003 Dreams

7-3-2003

(1) I'm riding on a bus heading south on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. I look across the aisle – that's Ian McKellen sitting across from me! I look away, not wanting to stare.

More people get on the bus; it's crowded. McKellen moves to make room for someone ... and sits down again, next to me. He's looking at the receipt for something he's purchased – it's from the Other Change of Hobbit bookstore. I decide to start a conversation, but choose not to play the "my girlfirend used to be one of the owners" card. I say, "I should think that you'd be sick unto death of that hobbit stuff by now." He glares at me. "I will never get sick of 'that hobbit stuff'!" he says to me.

The scene shifts. We are now in a crowded restaurant/night club that has a floor show. The entertainment is awful.

It's clear to me that McKellen would like to pick me up. I don't want to go along with it, because I feel that, being thoroughly straight, I would be unable to
perform. But I think there's nothing I can say that won't encourage him.

(2) I'm walking past a home with a yard and no fence. A dog, a brown pit bull, runs up to me and starts barking fiercely. He goes no further than the edge of the yard, though. I observe that the dog seems to be well-trained, and I keep walking.

The dog suddenly lunges past the edge of the lawn, towards me. "Bad dog!" I yell, and hit it with my fists. There's an old stick nearby; I pick it up and start beating the dog with it. "Bad dog!" Whack! "Bad dog!" Whack! "Bad dog!" Whack! ...

7-5-2003:

Last night's dreams included a string of dreams taking place at a major science fiction convention – a worldcon, I thought. I had said something forceful and dramatic in some context – perhaps a fanzine, perhaps my weblog, perhaps on a panel – and was feeling defensive about it, ashamed that I may have hurt people's feelings.

But my remarks had attracted the attention of a group of flashy young turks – cyberpunk-types – and they were flattering me, treating me like one of them, one of the "in" crowd.

There was a bunch of dream hugger-mugger. Some of it developed into finding out that a number of the young-turk women writers were attracted to me. Lots of flirting, with an undertone of anxiety on my part (I didn't deserve it, my writing – or whatever – was troublesome, et cetera). At one point I observed that the flirtaceous kisses with new women were more exciting than kisses from old familiar lovers, but the excitement was somehow illusory.

[I woke up at least halfway, and turned over to see Debbie's sleeping face – which seemed younger and smoother to me than it usually does. I felt strongly that the lasting love I have for her was a better deal than the fun flirts I had been dreaming about. Back to sleep and moreof the same dreams....]

Here are Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Ellen tells me in this helpful, just-between-friends way that she really likes my long beard, but it would look lots better if I had it trimmed.

June 2003 Dreams

June 7 2003

The aliens have landed, at least one shipful. Are they hostile? I encounter an alien on the stern of a boat moored on a pier – I'm climbing a ladder, it is inside the cabin. It reaches out and touches my hand with its tentacle. It speaks, apparently naming itself (the name sounds Viking or Norwegian). I touch my chest and say my own name.

We're afraid the aliens are hostile invaders, but they seem to be interested in trade goods. We trade various things for alien artifacts. Their spacecraft, when we examine it, is actually shoddy and flimsy. They came to Earth in *that*? Our fear of them diminishes, and we give them a cheerful goodbye when they depart.

Afterwards, one of us says, "They came here on a shoestring. Now that they know they can trade with us, though, they'll come back on a big budget. Will we be ready for them? The danger isn't over."

We talk about my encounter on the back of the boat. I describe it in detail once again.

* * *

I'm playing with a child who turns out to be the son of one of the original cast of the BRADY BUNCH TV show. I babble a lot about the show. ("How come Alice was the only one shown doing a lick of work?") We take the kid to Comic Relief to buy comic books and graphic novels about the encounter with the aliens. One set of graphic novels has different versions for different intended ages: one for little children, one for teenagers and one for adults. I stack them all up as we pull them, and the stack falls over.

I go looking for Rory Root to ask if there's any more that we've overlooked. I see someone bent over that might be him, but when he stands up, he turns out to be someone else.

(Some time early in June)

It's a dream-recreation of John Carpenter's film THE THING [which I haven't seen] and/or the John W. Campbell story "Who Goes There?" [which, of course, I have read]. I'm on an expedition to the Antarctic, and someone in the group has been replaced by an alien mimic. We've just discovered this, and we are gathering together to get ready to do the blood test (hot needle thrust into drawn blood – the alien mimic blood will recoil from the needle) and there is increasing fear that the alien mimic will attack with deadly force before the test reveals it. Some of the sled dogs are behaving hostilely – have they been replaced by the alien mimic also?

June 18, 2003

(1) Yet another SF convention. I've been up all night and the sun is coming up. Surprise! I'm naked, and I need to get clothes. (I'm locked out of my room. I make my way down to a party room that had been going strong. It's occupied now, though: Doug Faunt is sleeping in the bed. But someone else is making breakfast there, too. I get a towel to wrap around myself. Later, I find some clothes to wear until I can get back into my room to get my own clothes.

(2) SF people are talking about a book being put together for Tor.
It's supposed to be outreach to black readership, and it is an original anthology of fantasy stories about an African-American family: each individual author's story covers one particular time period and one generation – some set in the antebellum South, one around the Civil War and Emancipation, on in Reconstruction, one in the Jim Crow era, and so forth. One of the contributing authors is Kevin Murphy, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden is the anthology's editor. I look over some of the story proposals and observe that they seem to set the members of the family apart from the mass of slaves and descendants of slaves in their values and virtues: They seem to me to be "whiter" in character than other black people in the stories. I remark on the racism of this, to the resentment of the people with who are showing me the book and its contents. How could I call their wonderful bridge-building, cultural-gap-spanning book "racist"?

(3) The dream segues into a scene in a Tidewater plantation in Colonial times, and I am the owner of the plantation. One of my slaves, a boy, has been disrespectful, and he must be punished. He is too young and frail to be whipped, though, so I order that his mother be whipped in his place. This has the "advantage" of strengthening family feeling in the boy, as well as the immediate goal of punishment. The lashes of the whip cut into the skin and flesh of the mother's back. Are five lashes enough? Ten? Much more than that and she might not survive. I awaken feeling revulsion, disgusted with myself that I could order such a thing
to be done.

(some time between June 19 and June 21)

I am wandering around a dark and clammy basement of an old and large building. Something is terribly wrong, and I am searching for the source of the danger. I m frightened.

I hear a noise and turn. There, trying to creep silently into the same basement, is a boy, ten or eleven years old, disheveled dark hair, glasses, etc.

I am furious. "Mister Potter!" I say indignantly. "Following your nose is all well and good; but I suggest that you follow it straight back to the Gryffindor common room. Now, Mister Potter!"

Dream Catcher-Upper

I haven't posted dream-diary entries since last June, due to a number of causes.

First of all my dream diary had gotten disorganized right around then. I would record dreams in a handwritten journal I've been keeping (my main dream diary is a text file on a computer). I would write hasty notes, reminders about dream content, and not get back to flesh them out. I would simply try to remember dreams, without writing them down.

At the same time, and very likely by no coincidence, my the content of my recalled dreams took a darker turn. They were more violent. I began to notice more explicit sexual content, some of which involved people in my waking life. I came to feel rather uncomfortable about the idea of publishing on the Web what amount to sexual fantasies about friends and acquaintances.

The violent tendency climaxed in July, with some seriously heavy stuff coming out in one dream that I remembered clearly, leaving me shaken, but which I didn't have the nerve to write down even as a sketch until the end of September.

I also felt uncomfortable about editing, about censoring, deliberately omitting details of the dreams from the accounts I might post to As I Please, or leaving the dreams out altogether. I felt like this would be dishonest, somehow. This discomfort fed back into the disorganization of my diary-keeping.

At length, I set out to bring my dream diary back into order, to get my recorded dreams into one place, with intact chronology. And after I did so, I could even bring myself to include the nightmare from July.

I was rewarded for this by almost two weeks of daily dream recollections, all included in the dream diary.

And now it's time to bring my dreams back into this blog. I'm not going to include everything – no one needs to know precisely which famous fantasy writer I've been soul-kissing in my sleep. But I will be posting dream-diary excerpts here from time to time, intending to get more-or-less current.

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.

Almost Lucid

I'm driving through a green valley that has industrial buildings in it, and I think I'm in Seattle, and the factories are the Boeing plant. Overhead, strung up on supports over the road, is a model of the International Space Station, which has been built a lot bigger than I remember it having been, with lots and lots of solar panels.

Then, in one of those dream transitions, I'm in the space station, in orbit around the Earth. It's part of some government program to build support of the space program by sending ordinary people into space. I've just gotten onto the station, having been brought up on a shuttle. I'm feeling slightly queasy, and I'm wondering whether I will have trouble adjusting to zero-gee conditions. I notice with curiousity that the doors between compartments look like ordinary doors in buildings on the ground. I think that I would have expected that they would be different. My nausea is staying with me: not growing, but not going away either, and I'm starting to become concerned about it.

Another dream-transition, and I'm standing in a cafeteria. I notice that I'm standing, with weight on my feet, and think that this means I'm not on the space station any more. Did I dream being there? Am I still there, but dreaming now?

Across the room, I see my friend Elise Matthesen. I wave to get her attention, and go over to talk to her. "Are we on the space station or not?" I ask her. "Are we dreaming or not?"

"Well," she says, "we're definitely feeling weight, so we're not in space." As a final confirmation of this, I take my cell phone out of my pouch and let it go. It falls into my other hand. We're definitely on the ground.

"As for dreaming, you know you can tell if you are dreaming if you look at a clock and you can't read the numbers." I recognize this as being a detail from the movie Waking Life. There isn't any clock visible, but by now I've come to the conclusion that I am dreaming. But the thread of the dream slips away into deeper sleep at that point, and I remember no more.

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.

Dream Fragments

(i) We're moving, trying to clear our stuff out of the apartment. Everything is almost out, and but I notice that our DSL modem (the old one that we used in waking life for our Telocity/DirecTVInternet connection) is still hooked up, standing upright on the bedroom floor, its LEDs blinking.

(ii) (Later, after waking and falling back asleep) After a bunch of activity lost in the fog of unremembered dream, I enter the building that houses my office. I choose not to take the elevator up to the third floor, my floor, but instead walk up the stairs, along the side of the building.

I'm quite tired, and my body is sore, particularly my left side. I reach for the handrail with my left hand ... only to realize that my left hand had been amputated some weeks ago, and I still haven't accustomed myself to its loss. The mistake is too much for me, and I stop climbing the stairs. I turn around and sit on the landing, weeping, holding my face in my right hand and supporting it with my left stump.

I woke up, finding myself lying on my left side. My left leg and arm were indeed sore, from having restricted blood circulation. My left hand was intact, although for a while after waking I kept touching it to reassure myself that it was still there.

Activist Dreams

3-13-03: A Relief Worker in Amaz

I'm part of a team of relief workers in a middle-eastern country. I arrive on the scene of some kind of massacre in a refugee camp — many inhabitants of the camp were killed in some kind of poison gas attack. My role in the relief work is to talk to as many people as I can to find out what happened and what they think needs to be done. Officials from many countries are interested in this work. I encounter an official from the Egyptian foreign ministry, and I invite him to our next group meeting. He is very cordial, but I know his politeness and bonhommie covers a dislike of me and my group and hostility towards the work we are doing.

There is enormous disagreement about what needs to be done. Survivors of the attack and other and their sympathizers want the attack site converted into a memorial park for the dead victims. Other people want to put this terrible experience behind us all, forget it and move on. My group tends to be sympathetic with the refugees.

My work is to spend time alone with the person I'm meeting, interviewing them. An interview is arranged with a survivor of the attack, who turns out to be an American who had been living with the refugees in their camp at the time. For some reason it is very important that he be gotten out of the country without any government officials knowing that he is in fact an American. After he tells me his story, I arrange to have him smuggled out of the camp in the trunk of a car.

I continue my interviewing work, talking to everyone — people in the camp, government officials, other people in my team, reporters, local farmers, and so on. The head of our project, a middle-aged woman psychologist from Luxembourg, arrives in her car, a Deusenberg. She wants to me to show her around the camp. I escort her around, pointing things out, telling her what has been happening, what the team has been doing.

We encounter one of our teammates, a clean-cut American named Charles. The project head asks me if I had been able to spend time with Charles, clearly intending to arrange it if I hadn't. (Charles is quite busy and notoriously difficult to schedule time with.) "Oh, yes," I tell her, "Charles and I had a very good talk."

"Really?" she says. "How long did you have to wait to see him?"

"All my life," I answer.

3-17-03: The Activist as Action Hero

My dream last night came in three parts.

The first part is largely unremembered, but in it a young man went to Seattle to do something important. All I remember is seeing an advertisement for the Seattle football team, promoting community support after the team was trounced by the Detroit team in a seven-game stand. I saw this billboard while driving across the Aurora Avenue Bridge.

In the second part of the dream, the young man had been arrested, through some kind of treachery, and was facing a hearing before the city council to determine his fate — he might be put to death. I made my way into the council chamber to see what I could do to salvage the situation.

It transpired that the charges against him were based on lies and slanders passed about by a councilwoman, a blonde woman named Ortran. I denounced her as a liar and revealed the charges to be a fabrication. The young man was almost free to go except for one detail.

Another councilmember asked, "But what can we do about the threat of something-or-other?" (the pretext under which the young man was arrested).

I answered, "I'm sure you can rely on Ms. Ortran to stalwartly defend against that." There was some irony in my statement, but also an acknowledgment that Ortran had a genuine and important role to play.

In the third part of the dream, I was leaving the council chambers, noticing the city police officers standing guard on corners, relaxed now that the civic crisis was over.

Suddenly their radios crackle and they come to full nervous alert! There's a hostage situation developing on the other side of the building.

I race around the building and make my way through the crowd.

Ortran has taken a policewoman hostage. Holding the officer with one hand, with the other she holds the barrel of a high-powered sniper's rivle to the officer's throat. If anyone makes a move, Ortran will kill her.

The police are helpless. It's a standoff. Ortran demands that the young man be brought out to her, presumably so she can kill him.

I whisper to the policeman in front of me, "Give me your gun! Give me your gun!" He pulls it stealthily out of its holster and passes it back to me.

Concealed by the crowd, I have a chance of getting one shot off at Ortran. It has to count, in order to save the policewoman's life.

I get a chance at a clean shot and let it pass. Then another. I am afraid that the pistol I am holding isn't accurate at this range. I could fire and miss (or hit a bystander) and Ortran will kill the officer.

It has to be done — but while I steel my resolve and wait for the next clear shot, I awaken.

This Morning's Dream

Debbie and I and some other friends are scuba-diving in a warm tropical lagoon. We are swimming around a sunken ship. (In my mind, it was the Prinz Eugen, in Kwajelein Lagoon, but it was more like the Japanese freighter my father and I once explored in Truk Lagoon.) Here are interesting fish, typical inhabitants of a coral reef. There is the boat's single small gun on its bow. And over there is a dangerous-looking fish: a long thin creature, like an eel, swimming through the open water in a sinuous ribbon. (Here, perhaps, is where my conviction that the ship is the Prinz Eugen came from. While diving by that ship in Kwaj Lagoon with my father, a five- or six-foot shark swam quite close to us, although seemingly ignoring us.) We should get back to the surface and out of the water now.

The others go up ahead of me. on ahead. I'm taking care to breath carefully, exhaling as I ascend to prevent embolisms, watching the giant eel swim past. I ascend slowly, out of concern for decompression and the bends. At length I reach the surface and swim over to the boat, where the rest of the party is already on board. I cling to the ladder, take off a flipper, and toss it over the side onto the boat. Debbie laughs and says, "That's dirty!" and tosses it back to me, while I'm taking the other flipper off. "Hey!" I answer, "don't throw them back, I don't want to lose them over the side!" I toss both flippers into the boat, and then my facemask, and start climbing up the ladder into the boat.

Dream

Debbie and I are visiting our condo in the mountainous country to the north of our city. There is various sorts of dream hugger-mugger that I can't recall; then we are driving in our SUV(*) along the dirt road that leads back to the highway. Away from the buildings, we stop to admire the scenery. "It's amazing," I say, "that all this belongs to us." Over there is the chalky cliff-face that is just perfect for use as a screen for outdoor showings of movies. We can invite our friends!

Rather than getting on the highway and driving home, we cross over to the other side, and more unremembered dream hugger-mugger takes place. Debbie has to drive home, and I want to stay behind. That's okay, because I can take the bus home -- the stop is right over there. Too bad the bus is leaving right now, and it could be a while before the next one comes along, this being the mountains and all. Oh, well. Deb goes home, and I stick around.

Still more unremembered hugger-mugger. Then I go to wait for the bus. I climb up the steep embankment to get to the highway, cross quickly in a gap in the traffic, and stand at the bus stop. Soon I am joined by my friend Sabyl Cohen, who is waiting for the same bus. We get to talking. "It's interesting," she says, "that when we come here, the locals think of us as tourists. That's so unusual." "I guess they don't think you are a tourist when you go to Las Vegas, then," I reply. "Certainly not!" says Sabyl (who in waking life is a professional poker player). In one of those unnoticed dream transitions, we are no longer at the bus stop but in the kitchen of a cabin with unfinished wooden walls, still talking.

There is a sound, and we look out the windows. An airplane is flying low overhead. It looks like a jet plane, a Boeing 737, but the engines sound like propellers rather than jets. It appears to be in trouble, circling to make an emergency landing in the smoothest place the pilot can find. The plane comes around and approaches an open space, a grassy meadow. Its passengers have crawled out and are dangling from the landing gear, and from the wings, in order to cushion the landing. As the plane comes to a halt, I leave the cabin by the front door and hurry down the stairs, to join the rescue work. Running up to the crash site I see that, miraculously, most of the passengers are unhurt, although here and there are a few with broken arms or legs. I join the quickly growing crowd of people gathering to help.

(*)Relax; we don't really drive SUVs in waking life. We don't have a condominium in the mountains, either.