Sinn Fein (September 2, 2011)
Posted: October 2, 2011 Filed under: F0 (None), P0 (None) 2 CommentsThere’s a Chinese character which, in its traditional (Taiwan) form, looks like “Sinn Fein” written in English. The simplified (Mainland) version of this character looks something like 戕; at any rate, it has the radical 爿. Sinn Fein, someone tells me, is “a revolutionary cell” from China which has infiltrated Taiwan. (The person who tells me this is surprised that I don’t already know.) Someone called Oliver is involved.
Origin of wine glasses (September 1, 2011)
Posted: October 1, 2011 Filed under: F0 (None), P0 (None) Leave a commentI’m climbing up the outside of my house, planning to come in through the window on the second or third floor. I’m holding a wine glass in my right — and in my left hand a glass object which is shaped roughly like a wine glass, with a bowl-shape at one end (or maybe one at each end) and a narrow stem in the middle (but not nearly as narrow as that of a real wine glass). This second object is something that is used to play a musical instrument of some kind. Realizing that you could probably drink wine out of it, too, I think, “That’s probably where wine glasses come from and why they have a stem. Musicians probably used to pour wine into this and drink while they were playing.”
Inspiration:
I own several (four, I think) red wine glasses and drink wine occasionally. I hadn’t had any wine for several days before the dream, though.
Rhino mosque; more sugarcane; no pages in my Bible (August 31, 2011))
Posted: September 30, 2011 Filed under: F0 (None), P0 (None) Leave a comment(Note: I didn’t record this dream until several hours after I woke up, so it shouldn’t really be included in the experiment. I post it only because I found it interesting.)
I’m riding in the back of a car. Up ahead and to the right I can see a very colorful minaret. I point it out to the person sitting next to me (my wife, I think): “Look, can you see the mosque?” “Yeah,” she says. “It’s right here.” She points to the right, and there’s a huge mosque right there which I had somehow missed. The minaret which I had pointed out is just one tiny corner of this huge structure.
We get out of the car and look at the “mosque,” which actually looks more like a very colorful Hindu or Chinese temple than like an actual mosque. The wall facing us is actually a gently slope, not a vertical wall, and it reminds me of a Chinese temple, the part that would normally be decorated with nine dragons. The whole thing is garishly colorful — red, white, and blue — and the entire surface is covered with sculpted shapes which I at first take to be masks (like traditional Korean masks, though the colors are different) but which turn out upon closer inspection to be rhino heads. The whole mosque is covered with dozens, maybe hundreds, of sculpted rhino heads.
To the left of the mosque is a fenced-in area absolutely packed with rhinoceros — real ones. There must be over a thousand of them, packed together like chickens on a factory farm.
We walk over there, and now it seems there are only a few rhinos (six or so), facing us with their backs to a wall, and with a fence separating them from us. There’s some food we can feed the rhinos. I pick up a taro corm, planning to feed it to the rhinos. When I pick it up, the rhinos start making loud grunting sounds which sound a little like “Taro! Taro!” It sounds like a person trying to talk with his mouth taped closed. I say, “Hey, I think they can talk!” I put down the taro and pick up a stick of sugarcane, and they start saying (again, grunting the words like a person with his mouth taped closed) “Sugarcane! Sugarcane!” One rhino in particular is in a paroxysm of excitement over the prospect of getting sugarcane. Mustering all the power he has, he belts out (still muffled), “MORE . . . SUGARCANE!”
One of the rhinos, the one on the far right, is not a rhino anymore but a little girl of about ten or eleven. I try to give her a book of some kind (a copy of the Book of Mormon, I think). She says, “My Bible doesn’t even have any pages in it!” and I say, “I can believe it!” — meaning that she seems really naughty, so of course all the pages would have fallen out of her Bible a long time ago.
Jogging ahead of a truck; “Seven Deadly Heresies” (August 29, 2011)
Posted: September 29, 2011 Filed under: F0 (None), P2 (Moderate) | Tags: books I owned as a Mormon missionary Leave a commentThe elder of my two younger brothers is giving me a ride to a teaching appointment with “Nita” (a high school student whom I tutor). He doesn’t know where she lives and asks where he should take me. “Do you know the sugar factory?” I ask. “No,” he says. “Where is it?” I say, “I don’t really know. I just know it’s near there. Do you know Aquinas Church?” He mentions the name of some other church. “No,” I say, “Aquinas Church.” He doesn’t know it. “Well,” I say, “just go like you’re going home, and I’ll tell you when to turn.”
Now I’m driving (a white pickup truck, I think), and the guy who was giving me a ride (no longer my brother, but some other guy) is jogging ahead of me. I say, “So you want to drive, and I’ll jog for a while?” He hesitates. I say, “Really. That’s a real offer, not a token offer.” He agrees and gets in the truck, and I start to jog. I’m holding two pens (cheap blue-and-white pens that the gas station gives me for free when I refuel), one in each hand. It seems odd to jog that way, so I put the two pens in my breast pocket. That seems odd, too, so I hand them to the guy in the truck.
I’m supposed to jog ahead of the truck, but actually I have no idea which way to go. “Uh, which way would you go to go home?” I ask. He points the way. I jog around a corner and into an area where all the buildings are old and decrepit and the colors are washed-out. It looks very familiar. There’s a sign by the side of the road, but I can’t remember what it says. I pass two old women who are walking on the sidewalk. One of them says something about her son and a hurricane. (I can’t remember exactly what she says, but something like, “My son is doing real work with that hurricane.) After a pause, she says, “Did you hear what I said? I said–” and then repeats the sentence about her son and the hurricane verbatim.
*
There’s a guy sitting in a chair watching himself speaking on TV. On TV, he’s saying, “Another example is Mormonism. Mormons spend all their energy teaching their kids that there are seven deadly sins God doesn’t want you to commit.” I walk up to him while he’s watching this and whisper in his ear, “Actually, Mormons don’t believe in seven sins.” He says nothing, doesn’t even turn to look at me, but stares fixedly at the TV screen. I can tell that he’s deeply embarrassed to realize that what he said on TV was nonsense.
I decide to go get a copy of Bruce R. McConkie’s “The Seven Deadly Heresies” to show to the guy. I want him to see the part where McConkie (a Mormon apostle, now deceased) says, “There is a song or a saying or a proverb or a legend or a tradition or something that speaks of seven deadly sins. I know nothing whatever about these and hope you do not.” That will show him that Mormons don’t believe in seven deadly sins. I look through all my bookcases but can’t seem to find it. I climb up onto the top shelf in the corner of my study (the area where in real life I keep my “strange things” books — alien abduction stories and the like) to look for it. The shelf is much deeper and darker than in real life. I find two pen-sized flashlights on the shelf, and I turn them on and use them to help me look. My wife comes in and says, “Are you looking for that book?” “What book?” I ask. She says, “For ‘Nita’?” (my student). “Yeah,” I say, lying. “Good,” she says. “It’ll be good for her.”
I just can’t seem to find “The Seven Deadly Heresies.” Then I remember that I’m renting some shelf space at the local library and keeping many of my books there. I go to the library and find my shelves, but “The Seven Deadly Heresies” isn’t there. I find a laminated card with a list of all my books and what shelf they are on. I find the place where “Heresies” should be (it’s white, and more like a magazine rack than a bookcase), but there’s just a gray piece of foam rubber. I have to take that to the front desk, and they’ll get the book for me.
There’s a machine by my shelves where I have to put my hand so it can scan my handprint. At first I think I should do this after I go to the front desk and get my book, but actually I should do it before. A woman and a boy keep putting their hands on the scanner, confusing it. (They think this is very funny.) Finally, the machine gets so confused that it asks for a footprint instead of a handprint. I shoo the woman and boy away and let it scan my hand, and it’s okay.
I go to the front desk. The librarian is not young — probably in her mid-fifties — but is slim and reasonably good-looking. She’s wearing a rather low-necked dress which shows cleavage, but it’s strange cleavage: instead of one Y-shape, there are three, as if she has four breasts or her breasts are folded in the middle or something. When I arrive at the front desk, she says, “I saw you looking at me.” I keep glancing at her chest to see the weird cleavage, but she’s pulled the neckline up higher so it doesn’t show anymore.
She gets me the book — a small paperback with a red cover — and says, “That’s $798.” I’m incredulous. “798? For one book? My book?” She checks the computer. “Oh, sorry. $17.” I say, “That’s much better. 差很多.”
After I’ve taken the book home, I remember that I was just going to copy the relevant page to give to the guy, but I forgot to use the copy machine at the library. Well, I can just scan it using the computer.
Inspiration:
Resident Evil: Extinction was on TV the night before the dream. The heroine carries two knives, one in each hand, like my pens in the dream. The dilapidated buildings and washed-out colors also seem to be from that movie.
Hurricane Irene was in the news the day before the dream, as was a typhoon which was coming to Taiwan.
I recently reorganized my books, but so far I haven’t had any trouble finding things.
“The Seven Deadly Heresies” is actually a speech, not a book. However, I once owned a very small paperback containing that and “The Purifying Power of Gethsemane,” another of Elder McConkie’s speeches. I bought this book when I was in Utah, and I gave it away nine or ten years ago. I don’t remember whether or not the cover was red.
On the evening of the 27th, my wife and I went to a secondhand bookstore which was much more expensive than the one we usually go to. They offered a book for over $200, when she had bought something similar for just $40 at the other shop. She was talking about this the night before the dream.
The two pen-sized flashlights in the dream are the ones I keep by my bedside in case I need them for recording dreams.
Comic book; Adam’s oldest privilege; tiny gliders; naked on the stairs; coffee and stale eggs (August 28, 2011)
Posted: September 28, 2011 Filed under: F0 (None), P0 (None) | Tags: tiny wet sugar gliders Leave a commentIn a big room, a young preacher is sitting by the fireplace preaching to someone. I come in, sit near him, and start reading a comic book. It’s an Asian-style comic book, with all the drawings done in an overly cutesy way. There’s a lot of pink and flesh-color in the pictures, so that at first glance it looks like a pornographic comic book full of naked bodies. It’s not, though; just a lot of cute pink people and animals. I wonder for a second whether it would be rude to sit there and read a comic book while the preacher is preaching, but I decide it’s okay.
I say something about “Adam’s oldest privilege” and see an image of Adam (as in Adam and Eve) standing on a sort of balcony at the top of a huge waterfall. He’s naked and is urinating off the cliff into the water below (this is his “oldest privilege”). The view pans downstream rapidly to where someone is using the water Adam urinated in to baptize a child. (This last part is shown in a cartoonish way, and the pictures may be from the comic book I am reading.)
*
There are several connected apartment blocks, each with its own lobby and stairs. One of them (mine?) is pretty classy and has nice architecture and decor. The next one over is simple and cheap, and the lobby (as someone says) “hardly even looks like a lobby!”
I’m walking up the stairs — the classy ones — and a woman with dark hair and a green evening gown is coming up the stairs behind me. “Yes, really classy!” she says in a sarcastic voice. (The reason for her sarcasm is that I’m walking up the stairs buck-naked, and walking around naked, even in your own home, is rather low-bred.) I stop, turn around, grab her, and kiss her on the mouth. She’s stunned, but otherwise doesn’t react at all. She seems neither angry nor aroused. The kiss doesn’t seem to be doing anything for either of us, so I stop and release her. “You didn’t have to do that,” she says.
*
There’s a plastic bag on our dining room table containing two cups of coffee (paper cups with plastic lids) and something else (I don’t notice what). I think my wife put it there. We’re both getting ready to leave. She goes to the school where she teaches, and I go to a shop just next door to buy lunch for the two of us. I order something, and I give the bag with the coffee to the waitresses.
Later, I run into my wife and find that she still hasn’t gone to work. I tell her to hurry up, or she’ll be late. She tells me that when I buy lunch I don’t need to buy drinks because she already got coffee. Realizing that she must mean the coffee I just gave to the waitresses, I think, “I’ll just buy the same kind of coffee, and she’ll never know the difference.” I don’t remember what kind it was, though, so I go back to the shop. It’s open, but all the staff are in the next room sleeping. I rummage through their trash can looking for empty coffee cups. I find many different cups, all different kinds, so I’m still not sure what kind I should buy to replace the ones I gave away.
Later, I run into my wife again, and she still hasn’t gone to work. She must be very late by now. “Where’s the coffee and the stale eggs?” she asks me. (I guess “stale eggs” were the other thing that was in the bag.) Pretending to be surprised, I say, “Oh! I forgot them at the shop! Well, we can buy new ones.” She suddenly seems to be near tears and says, “Why can’t we just go to Yilan? When I didn’t go to [school name], couldn’t you figure out that I wanted to go to Yilan? You can hold [something] there. I think it’s not bad.” I’m caught off guard by this, and I say, “I had no idea you wanted to go to Yilan. Of course we can go. You can just ask, you know….”
*
I’m on a sort of narrow bridge or balcony. One on side is a handrail, and beyond that, a waterfall. On the other side is a steep wall with stairs coming down it. My father and I are on the bridge, and he’s badgering me about something. Someone says, “Why don’t you stand up to him?” I do. I tell him three things: “First, [. . .]. Second, [. . .]. Third, why don’t you shut the [expletive] up?”
At this point, someone who is wearing a vaguely police-like uniform comes down the stairs to the bridge. He wants to fix something about the water. His arrival awkwardly interrupts our confrontation.
*
Soup (one of our 11 sugar gliders) has two new babies — extremely tiny ones, smaller even than real joeys just out of the pouch. “Lucky thirteen,” I say. We go to a store, and one of the joeys escapes and runs under one of the food shelves. It try to catch it, but as soon as it comes out from under one shelf, it runs under another. Then it runs under a door labeled “Employees Only.” I pound on the door as hard as I can, but it doesn’t make much of a sound, and I’m sure no one inside can hear me. Then I notice that the door is ajar, so I just go in. There is a shallow puddle on the floor, and a very wet joey is spinning around and around in it; I can’t tell if it’s playing or struggling for breath. I take it out and try to dry it off with my shirt. “Are you okay?” I say. “Are you breathing?” I hold the joey up to my ear and hear hoarse, raspy breathing. Yes, it’s breathing. It’s okay.
Later, I’m walking on a sort of bridge or balcony, and along the side of the main walkway is a series of boxlike square depressions. There are several sugar gliders in two of them. “Are they ours?” I ask. “Yes, they’re ours,” my wife says. I look through the contents of each box to see how many gliders are in there. I find a few which turn out not to be whole gliders but just heads. “No, these are just heads,” I say, and casually toss the glider heads off the bridge. There are several complete gliders, too, though, including normal-sized ones and some very very small ones. I find Seven (the very aggressive alpha male of one of our glider colonies), and he sinks his teeth into my hand and bites long and hard. I don’t react at all.
I put the joey I rescued from the puddle with Seven, but then I think twice. “What if it’s not his? Let me put it with Soup.” I put the joey in the other box, where Soup is. There’s a brief sound of gliders fighting, and then silence. I look in the box and see that Soup and Geography (Soup’s adult son) are both dead. Their bodies have been cut into many pieces — head, tail, two pieces of torso. The cuts are very neat, and there is no blood. The tiny joey is nowhere to be seen, but I assume it to be dead as well. I say, “They’re all dead! I’m so sorry!” My wife looks and then turns away. “Oh, you didn’t have to let me see that!” she says. “I didn’t want you to see it,” I say. “I was just telling you.” I’m sobbing now, but it feels forced and fake. “They’re all dead! It’s all my fault!” I keep repeating, but I’m saying it mostly just because it seems like what I ought to say.
At this point I wake up.
Inspiration:
The night before the dream, we went to a huge secondhand bookstore in Taichung. Wandering through it, I found a section with shelves and shelves of cutesy Asian-style comic books.
After visiting the bookstore, we had dinner at an all-you-can-eat steak place. My wife recommended one of the side dishes, which was an egg prepared in a strange way; I wasn’t interested. (Is that where the “stale eggs” came from?)
During that same trip to Taichung, we passed an apartment building which was attractively designed, making it a bit of an oddity in Taiwan. My wife pointed it out to me, and I said, “You don’t see many buildings with nice architecture like that in Taiwan.”
My wife and I both work in the mornings and then have a long lunch break at home together before our afternoon classes. I usually buy lunch and drinks on my way home, but sometimes she’ll tell me I don’t need to buy a drink for her because she already has one.
My wife recently mentioned that one of her students had gone on a vacation to Yilan (a city in eastern Taiwan).
I raise mealworms for my gliders to eat, and I keep them in three plastic boxes — one for larvae, one for pupae, and one for adult beetles. Periodically I sort through the beetle box and pick out all the dead beetles and beetle parts. The way I sorted through the gliders and tossed out the heads in the dream reminds me of the way I sort through the beetles.
Train accident; Dooby Blue; green newspaper (August 21, 2011)
Posted: September 21, 2011 Filed under: F2 (Moderate), P1 (Weak) Leave a commentTwo trains are going across a railroad crossing at the same time, on different tracks and moving in opposite directions. They are moving perpendicular to the road. However, the driver of one of the cars on the road mistakenly thinks the trains are going parallel to the road, or maybe even on the road. The driver panics, speeds up, and causes an accident which “blows out all the glass in the glass factory” (as a voice puts it).
It seems that another reason for the driver’s panic is that he believes his daughter is about to be raped and wants to hurry to stop it.
*
I say, “Laopo, thanks. Call Dooby Blue.”
*
A woman is sitting at a table, wearing a white dress with wide lacy shoulder straps. One of the straps slips a little.
*
I buy a green newspaper. I tell my wife that I bought it only because she mentioned it. I wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise.
Inspiration:
“Laopo, thanks. Call Dooby Blue.” — Laopo is the way a man addresses his wife in Chinese (it’s not common to call your spouse by name). Dooby Blue rhymes with Ruby Wu, one of my colleagues. For several days leading up to the dream, I had been reminding my wife to call Ms. Wu, who wanted to talk to her about something.
In Taiwan, blue and green refer to political coalitions, and ordinarily a “green newspaper” would mean a paper which leans left on domestic issues and which opposes closer ties with China. In the dream, though, the newspaper was actually green in color.
Fulfillment:
Immediately after the dream, less than an hour after waking up, there was a report of an incident at a railroad crossing on the news on TV: a man committed suicide by walking out in front of a train. (The man was in the army, but had previously been in prison on drug charges. His commanding officer accused him of being involved with drugs again, but the man denied it.) The match with the dream isn’t very precise, but I’m counting it as moderately precognitive because it happened so soon after the dream.
*
On September 17, my wife asked me to pick up a copy of the China Post, the more politically “blue” of Taiwan’s two main English-language newspapers, which she needed for a class. I said it would be no problem, that I could pick up a Post at any convenience store. However, when I tried to actually buy it, I found that every convenience store I tried sold only one English-language paper: the “green” Taipei Times. Between the two of us, my wife and I tried over 30 stores before we finally found one that carried the Post. I had never noticed before how overwhelmingly “green” convenience-store newsstands were, and wouldn’t have noticed it if my wife hadn’t asked for the blue paper.
Pyramid and human sacrifice; orange tree ambigrams (August 17, 2011))
Posted: September 17, 2011 Filed under: F0 (None), P1 (Weak) Leave a commentI’m on an enormous terraced pyramid, like a ziggurat or an Aztec temple, but bigger and more complex. Many smaller buildings and rooms are built into the pyramid; in fact, the pyramid seems almost more like an artificial mountain on which many buildings have been erected than like a building in its own right. Someone explains to me that on this pyramid they perform “animal sacrifice, with the occasional human sacrifice thrown in” (I think: “Is that legal?”).
Some people, I am given to understand, go voluntarily to be sacrificial victims. They want to see a human sacrifice so badly — even if they themselves are the ones being sacrificed!
Looking lower down on the pyramid, I see a small shed-like building with windows. A splash of blood suddenly appears on the window facing me, and I realize that someone is performing a sacrifice in there. A man walks out of shed carrying a maul-like weapon — a long pole with a heavy lump of lead at the end. This, I understand, he uses to bash out the brains of his victims.
I need to go now! I leap down the stairs of the pyramid, covering an amazing distance with each step, as if in low gravity. At the bottom of the pyramid is a road (an ordinary modern-style road, with a dashed yellow line between the lanes and everything), and on the other side of the road is some kind of hotel or resort. I make it to the road and think, “I’m safe now. He can’t chase me off pyramid property.”
*
I’m preparing a room for guests. It has pale wood floors. There’s something unusual about the light switch. I put my shoes on the floor in the room. I hope my guests can accept the room.
*
One of my students (an executive at a manufacturing company) wrote an article for homework. I ask him to read it to the class, but he refuses. I say, “Uh… O-K,” and think “Is it too personal, or what?”
*
I’m looking at a scene in a forest. There is a fallen tree which, from my point of view, extends from left to right. On the left is a deer. On the right is another animal, which I think of verbally as a “squirrel” but which actually looks more like a Lego monkey (the kind that used to come with pirate-themed Lego sets, and still does for all I know).
(In what follows, I’ll just refer to them as “the monkey” and “the deer.” The words which they say, and which are written on the tree, are not exact. They were not clearly defined in the dream, but I got the gist.)
“This is not a tree deer can use,” says the monkey. “Why?” says the deer, surprised. The monkey rolls the trunk 180 degrees, displaying the other side. Written on the side of the trunk is “[company name] orange tree.” As he does this, the monkey says triumphantly, “Because it’s a [company name] orange tree!”
The monkey continues: “If you need a tree –” (the trunk now reads “you need a tree”) “– you can’t have a tree!” The deer looks very surprised and says, “What?” The monkey then flips the tree over, so that the words “you need a tree” are now upside down. Upside down, they read “you can’t have a tree”; the text turns out to be an ambigram. Now the deer understands, and thinks the monkey is frightfully clever.
The monkey continues: “If you need more trees –” (these words now appear on the trunk) “– I give you fewer trees!” Again the deer looks surprised and says, “What?!?!” and again the monkey flips the tree over. Again, it turns out to have been an ambigram: “you need more trees” reads “I give you fewer trees” when turned upside down.
The monkey is obviously very proud of his cleverness and is having a lot of fun shocking the easily-shocked deer. The deer realizes that he is being made a fool of but takes it good-naturedly. He just can’t believe how clever the monkey is.
Inspiration:
On August 2 we watched the movie Apocalypto, which is ostensibly about the Maya but which features Aztec-style human sacrifices performed on a terraced pyramid.
The evening before the dream, I was reading The English in the West Indies by James Anthony Froude. In the part I read that night, Froude commented rather extensively on the orange trees in Jamaica (hence the orange tree in the dream). He also talked about the possibility of introducing bears into Jamaica so that the English would have something to hunt; the bears, he said, would eat roots and berries “with the occasional black pickaninny as a special delicacy” (hence “animal sacrifice, with the occasional human sacrifice thrown in”).
Ambigrams have been a hobby of mine, but I haven’t made any new ones in several months.
Two-genius limit; the law failed them; The Buddha is in __ (August 15, 2011))
Posted: September 15, 2011 Filed under: F0 (None), P1 (Weak) Leave a commentThere can only be two geniuses at a time in any field. If more than one of your contemporaries is better than you, then you’re not a genius. This statement is accompanied by an image of someone (me?) rinsing out his mouth with water and spitting it out in the sink. The first time he spits, there is a lot of blood (or maybe some other reddish or brownish liquid) in the water; the second time, there’s just a little; the third time, it’s just water.
*
Voice: “… Others trusted the law itself to help them, but the law failed them by selfishly limiting the number of lawyers.” (Another example was mentioned before these “others,” but I’ve forgotten it.)
*
Several Indian (Hindu, not American) girls are underlining sentences in a book and repeating them again and again to memorize them. They use many different colored pens for the underlining. All of the sentences they are memorizing have the form “The ___ is ___.”
Another person, an Indian man, is reading some kind of scriptures aloud. He reads, “The Buddha is in [a Sanskrit-sounding word].”
Thinking that the girls can learn something from this man’s example, I say excitedly, “See that? The Buddha is in [word]! Do you ever see anyone underlining that and repeating it many times? And yet he remembers it easily!”
Inspiration
On August 14, the night before the dream, I watched the Bollywood film Three Idiots. Much of the film revolves around students at an engineering college; most of them are used to blindly “learning” everything by rote memorization, but one of the main characters challenges that method and suggests other ways of learning which are more meaningful. Another of the main characters is very religious and superstitious and is always praying to various gods to help him do well on exams. One of the professors urges the students to be super-competitive. To demonstrate the importance of being first, he asks if anyone knows the name of the second man to set foot on the moon, and of course no one does. Many elements of the dream — the Indian students, the rote memorization and the challenge to it, and the two-genius limit — seem to have come from this movie.
When my wife is studying, she often underlines in many different colors.
Several days before the dream (August 4 and perhaps a day or two before and after) I was listening to the song “I Fought The Law” by the Crickets.
Baby windows; carving a cactus (August 14, 2011)
Posted: September 14, 2011 Filed under: F0 (None), P0 (None) Leave a commentI’m teaching an advanced English class at a manufacturing company. The class consists of 20-some male executives and one woman from HR. (This is a class I teach in real life.)
The woman raises her hand and asks a question, but it has nothing to do with English. She explains that if you have a browser window open on your computer, and you click on something that opens a new “baby window” (by which she means a window which is not maximized), you can’t access their company website in the “baby window.” Why, she wants to know, are the “baby windows” different?
I say, “Who coded the HTML for your company website? Did you?” No one understands what I’m talking about. I go to the whiteboard and prepare to write “<html [a lot of stuff]>” on the board, giving them some stuff they can add to that tag to fix the problem. I know they won’t understand at all, but they’ll be impressed that I, an English teacher, know so much about computers.
I reconsider. Instead of writing on the board, I ask, “Does everyone’s computer do this?” Yes, they assure me, they all get “baby windows” which are different from the original window.
I check one of the students’ laptops. The “baby window” is just an ordinary window that isn’t maximized. It works just fine. I type the word “news” into the address bar of the “baby window,” expecting autocomplete to give me the address of a news website that I can select. There’s no autocomplete, but a news site comes up in the window anyway.
To explain this to the students, I will have to teach them the word smash, both as a noun and as a verb. I should probably also talk about the adjective form smashing, and maybe I can mention the Smashing Pumpkins in passing. It occurs to me, though, that I’m not totally sure what smashing means. Does it mean “cool” or “good-looking” or something like that?
*
I’m receiving step-by-step instructions (in the form of images accompanied by a voice-over) on how to cut a cactus into a house. Or maybe they are instructions on how to cut it into a city, or into a telephone. It’s not really clear.
Sketch from my dream notebook
The last step is: “Then destroy the city” (image of someone stepping down hard on an anthill) “and everyone will find their way to the new one.” By “the new one,” they mean the one you just made from a cactus.
Inspiration:
I’ve been reading my brother Luther’s new blog, which often deals with programming-related topics. I myself don’t know much about computers, though I’m reasonably competent in HTML and BASIC and can do a bit of C and JavaScript if I absolutely have to.
My students often ask off-topic questions which have nothing to do with English — science, history, religion, whatever. Not usually computer stuff, though.
Fulfillment:
On August 14, the day after the dream, I checked Google+ and saw that my brother had posted a link the day before about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This seems related to the “Then destroy the city” instruction. August 6 and 9 were the anniversaries of the two bombings, but I don’t remember reading or hearing anything about that prior to the dream.
Jogging on a table; sailboat and alligators (August 13, 2011)
Posted: September 13, 2011 Filed under: F0 (None), P0 (None) Leave a commentThere’s a big table — similar to what you would see in a corporate boardroom, but bigger, and people are sitting around it. I’m on top of the table, jogging laps. Some people have papers, cups of coffee, etc. on the table, and I try my best to avoid stepping on anything as I jog. I’m trying to decide whether it would be better to run in circles around the perimeter of the table, or to run back and forth along its length, slowly working my way down its breadth.
The table is also a pool, somehow, and jogging is also swimming. I notice that jogging on the table is a lot more comfortable than jogging on the ground. When I run on the ground, my knees and ankles often hurt, but on the table I feel fine. I’ve never been a jogger before, but with this discovery I think, “Hey, I can start a regimen!”
The table’s not so big now. I have to turn around a lot, and I can tell I’m getting in people’s way, so I go out to jog/swim elsewhere. I notice that, come to think of it, my ankles do hurt after all, and my legs are sore. Maybe it’s because my shoes don’t fit properly.
No sooner have I gone out than I hear someone calling me on the intercom: “William… William! … William!!!” (The tone of voice is similar to a scene in the Mormon temple ceremony where God calls Adam: “Adam… Adam! … Adam!! Where art thou?”) I say, “What?” in a loud, impatient voice. The intercom says, “Go to class.” In the dream, I’m apparently a student, not a teacher, and I’m annoyed at being called to class like this. I had thought I would have a little more freedom with my schedule.
Though I’m annoyed, I obey. I go back to the classroom and sit in the front row. Someone brings a small boy over to me and says, “This boy, [name], found this under your desk — a garnet.” (I don’t remember the boy’s name.) The boy hands me an irregularly shaped dark-orange stone. I say, “Thanks, you keep it,” and feel even more annoyed. “They called me back for this?” I think.
*
Two little girls, maybe seven to nine years of age, are sitting in the row behind me in the classroom. They are writing an English assignment, and one of the girls corrects the others’ grammar. (Her mistake was using the wrong preposition, something like writing “I have great respect to him” rather than “for him.”) The girl who made the mistake objects to being corrected and insists, “But my mom says…!” I realize, with a feeling of great surprise, that the mother she is referring to is my wife, and that this girl is my daughter! (In real life I have no children.)
*
I’m on a sailboat with someone — the younger of my two younger brothers, I think. Although I very definitely think of it as a sailboat, and its hull is shaped like that of a sailboat, I’m not sure if it actually has a mast or sails. It has a very very long oar, and also four “normal” oars in oarlocks, but those four oars seem to be pointing the wrong way. I stand at the back of the boat like a gondolier and use the one very long oar to maneuver the craft. I have to pull it out of the very crowded boatyard where it was moored, and I think it will be difficult, but the boat turns out to be very light and extremely easy to maneuver. I successfully navigate out of the boatyard and into the open ocean.
My brother is sort of running behind the boat — like he’s water-skiing, but he’s running — like a basilisk lizard, I guess. I’m not sure whether or not there’s a cable connecting him to the boat. I keep telling him to get in the boat, but he doesn’t.
The boat goes very fast and smoothly, and before long we’ve gone all the way to the other shore of the ocean — the Atlantic shore (we had started in the Pacific). (I know that doesn’t make sense. It’s a dream, okay?) I tell my brother, “Get in quick! This side’s dangerous!” We’re at the beach now, and the water’s very clear and shallow. I look in the water expecting to see sharks, but instead I see that it’s just packed with an impossible number of little black baby alligators. They’re all just floating motionless in the water, eyes on us. My brother (who I think is on the beach now, not running behind the boat) puts his hand in the water, and a few tiny alligators (minnow-sized, smaller even than the others, which are the size of real-world baby alligators) latch onto it. They’re so small that their jaws can’t do any real damage.
Inspiration:
On August 12, the evening before the dream, I taught an English conversation class on the topic of sports, and we discussed running and swimming, among other things. I also taught the term “pool table” to a student who wanted to know how to talk about billiards in English and said that the game was called “pool, just like ‘swimming pool.'” This may be where the idea of running — and somehow also swimming — on a table came from.
Also in that class, I explained that the ball-hitting implement used in ping-pong is called a paddle, not a racket, and mentioned that the word paddle could also be used to refer to an oar. I drew pictures of a tennis racket, a ping-pong paddle, and a ship’s oar on the whiteboard.
As mentioned above, the “William… William!… William!!” is a reference to the Mormon temple ceremony, in which I have participated in numerous times, but not at all recently. (The ceremony is open only to church members in good standing, which I haven’t been since February 2002.)
Experiments in Time 