Big Brother's Dream Diary

Sleep and Dream Diary

Sunday 11/13/05
Went to bed: 12:45am
Fell asleep: circa 2am
Woke up: 10:00am
Dream: Forgotten

Monday 11/14/05
Went to bed: 2am
Fell Asleep: circa 2:30am
Woke up: 9:40am
Dream: I joined a gang led by Bono from U2 who were going to kill and rob the members of R.E.M. to get money to fund the IRA. The gang also included a big dumb English guy named Zinger, Jeff from Coupling, and Kenny G. R.E.M. also included a hot girl who looked like Kiera Knightley in Domino for some reason, on whom I had a big crush, and the main reason I joined this group was to meet her and tell her how much I liked her and her music, especially “Shiny Happy People” and “Losing my Religion:, and ask if I would have had a chance with her. The answer was no, and she did more flirting with the Kenny G guy. I used a little .22 revolver to kill a couple other members of R.E.M. but we left her alive as our hostage. Bono, Jeff, and Zinger didn’t trust me much. It took us so long to load up our van with swag from R.E.M.’s big apartment that we fell asleep (the hot chick slept with Zinger, not me) and resumed loading in the morning. That morning, it was raining inside the room where Zinger and Domino were sleeping for some reason. After waking them up and telling them to resume loading our swag, I started loading and packing a bunch of orange traffic cones from under a coffee table while rhythmically chanting “Independence for Quebec! Viva Jay Sherman, Viva Quebec!” like from that Critic episode. An oblivious Asian guy wandered through on the way to take a shower in R.E.M.’s bathroom, and I nodded for Jeff and Kenny G to go kill him. As we finally finished loading up our swag and were debating whether to take Domino with us as a hostage or kill her since she’d seen our faces and can identify us, I woke up.

Tuesday 11/15/05
Went to bed: 2:00am
Fell Asleep: circa 3:30am
Woke up: 10:20am
Dream: I was getting married to a blonde chick who looked like Amanda Helin, a crush of mine from 8th grade, but I think it was supposed to be Jenna Bush, since ex-President George H.W. Bush was at the wedding. This may be due to right before I fell asleep watching that night’s Commander in Chief on tape, which involved the President’s cute blonde daughter facing a rumor in high school that she’d slept with a jerky guy. The marriage immediately faced a problem, that I was still hung up about my previous marriage to a hotter redhead chick who looked like online porn star Lauren McAdams of RedHotLauren.com. That marriage had taken place in a Maryland swamp, with myself dressed in ROTC uniform and most of my high school ROTC unit in attendance in full uniform. Shortly after that, she had made a pass at my friend Nathan Bax and then divorced me. So I was left mainly with a funny wedding photo album and program written by Marcus, including passages from the TI story translated into French for some reason. Anyhow, the hot blonde chick and I were driving around Bloomington-Normal in a VW Jetta whose seat I couldn’t get adjusted right immediately prior to the wedding, looking in vain for a Bank One/Chase ATM since I only had like 5 bucks in my wallet and that wasn’t gonna get us through the honeymoon. At the wedding, Marcus and I talked about the online RPG we were in at the time, an odd combination of FMK, WP3, and TI that involved political intrigue and warfare amongst Asian farmers in late medieval Korea but was nevertheless set in the game year 2005. I also urged my blonde fiancée to dye her hair red, but complemented her on her perky boobies.

Nap time: circa 3:45pm-5:15pm
Dream: Forgotten

Wednesday 11/16/2005
Went to bed: 3:00am
Fell asleep: circa 3:30am
Woke up: 5:00am
Dream: I was in some sort of Virtual Reality B5-based RPG game, sort of like a holodeck. My task was to prevent the Centauri Ambassador Londo Mollari (who was dressed in his nightshirt) from committing suicide by jumping off a second or third floor balcony in a giant building that was something like a cross between a shopping mall and a museum of science. It had a food court and a bunch of astronomical telescopes and electron microscopes on display, anyways. All the while I was chasing the semi-naked Londo through this mall/museum, he was reciting his dialogue from a couple of early 4th season episodes that were playing on the TV at the time. Eventually he managed to reach a balcony and jump off before I could catch him, so I lost the game and woke up

Thursday 11/17/2005
Went to bed: 10:45pm
Fell Asleep: 12:30am
Woke up: 12:15pm (brief awakening about 6:30am)
Dream: Forgotten, but something about BB guns.
Naptime: None

Friday 11/18/2005
Went to bed: 3:30am
Fell Asleep: 4:00am
Woke up: 8:20am
Dream: Forgotten
Naptime: 4:20pm-6:10pm
Dream: It started out as me playing a Moo2-style space-based computer game, trying to find planets to colonize and spread my empire. Then each planet I colonized rewarded me with a porn video clip or some pics. Then the B5 video in the VCR ended, and a PBS program about the new medicare rules came on, and suddenly, instead of finding planets to colonize or new porn video clips, I was in search of a good medicare prescription drug plan.

Saturday 11/19/2005
Went to bed: Forgotten
Fell Asleep:Forgotten
Woke up: 11:00am
Dream: Forgotten
Naptime: None

Sunday 11/20/2005
Went to bed: circa 1:00am
Fell Asleep: circa 2:00am
Woke up:10:00am
Dream: I was going back to school at a place that was some sort of cross between ISU, Hogwarts, and Degrassi Junior High. My dorm room was a cross between the triple in the Pit and the second floor bathroom in my house. Preparing me for college, my mom was making some sort of sculpture of the name MARTIN out of wood and metal to be something like a nameplate, and it was some elaborate thing with interlinking letters that looked like they were made of antique farm implements of some sort. Taking the first half MAR of this nameplate to hang them in my new room, I paused to piss in a toilet that looked like a really old bucket or well, and there were gigantic foot-wide carnivorous Junebugs in the bottom of that which got really annoyed when I pissed on them. I stabbed at a couple of them with an old broom handle, killing a couple, but one of them took off and flew through what looked a bit like the first floor of my house. I eventually chased down and killed that, too. There were several sets of identical twins going to school with me, including the Patil sisters and the Weasley twins and those two curly-haired brunettes from Degrassi Junior High. There was also a new pair of twins that each looked like a young Catherine Keener, and both them and a non-twin girl who looked very similar but not identical to them were pursuing me romantically, and I invited all three to spend the night in my dorm room. Sadly, I woke up before it could degenerate into a foursome.
Naptime: 4pm-6pm
Dream: Forgotten

Monday 11/21/05
Went to bed: 3:00am?
Fell Asleep: 3:30am?, then 7:00am
Woke up: 6:30am, then 12:25pm
Dream: I was David, the son of John Sheridan and Delenn from B5. We were staying in a somewhat fancy hotel of some sort, on a state visit to Emperor Londo Mollari of the Centauri Republic. As I was listening through the door as they were doing the dialogue from the late 5th-season B5 episode that was playing in the VCR as I slept, I wad idly picking at my arm. I found a tiny brown screw that I had at some point stuck into a mole on my left arm near the elbow, and pulled it out. Initially, there was almost no bleeding, but a few minutes later I noticed some blood on my upper arm. I went into the bathroom to run some cold water over it, and I think the water began intruding into the wound, and a tube-like line went around my upper arm and red arterial blood began pulsing out of the woundat one end, and then water began leaking out the other end of the line, followed by more blood. As I took it out of the water flow, dozens of such lines appeared all over my body and I began bleeding from what I somehow knew were 28 places on my body. As I screamed for help, I could feel the blood also pulsing out of my stomach walls into my stomach. As I collapsed on the floor from blood loss, I swear I heard the theme for “House MD” playing as if I was this episode’s patient-who-suddenly-collapses-with-a-mysterious-ailment and the opening credits were starting, then I woke up.
Dream 2: Something like a cross between Firefly and Buffy, at first. I was on the crew of Serenity, except Nathan Fillion was more playing his character of Brother Caleb from 7th season Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was some long elaborate story involving trying to kill a demongirl or somesuch by drowning her in a river...I don’t recall all the details, but the story looped back on itself and after a while, I was in a flashback or something at the beginning of the story. Then this became the first new episode of Firefly, and I was watching and taping it on the TV while my sister Rachel and I did the dishes and cleaned out the refrigerator while waiting for mom and dad to come back from some Advocate Charitable Foundation dinner dance. We were getting a new fridge and had to empty out the old one first. As we finished that and the parents came home, we needed to put in a container of water, which we first had to locate. Suddenly I was a male flight attendant on Delta Airlines, and I had to find the beer-keg-like water container there, but all we (myself and the other flight attendants, mostly females) could find was an empty keg of chicken soup. After going through the cargo hold with a flashlight and looking amongst the cylinders of oxygen and such (I’d recently read an article in some newsmagazine or newspaper about airlines now being required to provide medical oxygen for elderly and handicapped people free of charge, which may have influenced this dream), I went through the index card file of emergency procedures to find where the water keg was supposed to be kept. I got distracted and instead began reading the emergency instructions in case of nuclear war. Apparently, in this dream at least, in case of WW3 all airliners were supposed to land at Litchfield, Tennessee, where there were a pair of long runways and a supply of jet fuel. Naturally, this led to the dream becoming post-apocalyptic and we had to land at Litchfield, which had a bunch of jetliners and a few elderly T-38 and F-104 fighters and trainers parked on the tarmac, and where the other flight attendants began taking baths in old-fashioned wooden tubs while reciting “D-E-L-T-A” using the Spanish pronunciations for the letters. I wandered around the small town of Litchfield, where I came across and befriended a brunette woman who had illegally borrowed a gun from an elderly couple for self-defense, and who was also wandering the streets of Litchfield. I followed her into a small Korean restaurant, whose other inhabitants were North Korean sympathizers who began shooting at me, but I backed out quickly and called in reinforcements from the cops. We shouted at them to come out, but they said “you can’t get us out without grenades”, but of course I had a grenade and so did many of the cops. We tossed the grenades into the Korean restaurant, killing some of them and forcing the rest of the North Koreans out into the snowy street where we shot them down as they fled. Then I woke up.

Sunday, November 27, 2005
Went to bed: 4:15am
Fell Asleep: circa 4:45am
Woke up: 12:35pm
Dream:
I was going back to ISU, moving back into a dorm that was a weird combo of Atkins-Colby and Manchester halls. As I went to move in, I stopped off at a bookstore and impulse-bought three copies of Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. They were 5 bucks each, and I was charged exactly 15 bucks for the three, and wondered why I wasn’t charged sales tax. I also worried why I bought them in the first place, since A) I already own two copies, and B) I really couldn’t afford to spend 15 bucks on anything, since I didn’t have a job. Wondering what to do with them, I went through the dorm in search of my old roommate, Toru Shibayama, the Japanese exchange student, to give him one as a gift. I wandered through the dorm, going through a bathroom and a couple hallways, finally finding Toru in a large room with racks of old vinyl records on the walls. I went through my backpack looking for the books, but could only find 6 vinyl records....three copies of an older album of music, and three copies of a newer album, both albums some sort of alternative music. I had a talk with Toru, complaining to him that most current alternative music sounds like the musicians either are trying to be Creed or OMD. Then I took the Amtrak train back to Chicago, stopped off at McDonalds and picked up a dinner of Big Macs, and went home. There, I found that Dad had bought a new car, a very futuristic car whose dashboard looked like it was mainly a computer terminal, with the driving controls added in as an afterthought on the far left side of the dash, but from outside it looked an awful lot like a powder-blue Studebaker from circa 1957. Dad was washing this car, then went on to wash two or three other people’s cars that just happened to be parked in the lot between our house and the library. I decided to take our new powder-blue car for a test drive down Leavitt to the north, but immediately had problems. Well, the car was very futuristic and computer-enabled, and I could just say “Computer, close doors” and all four doors closed. But the brake pedal and parking brake pedal were right next to each other, and in my bare feet (I wasn’t wearing shoes for some reason) I kept hitting the wrong one, and even when I did hit the normal brake, the car only slowed slightly instead of stopping. This made it hard to turn, since I couldn’t come to a full stop at an intersection, but tended to just roll right through. Eventually I reached the end of Leavitt where it crossed North Avenue (yes, North Avenue is actually several miles to the south of my house, not to the north, but dream geography tends to be screwy) and where there was a huge CTA bus barn. I got in a mild fender-bender by brushing up against a bus that was pulling into the bus barn, but at least I got the car stopped at last. But even with the parking brake set, it kept trying to start moving again, and I couldn’t figure out how to get the engine stopped.
Naptime:

Monday, 11/28/05
Went to bed: 4:30am
Fell Asleep: 5:15am
Woke up: 11:00am
Dream: Only snippets recalled. I was either part of or watching an elaborate Lost-style unfolding-mystery TV show based on the Harry Potter novels. Through several scenes over multiple episodes, one prop in the background behind the H/Hr/R trio was a large trunk-sized instrument case like those used by rock bands to transport their sound equipment. On each side of this case was a large black-and-white photo of a band member...the first episode, only one side was shown, and it had a pic of James Potter and his signature. On subsequent eps, other sides were shown one by one in the background, with different members of the band on each side, and this was used to foreshadow characters that would later become important to the plot. I think Sirius Black was on one side, but the other two sides had people who were neither Wormtail nor Lupin. One was a guy named Leonard McGreevey for some reason. The final revelation on the case was a zoom in on the side with James Potter, with a pic of a tricycle and the inscription “To my son, Percy Weasley”.
Naptime: None

Thursday, December 01, 2005
Went to bed: 8:00am
Fell Asleep: 9:45am
Woke up: 5:00pm
Dream: Biggest. Geek. Dream. EVAR. God help me, I dreamed I was in a LARP campaign. It was back at ISU, Marcus was storyteller/GM, and I was in a party with Bax, Jen, and Chris, just like first season of TI. It was a Dungeons and Dragons-style fantasy RPG. I was playing a female mage/wizard of some sort named Delenn. Bax was playing a fighter/barbarian of some sort, I don’t recall who or what Chris and Jen were playing. We were LARPING in a busy building something like the Bone Student Center, with bemused and jeering fellow students passing by for much of the time, but at least they weren’t messing with the various clues and objects Marcus had placed around the area for us to find/encounter. We wandered around, finding various clues, and finding toy swords and such that we picked up to find if they were cursed or blessed or whatever. I don’t recall every item or clue we encountered, but I do remember a couple. At one point, we found a big stone marker something like a tombstone, on which was engraved a bunch of Windows icons and file names, and we had to guess what it meant. Turns out, it was directory and file names from Mlle’s computer (Mlle had left her computer turned on, and Marcus had copied them down, much to her consternation when she found out -- perhaps this bit is based on the fact that just before I went to bed that night, I’d surfed to a website with a list of pranks to pull on someone who left their computer unattended). Another time, we found a wardrobe/closet full of toy weapons, and each of us grabbed one. I grabbed a fancy white staff, hoping it was some sort of blessed spell-casting staff. Whoops, it was a cursed staff (so I couldn’t put it down once I picked it up), but it did grant my character +3 Courage for some reason. Another item I picked up was a fancy piece of wrought iron scrollwork, which I had picked up just to ask Marcus what it was. Turns out it was a hilt for a longsword I found later, which once I carried it in my other hand granted my character +3 Fame in Italy, a stat which I dutifully recorded on my character sheet. At various locations we reached, there also were monster encounters. One time, we got to this big white curtain-like thing at the end of the hall, and embroidered along the bottom of the curtain was the phrase “unleash the queen bees”, and suddenly a pair of giant CGI-looking bees attacked us. I swatted at them with my staff and they flew away. Near the end, we reached a stage-like area, and Tilda Swinton as the White Queen from the upcoming Narnia movie came out and challenged us with a couple of riddles we were supposed to have found the clues to but hadn’t. One question was “What is the name of the girl of gold?”, but we hadn’t found that clue. I asked my party if any of them remembered the name of the girl in the movie “Goldfinger” who Auric Goldfinger had painted with gold paint (which killed her by the bad technobabble of “skin suffocation”), and Bax suggested the name “Womack” (which is a bit character in one ep of Firefly, but I’m pretty sure not the name of the girl from the Bond movie). I wanted to answer “Auriga”, but I was pretty sure it was wrong, so instead of answering, we all ran away to find more clues before we confronted the White Queen.
Naptime: None

Saturday, 12/3/05
Went to bed: sometime after 10:00am
Fell Asleep: Unknown
Woke up: 7:15pm
Dream: Something involving sitting in a big comfy leather armchair in the giftshop of a local-history museum in Galena, IL and reading a book. The rest is forgotten.
Naptime: None.

Sunday, 12/4/05
Went to bed: sometime after 9:00am
Fell Asleep: Unknown
Woke up: 3:30pm
Dream: Forgotten
Naptime: None

Monday, December 05, 2005
Went to bed: Forgotten
Fell Asleep: Forgotten
Woke up: 4:00am
Dream: Long, involved, and confusing. At first I was playing a weird game of Empire Deluxe, a scenario that was a cross between BigEarth and Napoleon, in which I was the US, my main enemy was the Russians, and for some reason my cruisers could go on land, and we were fighting over Central Asia and Southern Africa. Then I was in a weird army unit on a SpecOps mission in Indian-controlled Kashmir, and I was either prisoner of the Indian Army or we’d captured some Indian forces, and we were hiding in some woods, and fighting against/hiding from a weird insect species that were a cross between Fire Ants and Tarantulas that lived under ground and could mind-control us if they touched our skin. Luckily, we wore these nifty futuristic Starship-Troopers-like space suits or Power armor that protected us from their touch. Eventually we got captured or rescued by some helicopter-borne troops personally led by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraff. As we flew off in his helicopter, Musharraff explained to me how he’d wished he knew about the one Muslim soldier among us, as it would have been easier to get cooperation in his mission from the Syrian government. He also told me that these mind-control spider ants were being used by Palestinian terrorist groups to recruit suicide bombers, rationalizing that mind-controlled people got super strength from the bonding and thus were a modern-day version of ancient Philistine mighty men/champions like Goliath of Old Testament fame. He said prospective mind-control victims were told that, while mind-controlled, they could not sin, so people were lining up to be mind-controlled in order to partake in promised rape, adultery, and child molestation of western diplomats and their families without fear of divine punishment in the next life. Describing one such attack on the Daughter of an American Diplomat, the daughter suddenly became my sister Rachel. Suddenly my sister and I were in a big movie theater waiting to see “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”. While waiting, I was playing with a pair of orchestra-style Cymbals, running my finger along their rim to make them vibrate slightly for a cool sound effect. The movie started, and it began with Harry and another student (something like a cross between Seamus Finnigan and Cedric Diggory) discussing something at a blackboard with a teacher/Order-member who was an odd cross between Lupin and Gilderoy Lockhart, played by a short Scottish guy with a dorky goatee. Harry then began playing a Wizarding Video game, which was sort of holo-projected in the air in front of him. The game was called “Muggle Invaders”, and was much like Space Invaders, except instead of alien craft in rows coming ever lower, it was little stylized cars and muggles and handguns and such, muggle artifacts mostly. Finally the opening title appeared, and then Harry was at Hogwarts, and in the audience I turned to my sister in wonderment, “Holy crap, they cut out ALL of the Woes of Mrs. Weasley and the opening 12 Grimmauld Place stuff?” and she was very annoyed with Steve Kloves yet again. The plot of the movie centered around a crashed alien spaceship that was found in the Forbidden Forest, bearing a sort of Caal-like alien lifeform/presence that could mind-control people and was transferred by touch. The people in Hogwarts were trying to prevent the aliens from taking over the school. Much of the movie dialogue in the dream was lifted from the “Crusade” episode which was playing in the VCR when I woke up in the middle of Dumbledore explaining how he’d translated the log of the alien spaceship captain describing his efforts to fight the alien lifeforms.
Naptime: 4:15pm-6:00pm
Dream: I was trying to get out to the suburbs to visit my friend Chris. I went looking for a Metra station, and found one at Lawrence Avenue, although en route I passed a sign saying the CTA station there was under renovation and thus I should choose an alternate route. When I got there, the station was open. It was an odd but busty train station, with both CTA El trains and Metra trains with Amtrak Acela trains coming and going, apparently on the same tracks. While waiting for my train, I ran into actor Adrian Brody sitting on a bench, and we talked for a while about his role in the upcoming King Kong remake, with his lines coming from the Charlie Rose episode that was playing on PBS while I napped. No, there was no cyborg Charlie Rose. As I got up to leave, I absentmindedly left my train schedule and map in his bag, and had to go back to get it. Trying to cross the tracks to the correct platform (the station was at grade level like the ones past Western on the brown line, but had three platforms and four sets of tracks like the Belmont L stop), I fell between two tracks as a pair of Amtrak Acela trains were coming down the two tracks from the same direction. I tried to run to stay ahead of them, but as they pulled out of the station they sped up, one train was coming up right behind me so I ended up lying spread-eagled on the slanted front of the right-hand locomotive, being yelled at by the crew inside. As they finally started slowing down, I rolled off to the right and onto the side of the tracks. The train coasted to a stop, and there were a combination of flatcars loaded with bales of hay and triple-decker passenger cars filled with schoolkids in the train. The schoolkids were busily engaged in sexual experimentation, and one of the little boys had a disturbingly long tongue that lolled out of his mouth by at least a foot, and he and his female classmates were practicing French kissing. A TV news crew came up and tried to film this, and I tried to stop them filming and explain to the kids that they really didn’t want to be caught on camera doing this. I woke up briefly to see that the Adrian Brody interview was on Charlie Rose, then fell right back to sleep. Now I was dreaming about typing the first half of the dream into my dream diary, before remembering that I just got a puppy (a white and brown dog that looked like a Jack Russell terrier) and I had forgotten to feed him, walk him, or give him a bowl of water for a couple of days. I went downstairs to look for a suitable dish for this task, finding the dog waiting for me at the top of the stairs down to the kitchen, where he enthusiastically greeted me by jumping up and trying to lick my face. I went down to the kitchen and began rooting through the Tupperware cupboard looking for old Philly cream cheese containers to use for his food and water dish, but kept getting distracted and forgetting what I was doing. I finally located the cream cheese containers, but A) several of them still had part of the foil and clearly had been put back in the cupboard without being properly washed first, and B) there were odd sizes and shapes, including a teapot and sugar bowl (but still with the Philly brand cream cheese printing and made of plastic) and a little thing like a small trophy cup. I finally located a suitable pair of containers, and turned to see that my puppy had given up on me and was trying to eat my sister’s new French Poodle instead. As I scolded him by saying “Bad dog! Don’t eat my sister’s puppy!” I woke up.

Thursday, 12/15/05
Went to bed: 11:30pm
Fell Asleep: 12:00am
Woke up: 7:15am (plus waking up at least twice during the night, interrupting the flow of dreams)
First Dream, about 3:30am: Something about working in a huge logging complex of some sort, with a lot of wooden porch-like structures, and a man-made canal-like river running through it that logs floated down from one stage of processing to another, involving swimming in said canal while dodging logs dropped from the porch level above.

Second Dream, about 4:45am: I got a job during the Xmas busy season in a huge store something like a cross between Wal-Mart and Toys ‘R Us, although it had fancy wooden checkout counters like a fancy department store. I was working a cash register, but got switched between two registers at some point for some reason now forgotten, perhaps having something to do with a problem making correct change. A customer tried to buy an air rifle from me, but it wasn’t the standard .177-caliber size and so I had to go looking for the proper .695-caliber ammunition pellets for it.

Third Dream, right before waking up: For some reason, we had to move. I helped Dad find and buy a property in Bloomington-Normal that was one standard lot and part of a second with two houses on it, where we moved into one and rented the other out to Marcus Johnston. Both houses were surrounded by trees and little walking paths sort of like a park, and were partially on the side of a hill. Next door was a big Federally funded library for all of Central Illinois, but inside it was very confusingly laid out. I went over to the house Marcus was renting, and found that Chris Yarwood was also visiting him. The two of them were playing a marathon game of Axis and Allies on a long counter-like table with two map boards laid out back to back. Sometimes it looked like both boards were identitcal, with one for Marcus’s positions (he was the Allies) and one for Chris’s (as the Axis), but sometimes it looked like one was the European front and one was the Pacific Front. They each had so many units on the board that they needed to use non-standard pieces and markers to keep track of them. Some of the pieces looked like Orcs wearing circa 1900 Prussian army uniforms. Also, they were using some weird color-coding system for the territories, where a territory that had a large number of units in it or had been heavily fought over became “Red” and got a free industrial complex, while one that had been empty for a long time became “Yellow” and lost its income value. Somehow Marcus’ Germans had conquered the Eastern US and Canada and had a truly massive number of troops there, facing off in a long stalemate against a huge British army in the Western USA. We turned on PBS and watched an episode of that awful “Discovering Psychology” telecourse with Philip Zimbardo (which of course was what was really playing on PBS while I slept), and Zimbardo was quoting the number of neurons in the brain as being 2 Trillion, and I was talking to Marcus about how Carl Sagan’s “The Dragons of Eden” had quoted that number as 400 billion, or roughly the same number as the number of stars in the Milky Way, and that obviously one of them was off by an entire order of magnitude. Then I woke up.

Another bizarre dream thanks to the nicotine patch.

Night of 6/14/2009

I was back at my old college, playing a virtual reality skiing simulation. After doing so well that I survived a simulated avalanche, I decided to try skiing for real, and packed up the appropriate gear and headed out onto the quad. The school's art students had been busy carving sculptures out of the snow, including caricature-like busts, and a mock "monuments to stupid statements" section including a marble statue of NBA star Allen Iverson and some statement he'd apparently made in this dream world that "Hot snow will fall in Chicago before the Bosnians and Serbs will live together peacefully". In this particular dreamscape, I expected to find a ski resort just south of campus (despite the flat-as-a-pancake central Illinois landscape), but instead found a golf course, in which the weather was a bright summer day, as opposed to the late-winter/early spring of the rest of this dreamscape. I kept going south, past some new-construction buildings, and found a four-lane divided interstate highway, which ran through a sort of ravine, the slopes of which still had some just-starting-to-melt snow on them. I trudged up the side of the ravine, skied down, and began climbing back up to the top again. This time, I found that there were some more art-student-carved snow sculptures, this time looking a lot like the screaming souls in the Pstone in the opening sequence of the new FMA series. I began climbing up to the top of the ravine, over the snow sculptures, but as I climbed, the sculptures slowly changed from cartoonish round heads to realistic female bodies made of snow, to female snow bodies with hair...to dead-looking female bodies...to live-looking male bodies dressed in suits and with the faces of various American and European diplomats from the past few decades. Suddenly, I was still climbing over the double line of diplomats, but I was inside a dimly-lit building of some sort. As I clambered over the head of Caspar Weinberger, my knee slipped and bumped his nose, and he started talking, so I reached down and turnd his nose like a radio dial being switched off and he shut up. Then I wasn't clambering over diplomats any more, but crawling/climbing along a line of bookshelves in the California home of ex-President Ronald Reagan. As I climbed along the bookshelves as if I was playing "The Splunk Is Loose", the old game where you climb on furniture and aren't allowed to touch the floor, Nancy Reagan came out and scolded me, except she was played by the actress who plays the Queen on "Kings". She asked if I knew I was in the home of a former US President, and that the Secret Service agents still guarding him would probably not be amused by my sneaking around like this. I told her I was sure the agents were familiar with the game, and looked up at the ceiling, where two Secret Service agents stared down rather sheepishly, since they were clinging to the ceiling like River Tam in that scene from early in "Serenity" and were clearly playing the game as well. And then I woke up. Yes, my dream ended on a punchline.