Firefly, Season Two

I'm watching TV in the house on Concord Drive with a woman, but I can't really tell who the woman is. We're watching Firefly, and I realize that it's an episode I haven't seen before. I get really excited, and the woman I'm watching with confirms that they have started filming a new season. There is a small box next to the couch I'm sitting on, and it has DVDs for the first two episodes of the new season, but there isn't one for the third episode, which is the one we are watching.

It's very hard to make out what is going on in the episode. The episode is shot in high contrast, with everything turned into shades of blue. As I concentrate on it, it resolves into a more normal shot.

River Tam and my friend Bethany are walking through the Serenity, although it is much bigger than in the first season, very dark, and full of strange pipes and machines. It is much more like something out of Aliens. River and Bethany are trying to track down a ghost that has been haunting the ship. As they're walking up some steps River suddenly turns around and starts to stalk down the steps. The ghost had been right behind her, and turning on it makes it appear. It floats backwards as River stalks down the steps and across the circular platform at the bottom. It looks like some big cartoon Frankenstein monster, wearing a sweater with horizontal yellow and orange stripes.

It suddenly dodges around River and melds with a car that is on the platform. River tries reaching into the ethereal space where the car is, but she can't find the ghost to grab him. Then she tries to reach into the physical space where the car is, and in one punch smashes out all of the windows on the driver's side. She doesn't get the ghost, but where the windows were there are scraps of something like red fabric, blowing in a wind that isn't there. Then River tries to reach into the space that isn't ethereal and isn't physical. Her hand goes through the side of the car, which ripples like a Stargate effect, and she pulls out the ghost.

Now the ghost is a big red line, about seven feet long, with a loop at one end and a claw at the other. The claw is trying to grab River and Bethany, and Bethany starts screaming. River gets angry and starts smashing the arm into the car until it shatters into thousands of little pieces which disappear as soon as they hit the floor.

Connection with reality: I almost started re-watching the first season of Firefly last night, but decided to go with Star Wars instead.

Fifth Grade was Never Like This

I'm in fifth grade, sitting at a long table in front of Mrs. Chase. On my right are an ex-girlfriend and Mark H. On my left is Stephen Colbert. Mrs. Chase is showing us a graph of our predicted grades. All of the dots on the graph are the letter 'R,' and they form a pattern that looks like an owl. I'm thinking that it should be called the Owl of Doom, but before I can say anything Mrs. Chase says she was thinking of calling it the Owl of Doom, "if that's okay with Mr. Colbert." Colbert feigns humility, but eventually gives in to having the graph named the Owl of Doom in his honor.

This is when I notice that a woman is standing in front of Colbert. She's wearing white panties and a green hoodie that she has unzipped. She is trying to gain Colbert's favor by displaying herself in front of him. My ex-girlfriend remarks that it makes her feel bad because the woman's tits are so big. I'm thinking, "They're very nice, but they're not that big." When I look back, the woman has zipped up her hoodie. It has a fascinating fractal design over her right breast.

Connections with reality: I just reconnected with my fifth grade teacher on Facebook. I've always been irritated with NASA's ISS Node 3 getting called the Stephen Colbert rather than the Serenity, and I was thinking about watching Firefly last night. A woman I know got in an argument with her boyfriend because he said that an actress on TV was really hot.

Fratricidal Pythonic Rats

I went to see Jason, who was living at the house I grew up in on Concord Drive. We were down in the basement, which had been remodeled to look like Evan's parent's basement. I brought over my rat Hermes but was having trouble keeping track of him. At one point I was holding Hermes in might right hand, and I looked to my left and found another rat and his baby desperately clinging to my right arm. I realized it was Hermes long lost brother, and was overjoyed. Then Greta sat down next to me with a large albino rat, which I realized must be the mother of the baby.

At this point Jason had to get up and deal with some other people who had come over to visit. I was trying to find a box to take the rats home in. But all the boxes were full of colored wooden blocks. When I would empty them out they would turn out not to be the right size for the rats. Meanwhile, the rats were all scurrying about, so once I figured out that a box didn't work, I would have to crawl around the room collecting more rats. In the middle of this Greta gave me a note saying that Jason wouldn't be able to get back to me.

Then after a couple more tries with boxes, the people Jason was supposed to be talking to came in. They were very well dressed Russian nobility. I looked down and Hermes' brother had become really huge in my arm, with Hermes' head sticking out of his mouth. I didn't understand what I was seeing. The Russian woman took a cigarette in a long cigarette holder out of her mouth and said something snotty to me about rats. I looked down and realized that Hermes' brother had completely swallowed Hermes. I freaked out and started smashing the brother's head against my cheap folding table from the Game Cave, but he wouldn't die, he just kept whining at me piteously.

Spidersuperman and the Restuarant

I was Spiderman, but the other super heroes were making fun of me because of my cowboy boots. Then we heard of a crime and all ran off across the city. I was swinging down the middle of the street watching the Thing and Gort (from The Day the Earth Stood Still) swing down the street on flag poles.

When we got to the building where the crime was I was suddenly Superman. I was in the stairwell and I flew down a few stories. There I found a grey, shifting, and floating mass. It was wearing a fedora, and there was a hand coming out of it. It said it was an FBI agent, so it was okay for it to be beating someone up in the stairwell. It was making me really nervous, and it started making fun of me for being Superman and being afraid of him.

At this point I realized I was dreaming. I figured if I was dreaming, there must be a door that I could use to get out of there. I looked to my right, and sure enough there was a door disguised in the wall. I opened it up and went through it, and I was in my next door neighbor's house back on Concord Drive. It was night out, and it was dark and spooky in the house, so I went to the front door to go somewhere else. Since I knew I was dreaming, I figured I could make it so that there was a beautiful woman on the other side of the door.

When I opened the door it was very bright and sunny out, and I had forgotten that I was dreaming. I went to the family restaurant I worked in with my mother, my sister, and a baby sibling (none of whom matched my real family). It was an open air place, very much like the parking garage on Elliewood Ave. We were selling the place, and my mom was taking the baby to our new home. My sister and I had free run of the place for the next two weeks, as long as we didn't damage it for the new owners.

Strangling an Island on a Train

I was on the train, and I realized that sitting in front of me was an ex-girlfriend. Since we'd known each other she had become a famous science fiction author. I debated whether or not to leave her alone for a while, but finally decided to talk to her.

I started by telling her how much I appreciated what she had done with her last novel. In the second edition second edition the last part of the novel (where the hero goes on a journey to China) was removed to form the start of her next novel.

When she replied was when I got my first good look at her. She looked like Bridget Fonda in Point of No Return. She said that the journey to China was really a "panel piece," an idea she had gotten from reading Chinese romance novels. "The heroine asks where the emperor's palace is, and her guide points and says 'Three blocks down on the right.' And eventually we get there, but it takes us nine hours." She had been really nervous about the change, afraid that she would lose readers one way or the other. "I make a lot of money worrying about losing readers," she said.

"As long as you don't make Bujold's mistake, you won't lose me," I replied.

"Well, I hope that when you read my books, you get something more out of them because of the connection we shared."

"No, your writing is so good that when I read it I get totally lost in the world you have created, and I don't realize who has written it." I realize as I say this that it hurts her. But it's the truth: I can't realize who wrote it because it would hurt me.

At this point in the conversation I'm lying across two train seats with her leaning over me. Another fan of her work comes up behind her and starts talking to her, so we both sit up. He's a very geeky kind of guy, like a small Andy Dick. He waves his arms around a lot as he talks. He's talking about how there is this empty place inside him when he reads her books. I'm trying to decided if my ex would be more disturbed by me hanging around while she is trying to talk to another fan, or if she is more disturbed by the other fan, when he says "It's like trying to strangle an island."

I wake up thinking that I should have stuck around.

Connections with reality: I've been getting Lois McMasters Bujold's books on the kindle and rereading them, although I stopped this week because I ran out of money on my book budget. I went to a mall last night that had a lot of Chinese New Year stuff set up in the central atrium.

Kindergarten Tree

My brother and I were walking through the area around Park and High Streets in Charlottesville, although we were in Richmond. I used a key I had so we could take a short cut through a building I used to work in. I was thanking him for giving me a ride down so that I could move to Richmond. I was telling him how it would be nice to be near all my old friends who ended up in Richmond after going to VCU.

Then we walked in to Jefferson Park and my brother was gone, and I was walking with Bill and Mark H. They said, "Let's go to kindergarten and get high." They started climbing up this huge tree. The trunk was at least 15 feet around. They were climbing with their arms and legs bent at inhuman angles, like something out of a Japanese horror film. They were climbing up by gripping the edges of the bark on the tree, which spiraled around the tree like a barber pole.

As soon as Mark and Bill headed up the tree, two random guys appeared and tried to follow them, but the random guys were unable to climb the tree. They yelled up to Bill and Mark, begging them for help, saying that they wouldn't have fun unless they helped the random guys up the tree.

Then I tried climbing up the tree. There was no bark, and I had to grip on to some sticky bumps that were protruding from the tree. At first it was hard but doable, but after about fifteen feet I just couldn't go any farther. I fell down, but landed on my feet staring up at the tree. I woke up wanting to get high.

When I first quit smoking cigarettes, I used to have lots of dreams where I would smoke in the dream. Then I would wake up feeling like shit, thinking I had smoked a cigarette the night before.

Watching Myself on TV

I was called down south to one of the Carolinas to help work on a murder mystery. I got to the FBI command center for the investigation, which was in an old hotel, the kind with one level of rooms all with doors leading outside, arranged in a row with a covered walkway in front of the doors.

The room that the FBI had taken over for their command center was huge. I wander back through it, chit chatting with various people, many of whom I knew from high school. Most of it was personal stuff, catching up with each other, but a fair bit of it was about the investigation. Eventually I passed a table with two women I didn't know at it. However, they knew me. When I looked at their name plates on the table, I realized that one of them was the woman I was supposed to report to, but I had forgotten her name up to that point. I sat down and handed her the manila folder I had been carrying around with my orders in it.

The other one, who looked like Mary from work, asked me if I had any concealed weapons on me that I needed to register with her. I hesitated, because I had my butterfly knife in my back pocket, and while I was with the investigation I wasn't a law enforcement officer. The Mary look alike went on for some time about concealed weapons, and what a pain it was for her, especially when people held out on her about them, and how we could deal with it now or later, how she (as part of the FBI) could confiscate it now, or she could just turn me over to the Mountain County Police. I asked her if we could deal with it after dinner, figuring I could just stash it in my hotel. She agreed.

At this point, the other woman had come back. She handed me a white t-shirt with several strips of masking tape on it. There was cursive writing on the masking tape done with ball point pen. It had a list of parking spaces that I could use. I assumed it had my hotel room number on it as well, but I didn't read all of the numbers to be sure.

I got up and went back to the interrogation room, where there was a group of people standing together talking over what the interrogation strategy would be for the suspect they were bringing in. They were somehow all managing to stand facing away from me. They had long dark hair, so I couldn't see anything of their heads, and I had the impression they had no faces. I realized that I wasn't quite ready for an interrogation, so I left to go to the bathroom to freshen up. When I got back from the bathroom, I got lost and couldn't find the interrogation room again. I kept walking down the hallway opening doors, but they were all the wrong door. Eventually I realized that I had gotten into the wrong hallway. As I got to the door of the interrogation room, I realized that maybe I shouldn't walk in during the interrogation. I started to open the door, which had two huge stickers on it with lots of warnings using incomprehensible ideograms and lots of fine print. Kathleen, my supervisor, came up behind me in a white lab coat, and reminded me that Lt. Bone was running the investigation, and he was a real hard ass.

We backed out and went next door to the observation room. Inside was Russ, Kathleen's supervisor. It was a very cramped room. It was narrow in the first place, and one whole wall was packed with filing cabinets. The window between us and the interrogation room wasn't a one way mirror. It was dirty, yellowed sheet of thin, clear plastic. Down at the bottom was a small slot for passing notes back and forth. Clearly, the whole thing was improvised.

There was a huge crowd of people sitting and standing at a table. Again they had their backs to me, with long dark hair, and the impression of facelessness. There was one man in a light blue button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, who's face I could see. I figured he was Lt. Bone. The suspect was an overweight black guy with close cropped hair, dressed in an electric blue track suit. He was totally at ease and answering a lot of questions. I could barely hear anything, but I looked down and saw a small black cube, with a screen on one side. I could hear someone typing, and notes about what was being said were showing up on the screen. They were talking about being constructive at the moment. I looked over to see who was typing, and I saw Marishka Hagaritay with a small keyboard. I hadn't noticed her because she had been hidden behind one of the filing cabinets. I remember think that she didn't look nearly as hot in reality as she does on TV.

At this point the show ended. The whole dream up to this point had been a TV show that I had been watching in my hotel room. I was impressed with it too. I was thinking that this was maybe a second TV show that was worth watching on Hulu, along with the Daily Show with John Stewart.

I got up and left my hotel room. The hotel I was staying in had the exact same exterior as the hotel in the TV show, but with new paint on the trim. I walked down the block to a small diner. While I was eating (at the counter) I noticed that the time zone here was an hour and fifteen minutes off Eastern Standard Time. They had these weird clocks with all the numbers rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees, so that fifteen after was at the top. The clock wasn't round, either. At each fifteen minute interval there was a rounded lump sticking out, and each one had another circle of obscure numbers in it.

When I was done with dinner I went back to the hotel. Kirk had been working outside of town, and had just gotten back in. He was wondering if it was time for dinner yet, and I noticed another of those weird clocks in the hotel room. After making some comment about the clocks to Kirk, I suggested we go to the diner for dinner. He wasn't interested, so I suggested the Italian place I had eaten at the night before. But Kirk wanted to go to some weird ethnic restaurant. So we went outside and walked over to the street, which was 355 near the White Flint Metro Station. We jumped on a bus. It was more like a trolley, with an open back with two benches facing sideways away from each other. The whole thing was painted in Rastafarian colors, and the driver was playing Bob Marley's Exodus really loud.

The bus pulled a U-turn and started heading north on 355. It was wobbling back and forth a lot, and there was no way to secure yourself in the seat. Kirk and I were both sitting up on the top of the seat backs, grabbing onto the poles supporting the roof. I was really nervous about it, but Kirk was totally casual, having ridden the bus a lot in Richmond.

When we got to our stop the bus just slowed down a bit. We had to jump off and hit the ground running. Kirk and I got off, and so did a family of black people. The family was really confused, because they hadn't been here before and they didn't know which way to go. Kirk walked over to the shoulder, hopped the guardrail there, and ran down the hill. I looked, but that section of hill seemed too steep, so I went around the guard rail. Here there were strips of mulch with small shrubs in them. I managed to run down the hill without stepping on any of the shrubs, although I did step in the mulch twice.

There was a parking lot at the bottom of the hill. Kirk had already run across the lot and ran into a cave that went under the next parking lot and led to the restaurant. I ran across the lot after him, but when I got there all the cave mouths were really small, and I would have to crawl through them between the narrow gaps in the stone columns. I wanted to go further to my right, to try and find a larger cave mouth, but I figure that by the time I did that Kirk would be so far ahead of me that I would get lost in the caves. I was thinking what an asshole Kirk was being by running ahead like that when I woke up.

I haven't had a good dream memory like this for a while. I think the key is to remember as much of the dream as possible while still in bed. When you wake up from the dream, try to remember as much as you can right then and there. Then as soon as you can after you get up, write it all down.


Connections with reality: Kirk is thinking of coming up here this weekend. Brad Warner is planning on moving to North Carolina.

Wheelchair Protest

I ride my bicycle into DC, down into the U street area near Ben's Chili Bowl. I stop across the street from the internet cafe that I want to get lunch at. When I go to lock my bike to the street sign, I realize I left my other bike here from last time, and I need to lock that up too. There is already a third bike locked to the sign I usually use. It's secured to the sign with a bike chain (as in, the chain for the gears). I stand there for a while trying to figure out how to lock my two bikes to the third bike so that the other bike can still be unlocked and ridden away. Then a bunch of people in wheelchairs (most of them motorized) come down the street in the bicycle lane. They are all dressed up in black suits. They are protesting the way that people on wheel chairs are treated on city streets. The light turns red and they all stop, and some guy starts walking down the line haranguing them. He's asking the wheelchair people if they would behave this way if they were at home.