Friday, January 29, 2010

Owen and the Ambulance

I was driving an ambulance. My partner was Owen Wilson. It was icy out from a recent snowstorm and we skid out of control and crashed driving onto the top level of a parking garage. Owen and I stumble out of the ambulance, trying to get away from the cops who are chasing us.

We run down the parking garage, dodging ice and having a fascinating intellectual conversation (part of which is unintelligible to me). After doing this for some time we are still on the top level. Owen (who is now John Schuck, in his role as Capt. "Painless" Waldowski from MASH, complete with a cigar) finds an old car hood, and rides down and around the slope of the parking garage on it like a sled. Unfortunately the recent earthquake turned the garage into something out of an Escher print. We he gets out of sight there is a bang and a yelp, and he pops back up in the air and lands right in front of me.

We walk down and get to the dark overhang of the next level, looking very much like a cave. We hesitate before sneaking into the darkness. Creeping around the corner, we find the cop who had been chasing us. His leg is injured such that he is standing up but he can't move. We walk past him and he orders us to stop. My partner (back to being Owen Wilson) keeps walking. The cop keeps saying "Don't move, Blue!" Owen is wearing a red motorcycle outfit, so the cop must mean me, but I'm not moving.

Owen is walking carefully sideways along the edge. All of a sudden he jumps for it. I walk over to the edge and look down. The back of his head is totally caved in, but he is still alive, mumbling apologies.

CSI: My House

I was having a party at my house. One of my coworkers went out into the back yard with some hip surfer dude. They didn't come back, and when we went outside we found her strangled to death. She'd been zipped up in a big mesh bag with a coffin sized mattress. The mattress was on a wooden bench next to a camp fire. The mattress was supposed to catch fire and burn up all of the evidence. Kirk and I walked carefully around the crime scene, crouched low with arms and legs curved out, looking for forensic evidence.

I had this dream Tuesday night, but didn't post it because it disturbed me so much. It wasn't like a nightmare. During the dream it was just like an episode of CSI (without the inevitable gross out scene). But the second I woke up I was totally freaked out by it.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Time Travelling Bank Robbers

Me and the rest of the gang of bank robbers walked into a garage early one morning. It was the sort of garage that hadn't been used for a car in ages, and was instead a place to work. As we came in, one guy found a shell casing on the floor. We figured that this meant other bank robbers had used this garage before, and saw it as a good omen.

We sat down and starting working on our own bullets. We would unscrew the tops, pack them full of explosives and shrapnel, and screw the tops back on. All throughout this we kept up a lively conversation. It was a good bunch of guys, laughing and joking with each other.

Once we had our bullets ready we packed everything up and headed out to the bank. The garage was on High Street, and we walked through Jackson Park to hit the old Jefferson Savings and Loan on the downtown mall. When we got to the bank we got into a ferocious gunfight with another gang of heavily armed guys very much like us. It became pretty clear during the gun fight that we were the bad guys, and they were the good guys, even though they were another bunch of bank robbers. We decided that we didn't like being the bad guys, and somehow we got a chance to go back through time and change what we did, so that we could be the good guys.

So once again me and the rest of the gang of bank robbers walked into the garage early in the morning. But it wasn't the same gang. By going back in time to become the good guys, the first gang had left a void in the time stream. There needed to be a new gang of bad guys, and somehow I had gotten stuck with the new bad guys, instead of remaining with my old gang, who were now the good guys.

It quickly became clear that these guys were not up to muster. As before, we find a shell casing. Instead of being on the floor it is in a small chute hanging from the ceiling. The guy who finds it doesn't see it as a good omen, but starts talking about how it's evidence that the cops have been here, and the whole thing is a set up, and we're all going to die. The gang leader starts yelling at him in this shrill, piercing voice, telling him to shut up before his paranoid delusions ruin morale.

As before we start working on our bullets, but it's not as before. Instead of packing in shrapnel and explosives, we have brightly colored wooden shapes and square rods, and teeny bullets that we unscrew to pour Goldschlager into the bigger bullets, which are huge fat things half made out of glass.

And there is no friendly conversation. One guy is this introverted obsessive compulsive. He keeps organizing his bullet making materials. Whenever he does this, the gang leader yells at him with that shrill, piercing voice. The leader says that every time he's seen someone organizing their bullet making materials it has turned out bad, and someone had died. Then there's a woman who mixes her materials with the introverts, saying that they can then share. Then she takes three quarters of the materials, leaving him with not enough to make his bullets.

I sit quietly through all of this. I'm confused by this new method of making bullets, especially the bit with the Goldschlager. So I just sit and watch the other make their bullets so I can figure out how to make mine. I figure this isn't going to work out, and these guys are all going to die. But I just bide my time, waiting for the chance to slip away quietly, hopefully before the shooting starts.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Country, Color, Object

This dream was posted a day late.

I'm staying with Coleen and her family in a large house full of college students. There was a big party the night before, and the place is a total mess. Every surface is covered with garbage or a spill of some sort. Coleen and I are surveying the damage when she tells me that my job is to help Benjamin with his Blues Clues book. I'm confused. I thought she would need help cleaning up the mess.

So I go and find Ben in a back room. He starts giving me instructions on how I have to write my sentences. David is there, and he's chiding Ben for insisting that things have to be so exact. I open the book, and each page has blanks for a country, a color, and an object for me to fill in. Then Benjamin has to guess what I wrote.

Somehow, the three of us end up in the bathroom arguing about it. Something jumps up from behind the toilet and start to climb the walls.

At this point I woke up and rolled over. I kept doing that all night, with little snatches of the dream in between. The only one I can remember is that everyone was standing around talking. Everyone had fractals growing out of their faces, except for one person who had smooth skin that everyone was treating like a weirdo.

Sporty New Car

This dream was posted a day late.

I have a sporty new car, and I'm showing it off to people at Walker Middle School. Somehow Kara gets a hold of it, and I have to drive out of the parking lot in her car. I drive up to Dairy Rd., and she squeezes in beside me on the right, even though I'm making a right turn too. She zips around and down to 250, but loses control and slides out into traffic. Cars keep coming and smashing into her, spinning the car around like it's on ice. I end up being the one who has to explain everything to the cops.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Bad Drivers

It was late at night, and I was down on the old track at CHS. All of sudden these two cars drive onto the field. One is an old, rusted VW bug, and the other is a non-descript VW rabbit. They start racing around the track, but not really paying attention to the track. They're driving off the track and onto the field all over the place, and when they get to where I am (on the corner closest to the back entrance of CHS), they split around me, zooming by on either side. There are women and children running all over the place screaming.

After a few laps, the VW rabbit turns and drives up the hill, along the houses on Grove Rd. and toward the back entrance. The VW bug tries to follow, but ends up going into the creek with a tremendous crash and lots of tinkling glass. I run down to the creek to see what happened, taking out my mini-mag light and waving it around. When I get there the cops have already shown up, and one of them makes some sarcastic comment about how helpful the light was.

The VW bug crashed into a white truck, which was on a smuggling run down the path cleared for the power lines. To get it open we had to pull the front end forward and down. The first guy out of the cab has some blood spattered on him, and he's stumbling around and babbling incoherently. The Don Dennis comes out, as cheerful and dapper as ever. Then I woke up.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Toys and Airports

I drove down from Maryland to Virginia to see the people who were designing the new toy. When I got to their offices, it was like the corner of Preston and Mad Ave. in Charlottesville, but Preston and Mad Ave were major multi-lane roads, and the small apartment building on the corner was a 15 story glass box office building with a huge parking lot. I got out of the car, but it was a bright sunny day, and I was covered in layers and layers of clothes because it's so cold in Maryland.

I got to the receptionists area of the toy designers, but they weren't ready for me yet, so I had t sit in a corner while people filtered in and out, having end-of-the-day type conversations. Then I went through a door into a conference room. There was a oval table with a bunch of people sitting around it talking about the new designs.

The toy was going to be a freedom and mobility toy for little kids, so they could drive around and see their friends. The idea was to get a jump on the teenage desire for a car. It looked like a complicated rocket on wheels, with all sorts of pipes running around the outside. At one point I was passed designs for two pieces of safety equipment. The one I remember was the seat belt, which looked like one of those complicated weight-lifter belts, but it was made out of red plastic. I was thinking that I should have talked to the engineers back at my job at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, to find out what the latest in safety technology was. I knew I was going to be coming down to look at safety designs, so it was really stupid of me not to have thought ahead.

I got up to get something to drink, and there was a ton of noise from the reception area like a bunch of people leaving for the day. When I turned around it was night and the offices were dark and empty. I wandered around for a while trying to find people, but the modern high-tech offices were now some huge old house. Every office I looked into still had a big old bed in it. Eventually I ran into two of the women working on the toy. They were on the floor above me coming down. One of them was really pretty, and had on two tight white tank-tops. There was a light coming in one window and perfectly lighting up her breasts, just like a shot from American Beauty. The other woman with her was wearing a loose black skirt, and I had the impression she was very pretty, but I was just entranced by the woman in the tank tops, and never even really looked at her.

They came down the stairs to show me the toy, which was a light brown Zhu Zhu pet. They put it down on the floor and it drove around running into the walls. Eventually I realized there was a guy following us around with a remote control, and he was the one driving it. He wasn't intentionally driving it into the walls, he was just having trouble controlling it.

But then it was time for me to go to the Metro and catch my train to the airport. I went outside with my luggage slung over my back. I was running through the streets, and my sister Kara was running along side me. But I outpaced her by running through the gutter of a right turn lane. Then I was running side by side with a banker down the street. The banker had on a grey suit and a red tie. The light hadn't changed yet, so the street was empty, but we could see the cars behind and in front of us getting ready to drive down the street. I was running at an easy pace, but the banker was really panicked and running full out, although he was going no faster than me.

We jumped through gaps in the hedge on the median and made it across to the Medical Center stop on the Red Line. There was a huge circular drive to get up to the Metro station, but I took a shortcut around the right side. I got down into the concrete canal where the train ran, and then all of a sudden I was at the airport, walking through the parking lot. The airport was like a huge version of White Flint shopping mall, and I walked in through an Indian shoe-repair store. It had a bright red sign just like this Vietnamese Restaurant on 355, but instead of Pho 97 it was Mo Der 85. And it was in some weird font with bent lines. [I think "Mo Der" is a refernce to Mohinder Singh, a character in the novel Interface by Neil Stephenson and J. Frederick George.]

Inside was like a shopping mall, but instead of a wide open area between the stores it was a huge waiting area of rows of armless chairs, packed full of people. I wandered around for a while before I found my way to the departures area. I had to go down this long tunnel to get there, all cinder block and overhead pipes. Whenever there was a turn in the tunnel, huge signs had been made out of orange construction paper. They all said "Hey Kid" in three foot high letters, with a huge arrow pointing the way. The signs were in various states of disrepair, with the individual sheets of construction paper falling off the wall.

When we got to the security check point I panicked. I was searching through my backpack looking for my baggage claim check, because I knew they wouldn't let me through the security screening without it. As I'm going through all of the junk in my backpack, I realize that I haven't put it all into clear plastic bags for the screeners. Then I saw my utility knife, which I obviously forgot to put in my checked bag. That's when I realize that I never checked my bag, and I left it in the trunk of my car. I'm so panicked I can feel my heart pumping in my chest, vibrating my whole body like a jackhammer.

A helpful guy with curly hair in a white t-shirt comes over and we head back to the parking lot to get my bag. He asks me when my flight leaves, and I pull out my ticket and see that it leaves at 4:00. Then I take out my Droid cell phone to check the time. I turn it on and it says 4:40 and I freak out because I'm late by 15 minutes [apparently I'm not so good at math in my dreams]. But then I realize that 4:40 isn't the time now, it's just something from one of the apps. But I can't get the phone to tell me what the time is. I keep pressing buttons and changing apps, but all I can find is a lengthy definition of time in some fancy script. Eventually I force the phone to shut down and reboot, and find that it's 12:40, and I have tons of time to get my bag and check back in.

Me and the curly haired guy exit the concrete tunnels and walk out onto a grassy area. By the time I get to the actual parking lot the curly haired guy has disappeared. The section of the parking lot I'm in is completely empty of cars. However, the land is curved in a bowl, and I can see the rest of the parking lot going on for what seems like miles, and it is packed full of cars. I'm walking down toward were my car is, and there are a bunch of black teenagers in the parking lot. They're walking around in a way that's almost like a dance routine and singing. Most of them wander off, leaving one guy behind. He's balancing on a rock the size of his foot and singing. I get to my car and get my huge black bag out of the trunk.

I start the long walk back to the baggage check, which is near the Mo Der 85 place on the other side of the mall. When I get there a woman is sitting in the chair with one of those old beehive hair dryers over her head. I reach down and push the button on the front of the chair near her ankles, and out pops a baggage claim check. I turn around and leave, and as I'm walking out the door I can hear the woman behind me saying "Oooh, that was the last one."

But now I can't remember where I put my luggage. I'm wandering around the outside of the mall, looking into stores, trying to find the one with the locker that I put my luggage into. Eventually I get back to Mo Der 85, but as I'm walking in the door I wake up.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Ed's Books

I had this dream on the same night as the previous dream post.

I was sitting in my bed room at a house on W High St. that I have dreamed about before. The room I'm in has a hidden door to a secret room. You have to take a few steps down into the room, but it is bigger than my bed room. The room is full of shelves and boxes, and has two old metal desks in it that used to belong to police detectives. I have a lot of storage in the room, mostly mine, but also my parent's art collection.

While I'm poking around in there Ed Gatewood comes in. He's looking for his copy of Catcher in the Rye and some other book of the English-class variety. He has to do perform a play later based on the two books, and he'd left them in the secret room. We start searching for them, and as we do more and more searchers start showing up until the room is full of people looking for Ed's books.

Eventually Kirk turns on a light I didn't know about. It not only helps the search but illuminates the shelves of African statues nicely. At this point I remember seeing the books in a rectangular container with a bunch of other books. So we start searching all of the boxes and drawers. My girlfriend comes in and gets mad at me, because I'd told her the door to the secret room just lead to a closet.

Eventually, we find Ed's books. But when we leave we realize that the door to the secret room is broken. There are two sliding panels, but we can't figure out how to slide them so that they blend into the wall, and the two steps going down into the secret room are getting in the way. Finally Virginia helps us fix it.

Afterwards we are all sitting around in my bed room talking about it. Someone says to me that now all my wishes can come true. I emphatically state that I wish I was out of "this goddamn town." Jane laughs and says "Now that's a wish!"

Where's my Luggage?

I got to the airport on a bus. This is an airport I have dreamed of before - It's a huge modern airport where all the buildings, roads, and parking lots are circular. So I'm standing there waiting to get my bags off the bus. I start walking around the bus looking for my bags. After a while I come around the bus and see the ambasador. I'm relieved because I need to talk to him to solve the problems with my visa. However, he's talking to someone else near a huge pile of baggage. So I keep walking around the bus. He's still busy talking to other people. As I start to walk around the bus again it drives off. On top of the bus I can see my bags: two huge black gym bags. I run across the parking lot chasing after the bus. Eventually I caught up with it at the bus depot, but that is when I woke up. It was 2:00 am.

This dream was a lot longer than the description makes it sound. There was a lot of walking around the bus, and then there was a lot of chasing the bus.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Bicycling Past Dancers

Note that the date is off for this one, I woke up from this dream on 1/6

I was in Charlottesville, bicycling around town and arguing with Jim. It was not clear at all what we were arguing about, but it wasn't a very heated discussion. We were going west on High St., but when we came to the light at Park St., the way was blocked by dancing women. It looked like a bunch of women had just come out of the offices nearby and started doing a Broadway dance routine in the middle of the street, although by the time we got there several of them had just wandered off. It was obviously a planned event, because the city had put up traffic cones and sawhorses to block the street off for the dancers.

We turned right on Park St., which somehow became 5th St., which we rode up to the intersection with Main and Water. That intersection had become a huge traffic circle that was jam packed with bicycle traffic. One overweight teenage boy with dark hair cut me off, but other than that we got through onto Water St. okay.

We rode down Water St. to the parking garage, but there was a bus blocking the entrance. Jim was really nervous because the bus was beeping and it's reverse lights were on, but I could see it was moving forward. But the parking garage was full of small concrete ledges like the edge of a sidewalk, but twice as high. I managed to bunny hop over them and around the bus at which point I was at the entrance to the UVa bookstore.

That's when I was woken up by my rat going nuts running around his cage and rattling the bars.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Crawl Space

We made a late night run in my pickup truck to the outdoor Consumer Product Safety Commission fax machine in downtown Charlottesville (near the old CSX station). We needed to get copies of death certifications for a potential emerging hazard. I keyed in the numbers for the death certificates, typing a 2, then a 6, then running my finger down the 1 through 5 buttons to get a batch of five at once. We had backed up to the fax machine, and the death certificates came in the little back window of the cab, and kept hitting me in the back of the head. Only three of the five came through, so I thought I would have to key in each death certificate number separately.

However, that's when we heard the sirens coming from all directions. Obviously, the CPSC thought we were working for an NGO and were trying to discredit them by finding coding errors in the data. We saw the police coming from all directions (I vividly remember one cop car that was an old station wagon), but someone got away and back to my condo, which was built like one of the old dorms at UVa. We snuck in through the crawlspace that ran around the outer edge of the building. Lots of people were using the crawlspace for their kitty litter pans, and one lady had decorated the crawlspace near her unit with lots of colorful tie-dyes.

[All through out this I've been talking about "we" did this or that. There was someone with me through the entire dream, but I never got a clear image of who they were. The best I got was that they were sort of female: either a tom boy on an effeminate guy. I'm guessing the former, since I watched Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome the night before, and I've always been attracted to the Savanah Nix character in that move.]