Google Dream

Dream last night:

I am driving through Westboro with some friends, and I see the Google headquarters there.
It is a moderate-sized building made of tan brick.
“I’ve always meant to stop in, I drive by all the time,” I say. “C’mon, let’s take a tour!”

We walk inside. To take a tour, I have to sign my name at the security desk. They already have my signature on file, so just signing my name verifies my identity. They give me a visitor badge.
The interior is kind of like a museum, very open. Rather than have offices with doors, most people have a desk in one corner of an open room that has open doorways to adjacent rooms.

I look at the map. “Maybe we should start on the top floor and work our way down?”
A security guard gestures to me. “You should start there,” he says, pointing to a room.
It seems more like a suggestion than an order, so we go there.

It is a square room with a doorway on one side. Along the wall to the right of the entrance are a series of chairs, like the waiting area at a doctor’s office. Straight ahead are a series of windows, placed very high on the wall. They are half-height, like basement windows. On the wall to the left, there is a blocky staircase, no railing, just a series of blocks, leading to a small opening that is carpeted. The rest of the room is empty.
I sit in one of the chairs and wait. I realize that this is a line to wait to meet Eric Meyer, who is the head of Google’s UI and CSS department [in the dream, not in real life]. People are treating it like going to see the Wizard of Oz or something, they are all preparing the question they will ask. David Evans in there, he is excited, he turns to me, querying “what are you going to ask?” I say I’m not sure yet.

Gradually the line moves along. I watch people crawl out of the little hole, down the stairs, and out of the room, then the next person goes up the stairs and crawls into the little hole. It’s carpeted to act as padding so you don’t hurt yourself whacking your head or arms on the edge of the rectangular opening.
When my turn comes around, I go up the stairs and through the little doorway. On the other side is a good-sized office. Eric Meyer sits behind a mahogany desk. I hand him a scrap of paper I’ve been doodling on.
“Oh, you already know CSS,” he says after looking at the piece of paper, “let’s play a game, then.”

We enter some kind of virtual reality world, I don’t remember how. I am flying a plane of some kind, leading a squadron of planes against Eric. He is a Red Baron of sorts. He’s very good, flying towards the sun, then diving back down, then looping back up towards the sun. It catches most of my squadron by surprise, and he shoots them down. But I anticipated it, and riddle his plane with bullets. It is still falling, crumpled into a ball, and I keep shooting it as it goes down. I am laughing, not in a mean way, but with playful exuberance.
I exit the game, and somehow I am back in the waiting room. Eric is on a gurney, being wheeled out by paramedics. Somehow shooting him in the game has wounded him in real life. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, “I didn’t know!”
He coughs and waves me off, “don’t worry about it,” he coughs again, “you only winged me.” They wheel him off.

I’m not sure where to go next, so I wander through Google, wandering through different people’s office areas.
Then I hear a click-clack sound. It sounds like a old-fashioned newsroom. I follow the sound and it leads me to an old-fashioned office door, wood with a frosted glass window. Gold lettering on the window reads “Typewriter and Fax Department”. I open the door and go in. There are a couple rows of electric typewriters with people typing away on them. There is also a large device, half the size of a refrigerator, that buzzes and clunks. I realize it must be a fax machine. I also realize that a fax machine this old can only accept typed pages, and that is why they have the typewriters.

There are a few people gathered around one desk, and a woman is just finishing typing something. She reads off a number. “Wow,” says another woman, head of the department, “that’s twice as fast as I can type! Everyone, welcome our new employee!”
They are tryouts, where people can show of their typing skills for a chance at a job with Google.
There are a few people waiting to take their turn, at the end of the line, next to me, is an old woman, maybe 80 or 90.
She is there to try out. She is clutching a map and a thermos. She is wobbling a little, so she sits down at a school desk, one of the old ones where the chair is bolted to the desk with a metal arm. She sets down the map and the thermos. I can see the map, showing a red dot in Winslow, Maine. I realize this is where she is from. I mean to tell her that I was born in Waterville and went to high school there, but I never get around to mentioning it. It is her turn, so I help her up. She takes the lid off her thermos and pours some liquid into it. It is cool, clear water. She takes a sip and offers me the plastic cup. I take it and take a large sip. It tastes a little off but is very refreshing. She dotters up to take her turn at the typewriter, and I wander off down the hall.

Then I wake up.

A dream of cereal and slimes

Dream last night, more or less in two parts.

First Part:

I am going to the supermarket with Adam, Sarah, and some other people. I go to buy a box of cereal, which involves scanning it against my credit card to pay for it, which then prints out a barcode that you bring to the register to check out.

For some reason there is an issue, and the barcode it prints out is a null value, which will crash the register. It also means I can’t buy it, since the payment didn’t go through. As a prank, I stick the null value barcode over the normal barcode and put the cereal box back on the shelf. If someone tries to take it through checkout, it will crash the register.

We leave the supermarket, and go out to the car. I am worried that my prank will backfire and get traced back to me, and I will get in trouble. “It’s always the case,” I say, “I can never get away with anything.”

As we are getting into the car, a woman comes running out of the supermarket. It is the manager.

She stops us, and says to me, “You tried to buy a box of cereal, didn’t you?”

“You see?” I intone to my friends, then turn to her, looking down. “Yeah. But I can explain…”

“No,” she says, “I want to apologize for the inconvenience. To make up for your bad shopping experience, here is $25.”

She holds out some money, and looks at me expectantly.

“Oh,” I say, at a loss for words. “Um, thanks,” I say as I take the money.

She looks relieved, then turns and trots back to the supermarket.

I get into the car and we drive off.

Second Part:

We are out of the car now, and riding bicycles along a road. It seems like an old highway, it has a somewhat post-apocalyptic feel to it.

Two boys from our group pedal out in front, I think they are an older and younger brother. I pedal up to them, and we ride alongside each other for a while. Then, the younger boy becomes belligerent, and keeps swerving his bicycle into me, trying to knock me over. “I’m gonna hurt you!” he declares.

Finally I get tired of his attacks and the rest of us hang back and let him get a little ahead, so he’s not near our group.

After a little while someone points out that he’s gone. I comment to his brother, “wow, he must be really far ahead of us, I can’t even see him!” The road is level and visibility is good, so he must be a long way off.

“I’m going to find him!” says the older brother, and pedals as hard as he can, zooming ahead of the rest of us.

We pedal on, and it takes us quite a while to meet up with the brothers.

There is a crevice, a crack in the road that’s fairly wide and about 20 feet deep. The two brothers are down at the bottom, which is a flat area – the steep walls and flat bottom give it the feel of a colosseum. The brothers have reverted to their true forms, which are slimes, as seen in classic video game RPGs. The younger brother is trying to climb out, so he can get at us to hurt us or kill us, but the older brother keeps pulling him back down, keeping him in the arena.

“Keep going,” says the older brother, “I’ll go with you in human form.” He projects his human form out of the crevice next to us, and we continue on the highway with him. We are on foot now, and we have a long way to walk. As we walk away with the older brother’s human form, the older brother’s slime form is still in the trench, keeping the younger slime from escaping.

I’m not sure exactly how he is in two places at once, it has something to do with focussing his consciousness in a certain way.

We walk for a long time, and come to a rise overlooking an orchard. It is a strange landscape, the colors seem extra-saturated, and the trees are shorter than normal, though just as wide around as normal trees. There are rolling hills, which seem exaggerated, so that each hill has a perfectly curved shape. The overall impression is that of an artist’s interpretation of an orchard.

I turn to the older boy. “So this is what your homeworld looks like?” He nods. “It’s beautiful,” I comment, and we continue on with the group along the road, walking into the distance.

Dream: Convicts and Circuses

I had an interesting dream last night, I don’t remember it all, but here is what I recall:

There was a first half of a dream that I don’t remember, but I found myself driving somewhere (to work?) in a hurry. As I was driving to the on-ramp to the highway, I was speeding, and a cop passed me going the other direction, and turned on his lights as he did so.

I knew he was going to turn around and pull me over either on the on-ramp or on the highway. Luckily, there was a side road midway up the on-ramp that led to a rest area.

The rest area had a big parking lot, with a few cars, and a squat two-story concrete visitor’s center. I parked my car in-between two other cars to hide it a little, and walked over the building.

It was somewhat dark inside, and had a musty smell, slightly damp and earthy, like a basement.

I went inside, and as my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see a cafeteria. There were some people there, but they were glancing around nervously, I could tell something was wrong. I went up the cement steps to the second floor, where the bathrooms were. As I got to the top of the stairs, I found myself ankle-deep in water. It was even darker up here, the fluorescents were only flickering dimly and intermittently. I slogged towards the bathroom, but it was hopeless. That is where all the water was coming from, I could see the outlines of toilets and urinals, it looked like someone or something had smashed them.

I went back downstairs, where the floor was damp, but not several inches of water like the upstairs.

I looked at the menu above the registers, trying to decide what to order. Suddenly, the workers yelled “get him!” and someone grabbed me from behind.

The brought me outside, in an area between the concrete building and a chain-link fence.

They were a group of escaped prisoners. I knew they would kill me if they knew I was from Massachusetts. The leader strode up to me and held out his hand. “Give me your wallet,” he demanded.

“I’ll give you the cash,” I replied, “I have, let’s see, $60 here. The ID and cards are worthless to you, so let me keep those.”

He gestures at the wallet with his huge meaty hand. “Give it here. The whole thing.”

I hand him the wallet, he pulls the cash out an holds up my driver’s license to look. He is showing off to his cohorts by only glancing quickly but remembering the whole address. I blanch, knowing I was a dead man if he saw I lived in MA.

“51 Bolling Drive,” he says, “Bangor, Maine. Now I know where you live.”

I realize with relief he has read it wrong, he read my old address instead of my current one.

He tosses the wallet back to me.

I explain I am originally from Maine, lived in Massachusetts for a little while, and now live in Bangor. I tell them I was headed to meet up with friends, to go to the circus. I am bluffing, but have two circus ticket in my pocket.

“Why don’t you call them?” they ask. I am about to say I left my cellphone in the car, but if I tell them that, they will want to go to my car, and they will see my Mass plates. I am figuring out what to say, when one of them sniffs. “Missing the circus, that’s terrible.”

I knew then that they wouldn’t hurt me, they were no longer a threat.

“Well, I used to be a clown,” said one, producing a small bicycle.

They strung up a tightrope between some lamp-posts and began doing various tricks.

“If you can’t make it to the circus,” the leader beamed, speaking with a deep, rumbling voice, “then the circus will come to you!”

They set up a circus tent, and put on several circus acts.

Then I woke up.

Dream: Strange Invasion

I had an odd dream last night.

It begins with me reading a new Stephen King book. Or maybe I am watching a movie version. It starts off with a giant alien craft, shaped a lot like a foot, crunching down on a large house in a secluded area.

I am complaining about how bad the book/movie is, and after a bit, find myself inside it.

The aliens are symbiant/parasite type creatures, that latch onto human hosts to function. There are two types, which are the two sexes of that race. There is the eye, and the hand. The eye latches onto the top of someone’s head, and controls them by influencing their thoughts. The hand latches onto someone’s lower back, and controls someone by influencing their desires.

They both start out small, and only mature once attached to a human host. They are invisible to humans most of the time, only if they are weakened or if a human knows exactly what to look for and concentrates hard can they be seen. They look cheap, like low-budget monster effects. When fully mature, the hand looks like a rubber monster glove, and the eye looks like one of those plastic eye toys, where the eye is inside a clear water-filled ball. The eye is mounted on a tin-can like base, and has a small mouth with teeth that look suspiciously like pennies and dimes.

I am with my family, we find out about the aliens, so we are on the run from them. We are some of the first to encounter them, but manage to get away without being infected. We end up in an abandoned school, where we discover a nursery-like room where hand-seeds are being incubated. We think the eye troops are just outside, so we call them up (somehow we got their cell number) and tell them that we will leave the hands unharmed if they let us go.

The eyes agree, and after a while arrive at the school. It is then that we realize that the eyes hadn’t been about to catch us, we had lost them. Moreover, the eyes had gotten separated from the hands, and we had led them right to them! The eyes have brought captive humans with them for the hands to infect. We remain hidden while we watch what’s going on. When a hand infects a person, it is just a small lump, gradually the fingers grow out of the lump until the hand is fully formed. We are only able to see this because they have let their guard down, so they are visible.

It takes a day for the hands to mature, then the hands and eyes have an orgy. Or rather, the alien equivalent. The way they mate is via piggyback, literally, the human host with the eye hops on the back of the human host with the hand, and they run around yelling for a while. There is nothing resembling human sex that happens.
We didn’t stick around to find out how they give birth, we took the opportunity to scramble away.

We separate, and agree to meet back at our house. Moses and I get back there, and meet our mother (who is not Judy), but our father (who is not Neil) doesn’t make it back to the house. We don’t know what happened.

We relax, since we are safe for now. Our house is Judy’s house in Freedom, but at the same time is an apartment, on the 6th floor of a tall apartment building.

Moses and I are packing, jamming all we can into dufflebags. I notice that our mother is acting strangely. She opens the fridge, and we see it is stuffed with all sorts of fish. She begins offering us different fish to eat.
“I don’t want fish,” I protest.
She pulls out a pale white fish. “This is a hunger fish,” she says, “it’s not really a fish at all.”
“If it’s not a fish,” I ask, “then why does it have the word ‘fish’ in its name?”

We all stop and laugh.

Then our mother pulls out a gun. “You are onto us, aren’t you?” she asks menacingly.
Moses looks back and forth between the two of us, confused.
“Yes,” I say, “you’re infected with an eye.”

Moses makes a sound as if to speak, our mother turns towards him. I kick the gun out of her hand, grab it, and point it at her. “Come on,” she says with a smile, “you wouldn’t shoot your own mother…”

I fire the gun, aiming at a spot just above her head, where the invisible eye should be. Hit with the bullet, it becomes visible and falls dead to the ground with a splat. Our mother faints.

When she falls to the floor, some small items fall out of her coat. They are unattached eyes. They look at me in fear. One by one, I put the gun to them and fire straight down, bursting the eye. They are all dead.

I hear screams. Moses says “someone must have heard all the gunshots, and called the police!”

I realize he is only partly right. What must have happened, I realize darkly, is that the bullets went through the floor into the apartment below, and killed a young boy who was playing.

I contemplate the value of letting the boy stay dead, if his sacrifice was worth it in a war against aliens.

I decide I would be too tortured by the act in the future, that ultimately it would overcome me, make me careless and take risks that would be my undoing.

So I rewind, go back to the point where my mother falls to the floor. Instead of shooting the eyes, I get a hammer and smash them. They shatter like plastic eyes, not like human ones.

As I rise, Moses says “someone probably heard that gunshot and called the cops!”

I nod, and we sneak down the fire escape. I realize my duffle bags weren’t enough to hold all my video games, I will have to come back at some point to get the rest.

Once we reach the ground, we get in a car and start driving away, to formulate a plan of attack. People have started to realize something is wrong, the streets are chaotic with panicked drivers.

Finally we clear the city and are on the largely empty roads.

Then I woke up.

Time Travel Dream

Dream last night:

I am a boy, about 10. My sister and I live with our father, who is a reclusive millionaire mogul. He has discovered plans in a catalog for a number of strange devices. The first one we build is a mass driver (aka railgun) but is weak. You put a dime in the slot in the top, and it fires it out, but weakly. My sister and I fire it at each other, the dimes bouncing harmlessly off and clattering on the floor.

The next device is a time machine. I’m not sure what year it is, 1870 or 1970 maybe, but our father wants to travel forward to the exotic year of 1984. He builds it one night and leaves us, travelling forward in time.

We gather some friends, a few of whom are japanese and work in a nearby japanese restaurant. We activate the machine and jump forward in time.

1984 is strange and bleak, it seems like an economic depression has hit. We manage to locate our father, who is living in a shack. He doesn’t like it here, he wants to keep travelling forward, but the government has taken his time-travel device. He explains that we will have to help him break into the government facility to get it back.

So we head out, the poor millionaire tycoon and the rag-tag group of kids and early teens. We find the compound, there are machine gun nests and searchlights, like a prison, but we manage to get through the chain-link fence and inside the compound.

Inside the fence, it is a yard filled with RVs and other types of mobile homes. They are old and rusted, and parked haphazardly. Some are up on blocks, some rest on flat tires. We begin quietly searching them.

The eldest japanese kid finds the device and brings it to a central area, shielded from searchlights on all sides by RVs. We all gather round.

Our father says “well, I’m headed forward, are you coming with me?”
We shake our heads no. We want to go backward, back home.
“Ok, then,” he says, “I’m off.”
He is about to activate the device, but I stop him. “Wait,” I say, “we are heading back to the past. Can you give us any tips for the future?”

He pauses a moment in thought.

“When you get back to your mother,” he says, “there will be a huge blizzard. But actually, there will be no snow accumulation.”

The device is warmed up, and is starting to hum and buzz, louder and louder.

He steps toward it, and as he is about to go, he yells over the noise, “also, the father will apologize for the water! And the other will perform seppuku on someone else…”

There is a flash, and he is gone.

We gather up, and set the machine to go back home. We activate it, and soon we are back.

The japanese kids head back to the restaurant, my sister and I head to the farmhouse in Ripley, where our mother lives.

We are driving home with her, and we tell her what happened. She doesn’t believe us. Just then, it begins to snow, harder and harder, until it is a whiteout. Our mother says it looks like it’s going to be a terrible storm.

“No,” we say, “it’s like he said, it will look bad, but there will be no accumulation.”

Our mother doesn’t believe us, but 5 minutes later, the clouds have passed, the snow has stopped, and what little fell is already melting. The sun is shining.

She believes, not fully, but a spark. She is sad that our father has left for another time.

A few days later, my sister and I go to the japanese restaurant. We are greeted by our friends there. The eldest boy has always been somewhat rich and spoiled. We had all hoped that the time in 1984, were we had no money, would have taught him some humility, but he is back to being as brash as ever.

His father, the owner of the restaurant, comes in, and tells us to crouch down, in the yoga “child pose”. He walks around, and one by one, he cracks our backs. It feels good, and we are all relaxed.

I wonder out loud if this is what my father meant about seppuku, since we were in a similar pose when our backs were cracked. The restaurant owner asks what we are talking about. We tell him, and he shakes his head. “Such imagination, you children.”

“No,” I insist, “you will probably apologize about the water soon.”

He laughs, and we all kneel at the table, the low kind without chairs. We get our water and the food is being served, when the waitress notices residue on my glass. “Oh dear,” she says, “all the glasses seem to be dirty.”

The father apologizes about the dirty glasses of water.

“You see?” I say. He merely smiles. “A coincidence,” he says.

Suddenly there are shouts, and gunfire rings out. A yakuza gang who have been threatening the restaurant are causing trouble in the street out front.

The father begins to rise, but the eldest son waves him back. “It is my duty to take care of this,” he says, and strides toward the front. My sister and I crawl after him, so we can watch from a safe distance.

The yakuza out front have shot a woman who was passing by. The eldest son goes out and confronts their leader. “Go, now, and don’t come back,” he tells them. He stands defiantly in front of the leader. The leader recognizes him and smiles broadly. “Go home, rich boy,” he sneers.

The son again says “Leave, and don’t come back,” and points down the street.

The yakuza leader’s smile vanishes, and he pulls out an uzi. The son remains defiant, and doesn’t budge. The leader raises the gun, and sprays the son with bullets.

Bloody and dying, the son still refuses to move.

The leader draws his sword, a nasty weapon like a katana, but with a small blade at the end of the handle for close combat as well. The leader plunges his sword through the son. “Just die, and shut up,” shouts the leader.

The son slumps forward, as if to fall over. The sword is sticking out his back. The leader smiles. Then, at the last moment, the son reaches out, and with all his strength, pulls the leader close in an embrace. The blade on the handle impales the leader’s chest. The leader gasps, and blood begins to flow from him mouth. The son smiles, and they both topple to the ground.

The rest of the yakuza quickly pack up and run away.

I go back to the father, in the back of the restaurant, and tell him what his son did.

He is tearful, but very proud.

Somehow, discussion turns to how the son’s head should be cut off and preserved. I explain that lack of oxygen causes brain damage, that if he could be revived, he would be a vegetable. Some of the kids argue that freezing the head would get around this. I shake my head, but conjecture that maybe a pressurized oxygen container might work, since it would force oxygen into the brain.

As we are arguing about how to preserve the head, suddenly the eldest son walks into the restaurant. We all stare in disbelief. Behind him, we can still see his body lying dead in the street.

“But, how?” we all ask at once.

He smiles broadly. “Can’t keep a good man down,” he quips.

“I used your father’s device. I went into the future, and convinced future me to stand up to the yakuza.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder, pointing out to the street. “That’s me from next week.”

“But,” I say, “what will happen in a week? You’ll just die then!”

“No I won’t,” he smiles, “if I show up next week and ask me to go, I’ll just turn me down. I don’t want to die, I’m not stupid.”

I try to argue about paradoxes, but he waves me off. “I’m sure the universe takes care of itself. There are probably branching timelines or something.”

I shake my head in disbelief.

Dreams

I haven’t slept well in the past few days (only had one full night’s sleep in the past week) because of stress, and the side effects of stress (being sick).

But there were a couple dreams I remembered.

In one, I am in a hallway. I think it’s a school of some sort, a college or a high school, though not one I attended. We are playing a game, in two teams. I don’t really know the people on either team, except for Snooj, who is on the other team.

The game is a mix of Scrabble and football. I don’t know how to play, so Snooj is explaining the rules to me. But because he is on the other team, he is telling them to me all wrong, so his team will win.

I fumble around, trying to figure out how to score points, but I don’t understand the game at all. The whistle blows, and I slink back to my team. “What they hell was that?!?” they shout, “he played several words, and you only put down part of one, and it doesn’t even spell anything!”

I am ashamed and embarrassed as I look back and see that I have apprently tried to play “XVGRN”.

In another dream, I am in a building, which I think is based on my fuzzy rememberings of Twitchell Hill. It has multiple floors with one side open to a large room, and ladders and stairways connecting the floors.

It is set up like a newsroom, each desk has a typewriter and stacks of papers. I am part of the team there, and we are working on the One Laptop Per Child project. People are running updates and testing networking protocols. I have to search around for adaptors to connect them to a wired LAN.

At the time I didn’t notice, but now that I think about it, the OLPC laptops we were working on were actually Apple iPhones.

We are working frantically, and I come in waving a newspaper. I point to an article about the success of the OLPC in Peru, and we all get very emotional, seeing how our hard work has paid off, knowing that we have changed the lives of some children.

Bootlegging Dreams

Dream Last Night:

A company has somehow acquired all of my and Moses’ childhood toys. I go there to sort through and see if there is anything I want. I will only have one change to go though it, so I want to be thorough.

When I get there, he and I start sifting though things. I find an armload of stuff I want to keep, but the rest of the room (a storage area that seems pretty packed) I don’t really want anymore. I carry the stuff over to a table to set down, and while my back is turned, the company has removed most of the other stuff without warning. Even though I got what I wanted, I am still annoyed they just took it without saying anything.

Moses, it turns out, lives at the company. It is a beer brewing company. He shows me his room. “Isn’t this the bathroom?” I ask. It is. It’s a very large bathroom, a space taking like half or a third of the attic, but he is still in the same room as the bathtub, toilet, and sink. I can only imagine what it’s like when someone stinks up the place.

He goes off to do some work (he works there in some way as well as living there) and I walk around a bit.

I find myself going down some stairs, into the basement. It is an earthen floor, and catacomb like. Sections of the floor are wet, and the smell of damp earth is heavy in the air. There are some brewing tanks in one side of the basement. I hear splashing from the other side.

A woman is there, she is just finishing drowning someone in a pool of water. “Good thing you’re here,” she says when she sees me. “I need help moving the body.”

I don’t remember the rest of the dream.

Space Dream

Dream:

I am working for Bill Gates. He’s not a bad guy, and now and then I talk with him. Usually he’s busy off doing stuff. He is scheduled to take a space shuttle ride but is busy with something else, so he asks me if I want to go. I jump at the chance.

It’s a tight schedule, so I book a flight, arrange a rental car, and get my space shuttle tickets.

Then I realize I have completely botched my travel arrangements. I have scheduled the plane flight, car rental, and shuttle flight to all start at the same time. I am distraught, realized I’ve screwed it all up and won’t get to go. At the last minute, Gate’s administrative assistant steps in and straightens everything out.

I get to the flight, which goes smoothly, then take the rental car to the launch pad. I realize it’s just me and one other guy on the shuttle flight. I think he’s an airforce pilot or something. He looks around 25.

We strap in, and the shuttle takes off. It is scheduled to be a shortish orbital flight, but for some reason we are redirected to check out a planet that might support life.

We get to the planet and he lands the shuttle. We step out onto the surface, it is a very earthlike world, a bit dry and dusty, not a desert but dry, like Florida or Texas.

Exploring the area, I notice some houses and we walk over. It is a community, it seems fairly technologically advanced. There are a few natives around, they look like ordinary people, about our height, fair-skinned. Most are female and there are some children running about. The are somewhat in awe of us, and take us to meet their council of leaders.

We are taken to a large circular building. Inside it is dimly lit, but not bad once my eyes adjust. In the main room in the center of the building is a fire pit with glowing embers in it. Around it in a circle are many beautiful women. They are dressed in thin black robes, which are essentially transparent, and are wearing masks. Not unlike Eyes Wide Shut. They speak to us with reverence, and smile and flirt with us. Then the meeting is adjourned, the lights come up, and they take their masks off. They are all fairly young and pretty. Since they had just been flirting with me, I ask a couple out, but now they look at me with scorn and laugh, and all hover around the younger astronaut. “You are old and silly,” they say, “this man is young. He is the future.”

I am of course depressed by this, but then I notice a commotion near the entrance. A woman with a child has been brought in, and a crowd is forming around her, with gasps of disapproval. I edge closer to see. The child holding the woman’s hand has dark skin, in contrast to all the pale-skinned women in the room. “Throw her in jail,” the leader of the women says, “and take that” (she gestures at the boy) “to be destroyed.”

“Stop!” I shout, as they are about to be taken out, “you can’t do that to them!”

The leader of the women looks at me with a mixture of surprise and pity. “They are tainted,” she says, “by the inferior race. Come, I will show you.”

She leads me out of the building, down a road and a path. Soon we are overlooking a primitive-looking village of clay houses. “See, ” she points towards the village, “they are foolish and stupid.”

I look down at the village, noticing their clothing is brightly colored, they are singing and laughing. Where the pale women’s village is aloof and technological, with everyone wearing either light clothing or dark robes (just for the leaders), the dark-skinned village is earthen, and emotional, and a riot of colors and sounds.

“This is why the child must be destroyed,” she continues, “we cannot allow this worthless frivolity to infect us, it would destroy everything we have worked to achieve.”

We walk back to the women’s meeting hall. I realize I have to choose a representative to bring back to earth, to be a liaison between earth and this world. The airforce pilot has already picked out a very attractive woman. “She’s very limber,” he says, and winks at me.

“No.” I say. I realize I have the say over who we will bring back with us. “We will bring him.” I point to the dark-skinned boy, still being held by the wrists by the women in black robes. They are all shocked, and appalled. “Did you not understand what I just showed you?” the leader cries, “that boy is not one of us, he is of the mud!”

“Well,” I reply, “you will just have to learn to work with him, since he will be your ambassador on earth. And if you want him to treat you fairly, you’d better take good care of his mother, too.” The pilot begrudgingly kisses the young woman he had picked out goodbye, and we climb back on the shuttle with the boy.

Then I wake up.

Life in Rapture

My dream last night, in part, was this:

I am renting an apartment in Rapture, the undersea city in the game Bioshock.

It’s a pretty nice modern apartment, very clean and minimal (unlike the apartments in the game). Everything is going well, but then there is a power failure. I am watching TV at the time, and it is on a battery backup, so I don’t immediately notice. But then I look out the window, and the city is all dark.

There is rumbling and a crash, and the power comes back on. Everything seems ok, but I gradually notice sprays of water throughout the apartment. One wall cracks, and water then begins to gush in.

“That’s what I get,” I think to myself, “for getting an apartment at the bottom of the ocean.”

Then I woke up.

Zombie Dreams

Had a long zombie-apocalypse-themed dream last night. Not a nightmare, exactly, but not a good dream.

The world was flooded with zombies, in a typical Night of the Living Dead sceneario. I join up with a group of people travelling across the land, in a Mad Max-ish world.

It’s an epic, sprawling journey. At one point we find an alien craft. I accuse the aliens of starting the zombie epidemic, but they deny responsibility. “We were just vacationing here,” says the female alien. “Yeah,” says the male, “pity about what’s happened here, we really liked coming here.” The aliens look just like humans, except the female looks male, and the male looks female. “Well,” I say, “a bit of a coincidence that just as you show up, we have a zombie outbreak…”

“No,” says the female, “we’ve been coming here for years. Great planet.”

“If it wasn’t you, can you help us?” I ask. “No,” she replies, “there’s a strict no-intervention policy. In fact, every time we come here, we stop at Mars on the way home, and take some photos there, and tell our friends that’s where we spent our vacation. We’d get in trouble if people found out we went someplace with lifeforms.”

We travel on, leaving the aliens and eventually finding a military compound, which we clear of zombies and live in. I frequently complain that I wish I had a sword. I had one for a while, but it broke. A good sword can take off a zombie head with a slash or two, no fumbling for ammo. “Remember,” says one of the guys in the group, an ex-military guy, “if you are low on ammo, use your plasmids.”
“Oh yeah,” I say, “I keep forgetting about those.” [plasmids are from the game Bioshock I have been playing, abilities like shooting fire from your hands]

I notice there is a path near the compound, which goes up into the mountains. I follow it, and discover a walled city. It is a larger military compound, made of adobe, and carved into the mountain itself. As we are exploring, we notice some zombies there. But they are acting differently. They are all very white, like albinos, and have a society. They speak to one another, and have a leader. They still hunger for human flesh, but they have re-opened a mall there, and have a working food court, and restaurants. They eat this food, but it only slightly feeds their hunger. They still look at humans with a lean and hungry eye.

As the albino zombies come towards us, we run back along the path. The leader zombie is talking about a treaty, and I am shouting back that it’s a good idea, but they are still following us hungrily. They finally fall back, except for two, which we have to fight. They are tougher than regular zombies, strong and more solid, but we finally take them down.

I am about to go to a neighboring town, because I have heard they have swords, but around then my alarm clock wakes me up.