A Place in the Forest

I was on IM with someone, communicating in pure text. I was helping design / negotiate / arrange some sort of scene / performance / experience, that was going to require a Rube Goldberg / Dr Suess level of crazy complexity of ropes and pulleys. I remember making reference to having to arrange things and having discussed things, with other people I know, and pulling them into side IM conversations, people I know who in RL have nothing to do with each other or such crazy stuff.

The main person I was communicating with, I was never quite sure who they were. A me just outside of me kept asking "is this so-and-so? no, its not. oh, then its so-and-so-somebody-else? no, its not."

The back and forth conversations always had 2, 3, 4 levels of meaning, because everyone had other things they wanted to talk about as well or instead, but that nobody wanted to actually say, so every phrase had to be carefully analyzed and deconstructed to figure out all the things being said without being said, and each thing I wrote back to anyone got more and more difficult to write, becoming "heavier and heavier" in my mind, because it had to have many layers of meaning as well, because it had to respond to the surface text of everyone else, plus respond to the deeper meanings of everyone's text, plus include all the stuff i wanted to tell each person that I needed to say without actually saying.

All while this was going on, there was some sort of local multiple community fundraising / auction going on around me, the noise and social swirl of which kept making noise and distraction. Someone was there recording / broadcasting / podcasting the event, and kept wanting to know who I was chatting with and what we were talking about, and I had to keep deflecting him.

At midtime in the fundraiser, refreshments were served, some sort of crazy veggie wrap with a crunchy (!) spinich leaf exterior. I was starving, but got hearded into line for the 2nd set of groups to get to eat. It was chewy, gooey, and bitter.

I was annoyed by the interruption, because in the IM conversation, people were actually starting to say what they meant, but now I couldn't get back to it, and I was losing track of the scenes being negotiated, and all the layers of allusion that everyone was using.

I woke up with my heart pounding.

I wasn't a nightmare, but it's still pounding, and while I'm sleepy, I'm torn hard between fear that I will end up back in the same dream, and fear that I won't.

Meh.

I was having a technical discussion with Keith F. Lynch, via IM via a shared editor buffer (we kept interleaving text when we tried to talk at the same time), where I was explaining how network dependencies on startup for some appliance didn't have to be a bad thing, if the code sections kept track of their own start and run dependencies and so an emergent "Makefile with parallelism" type thing happened.

After that was done, and I was closing down my computer, I noticed that I was in an old classroom, and that I was one of the last stragglers to leave. But then Armando Stettner came in, but it took me a moment to recognize him because he'd dyed his hair pink. We resumed a technical/economic/pricepoint argument I had made with him before. But I pointed out that the people who buy brand new VW Beetles had a convincing different set of price influences, which invalidated his argument. He stopped, thought for a moment, and then agreed with me.

Soon after, I woke up.


Now, I've had many USENET exchanges and one face to face conversation with Keith Lynch, it was never about anything technical. Our one face to face conversation was in WorldCon in 2004, and was about the gothic appearance of my style of dress. And while I worked with and argued with Armando at my last job, I don't think this argument was one we've ever actually had, and under the light of wakefulness, the argument doesn't make sense. And I somehow doubt that Armando is ever going to dye his hair pink.

I was about to graduate from some school. (Which school, it wasn't any that I've actually attended.) I needed to take a shower to get ready, but all the showers were just showerheads sticking out of the walls in the study hall. Courtesy dictated I find one that wasn't going to spray on someone else there. While soaping up, I had a conversation with someone who was selling silly little desk toys. I bought some of them.

I was standing in line for the premiere of a movie, based on a series of books. It wasn't Harry Potter, or Lemony Snicket, but the people in the line knew about those. These series was similar.

I was at a family party, which lots of big gift giving. It was either hosted by or for/about my sister and her husband. I saw on the pile of gifts on the table, a Sybian "toy", just barely concealed by a towel over it. I was concerned, was that all that appropriate to just leave out like that? I was told not to worry, so far I was the only one to have recognized it for what it was.

I had two more dream scenes to transcribe just a few minutes ago, but now they are gone. Trying to write down a dream is like trying to pick up a cobweb. The process of remembering and turning it into words, destroys it.

I was back at the job I had had in the early 90's. It was the end of the year, and I had come in late after the end of the year parties, to get my clothes. Which had accumulated from occasionally changing clothes in my office. But they weren't there, he bagged them up and sold them by the pound. I was mildly pissed off at him, and I left.

The outside of the building was completely different then it actually was IRL, and the road going past it, while paved up to that point, curved away to the left and was a narrow gravel road going thru unimproved rocky grassy fields. Off in the distance I could see a large chemical processing plant. That's where my clothes were.

For some reason, I needed to have my mother make the introductions to get me in. The first person we met was, to my surprise, my cousin's wife, who I had worked with in the late 80s IRL. She had become slightly more heavyset and was going gray, and was looking a lot more like her mother-in-law.

She went in to get the person who had bought up all the bags of clothes, and it was a woman I know IRL, except she was a great deal thinner, older, and more attractive. Before I got to talk to her, my mom spoke with her in a private office. I knew she was making pointed request to protect the virtue of her boy, and the women she was talking to, while calming agreeing on the outside, was amused on the inside.

She lead us thru a warren of old office space, with ugly 70s wood paneled walls. In a conference room was a table piled with the bags of clothes she had bought with plans to sort and resell. I sorted thru them, picking out my own stuff. Several other women I knew wandered in and out, striking up conversations with each other. One of them wasn't someone I actually knew, she was instead a former lover of a friend of mine, who had parted on friendly terms, she was the inspiration for a female character in stories he writes (I have no idea if this is the actual case, IRL).

After I had picked out my stuff, I offered to reimburse her, since she had paid for them in good faith. All she asked was ten bucks. But something had literally eaten most of my wallet, with big bites, so I had to hit up my parents for the money. As we were walking out, I was idly chatting with my youngest sister. I suddenly could tell I was in a dreamstate, because I wasn't actually walking, but was just occasionally putting my toes down to the carpet to change the direction I was moving.

I woke up soon after.

I've just rented a big old oddly remodeled-over-the-decades semi-run-down house, packed up next to other similar big old run down places. As I explore out the back door, buts up against them, and the small weedy unmaintained lawns twist and merge together. I'm not sure where "my" building ends, and the others begin, looking at them from the outside. Some of them look abandoned, or at least nobody is ever home.

It does have a big garage/shopspace tho, but it's a couple of building fronts down the pedestrian friendly urban street. I know it's my garage, because there are several such together, each with the number for the house they go to over their main door.

Inside my garage, I've had built and helped set up a parachute landing approach practice tower/cable rig. Pushing the struts into place was heavy work, but I could feel strength in my arms and back as I pushed them into place, while more expert people ratchet the bolts shut.

One of the empty house neighbors has several families living in tents and old run-down RVs in his back yard. It looks like they've been there for at least all summer.


Why have been my last few memorable dreams been about acquiring and exploring housing?

A lot of people on my friends list have dreamblogged this morning.

I woke up in the middle of the night from a really weird dream, and I recall thinking "I need to dreamblog this one".

However, by the time I sat down in front of my computer late this morning, it was all gone, like dew blasted away by the bright sun.