Residential Preserve

It's late at night and I'm walking down a residential street in a crisp white naval officer's uniform. I'm walking behind a woman dressed the same way (in slacks, not a skirt). She's about average height, with thick, dark hair that is cut short. The residential area we are walking through is a preserve, like a nature preserve, but it's all residential. We're not exactly sneaking, but we shouldn't be there, and we'll be arrested if the police catch us.

We cross a bridge over Emmet Street where the walking bridge to Ruffner Hall is, but it's an automotive bridge, not a walking bridge. We come to a large, single story building on our left (which is not Ruffner Hall). We go around the left side of the building. There's a wide ledge running along side the building, with a railing of square pipes in a rectangular pattern. As we go along the ledge the ground drops away and we can see that the building is several stories tall. The woman I am with has gotten ahead of me. I can see in the windows of the building and we are walking past a college class room. The woman goes into the class room through a door at the end of the ledge, and gets a note from the teacher. She comes back out as I get to the end of the ledge and we start to climb down the building. The ledges and the railing make it really easy.

We go down about four or five stories and then go into a room full of naval uniform hats. We each get a hat matching our uniform, and the woman start to fill out a form authorizing us to take the hats and go into the building. There is a tall black man who is approving the forms while others wait behind us. He is questioning the woman about mistakes on the form. She is blustering her way through it good-naturedly, saying things like "You think so?" and "Is that right?" Finally he okays the form and leaves. After he does, another woman who was waiting says she noticed another place where we filled out the form wrong. I think about passing it off with a joke about Al-Queda, but then figure that mentioning Al-Queda will make her security conscious and she'll report us.

I put on my black army jacket and we walk out into the hall. Then we go out a door and we're in the back yard at Tandem, walking toward that new building with the auditorium. I start to get nervous, thinking that someone will notice the discrepancy between my army jacket and my naval uniform. That's when I realize I don't have a back story prepped in case we are questioned. I think about passing myself off as on detached duty under Major Rolf Huntsman out of Fort Bragg, hoping they don't notice that I pulled the name Huntsman out of recent political news (the name Rolf comes from a Chess writer). But then I realize that I don't know if Fort Bragg is even an Army base, much less active. Then the alarm goes off and I wake up.

It's Not The Horse That's Crazy

I had to sell my horse, so I drove down Olney/Laytonsville Rd. to where it dead ended at the Agricultural Fairgrounds near Shady Grove Rd. (If you're not from Gaithersburg, note that this is completely not the way things are set up). I walked around the race track to the bar, which was a big L shaped outdoor bar. I walked around to the long end and saw they had valet stables, so I knew I could sell my horse here.

The next day I drove back with my horse (in a four door hatchback). When I got around to the end of the bar this time I saw that the stables were closed. I realized I should have known this from reading the schedule. As I was standing there trying to figure out what to do (with my horse standing next to me on two legs), two short, muscular blonde guys walked in. They started talking about how they were going to be up me and my horse. (Note that throughout this scene there is a roof that flickers in and out of existence. Every time I turn my head it either disappears or appears. Also, in the dream I knew why these guys came after me, but now I can't remember.). I held my horse protectively around the waist and started yelling at them. My voice cracked at first, but then I started yelling up a storm. Soon enough the yelling attracted the local sheriff. As soon as he walked in I started beating the two thugs with my army jacket. Then I stormed out, but somehow I was behind the bar and I had to storm out through the kitchen.

I think I forgot the horse.

I posted this dream a day late.

Chess in the Morning

I wake up in my old room on Concord Drive. I need to get the Fischer Random Chess game ready for the day, so I go over to the shelf with my chess set on it. The chess set is a brown and white miniature marble chess set, with a king about 3/4 of an inch tall. I noticed that the knights were broken, and looked around for the glue. Eventually I realized the Elmers glue-all was hiding behind the rat's water bottle. I couldn't see it directly, but I could spot it's distorted label through the bottle. As I'm gluing the knights back together, I figure that this is a good excuse to finally get the nice wooden miniature magnetic set I was looking at. I try to remember what price it is and a price tag floats in front of my face with 29.99 written on it.

I set the knights aside to dry, but the condensation from the water bottle has left two drops of water right where I place the knights. After thinking about it for a second, I figure it's okay. I'm going to need a place to put two pieces while playing anyway.

I pick up the FRC computer. It's a small tan box with a red button on it and a small LED screen. I press the button, and the screen reads 4012. I'm not sure what that means so I get out the instructions, which is one of those one page with a dozen fold jobbies. The initial 4 apparently doesn't mean anything, as no matter what you start with rook-knight-bishop. The next two are Python style indexes, so 0 means to the left of the rook. That's where you put the first "matching piece." I'm not sure what that means, but I'm guessing it means "duplicate." That gives me rook-rook-knight-bishop, and the 1 then doubles the knight. The 2 then gives the order to put the pieces in, but there's no details on what 2 specifically means.

I'm totally confused and ready to give up, but before I can I wake up.

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.

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.

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.]

Missed the Bus

Just a fragment last night: I was waiting for the bus at Shady Grove station, but I had to peer through the bushes to see if the bus had come. All of a sudden I saw that my bus was leaving. I knew it was my bus because it was the Redskins bus: a RideOn bus painted in Redskins colors.

Three Fragments

Last night I kept waking up and falling back to sleep, so I had several dream fragments.

In the first fragment, my old friend Jason was giving me advice on playing poker against a porn star in a black lace teddy.

I wasn't even in the second fragment. It was a scene where David Hasselhoff is playing poker against a Russian gangster. Hasselhoff was trying to play it cool, but it was obvious he was desperate to get the gangster into a game, and that he had some scam he was going to pull on the gangster. But the gangster was saying that even though he folded in the last round, he would have won because he had a five in the hole. The cards they were using were really strange. They were covered with diagrams like teeny tables of numbers that were blank except for colored bars across them.

The third fragment was me getting ready to go to Bethesda for work, except I was in the house I grew up in on Concord Drive and it was the middle of the night. I went out front, and then realized I had forgotten something. When I went back into the kitchen I realized that the back door had been wide open all night, and anyone could have come in the house. Then I walked back to my room, but I hadn't turned the hall light on and the light in my room wouldn't come on, so it was pitch black. Then I realized that someone else was in the room and it was too late.