The Case For: Excellent way to transport dampness to new locations.
The Case Against: Freezing up with the memory that they’re animals and wondering what you should feel about this for upwards of twenty minutes instead of just wiping the F-R-O-G jam off the counter.
That One Dream
The Case For: It’s amazing how well you did keeping the refrigerator and the oven balanced on such precarious 18-inch-long flimsy sticks of woods despite all the people running around and threatening to knock it over or do some other mayhem!
The Case Against: Offers you no insight into how to balance your fridge or oven even three inches off the floor, let alone eighteen inches.
I had an extremely detailed dream in which Albert Einstein has this suspiciously Donald Duck-like struggle with a couple squirrels who are messing around with his model train set, but it worked out well in the end because two squirrels on parallel trains moving slightly differently gives him the key insight to developing special relativity. So I’ve got my spec script all plotted out for the Hysteria! reboot that I assume they’re working on now.
(I have never seen Hysteria!. I remember hearing on Usenet in the 90s that it was an unspeakably awful show. But Usenet in the 90s also said Futurama was an unspeakably awful show. Also Animaniacs after the first 13 episodes. Also the monorail episode of The Simpsons. Also The Wacky World of Tex Avery. So while we called a lot of things wrong, it’s not like we were always mistaken.)
I was slow to wake this morning because I was in the middle of a dream when the alarm went off. In the dream, I was explaining some important things about the constitution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 17th century to someone who had made an uninformed joke about the University of Kraków. Anyway, I just had to finish up a couple quick thoughts about the functioning of the Liberum Veto before I could turn the alarm off and join the waking world so I’m sorry to my love for unintended wakings-up.
[ Who are all these people who don’t know who I am by now? ]
Just in case you didn’t already know who I was, please consider this: yesterday I was not able to wake up right away when the alarm went off. This because in the dream I was having, I was having a dental X-ray taken, and I knew if I moved to turn the alarm off I would mess up the pictures. So I may have woken my dear spouse (I did) but I did not force my dream-land dentist to waste film or X-rays.
But I’ve been going through a couple nights of extremely complicated dreams in which I’m not sure which of the two dorm rooms with the exact same number I’m supposed to be in, because the one I started with is like a whole suite with several rooms and a decent kitchen and everything, and the other is a hotel room without a comforter on the bed, and I keep trying to work out if I shouldn’t be in the less good one because I guess I can’t believe I would get the good one just by luck alone. All I’m really sure is when I walk out of the building onto the lawn trying to find the bathroom it’s because I need to wake up and pee. Please send someone to affix a new number or maybe an -A to one of the room numbers so I know where I’m supposed to be. Or whoever has the other room with the same number. We can fight it out or something. I need somewhere to keep my dream stuff, and can’t keep using the spare bedroom here.
I have realized that when I have a dream about trying to find a bathroom, it’s because I should wake up and apply the bathroom that we have. Straightforward enough.
What I don’t know how to parse is dreaming that it was very important I wash my hands because I was about to eat a banana. I don’t make a habit of not washing my hands; I’ve been known to wash my hands because I felt like I had got them a little too dry after washing them in the first place. But if I have choose something to eat without washing my hands? A banana has a lot of appeal.
I don’t know why it was important that my night be spent being shown untrue trivia about Fran Drescher’s beloved 90s sitcom The Nanny, but there we are. I would like to bring you some of this trivia, but all I remember is “The premise developed very slowly: she [ I assume Fran Drescher ] didn’t even become The Nanny until Season 14”.
I know not every dream will be some bonkers adventure with John Larroquette and the Muppets. Or that it will turn out I spelled “John Larroquette” right on the first try, considering I have spelled Cincinnati wrong so many times my spell checker will not even flag the wrong version anymore. Nor will they all involve high-ranking nudists barging through or even necessarily being chased by something so frightening that I cry out in a haunting, half-paralyzed voice that wakes my love. But.
Last night? I dreamed that I noticed I had more money than I expected in my savings account, and since I was all caught up on bills, I transferred a thousand dollars over to my IRA. Did this go wrong in some way? No, not at all. It took like three steps, and the computer responded “right”, and all was done. It wasn’t even a frustration or futility dream. It was just a dream about telling a computer to move one number to a different column and succeeding.
I hate to complain to the Commissioner of Dreams, especially since I need most of my workdays to fight with Nintendo about getting them to fix my Switch, but this? This is just … there is nothing dream-appropriate about that.
I had been figuring to continue my talk about alarming things. I mean alarming to me. And particularly about things alarming to a wakeful mind that’s as rational as you get around here. Then I went and slept. If we accept that dreams can be warnings of what we must face, then I’m up for something big soon.
For this dream alarm to make any sense at all I should tell you we haven’t met our new neighbors. All we know about them is that they maybe exist. We’re not sure. The house next door is a rental. Sometimes we’ve had great neighbors. Like the ones who were pointing out the adorably silly look of this kitten’s tail, and said someday they’d bring us a pie from work. Those were great neighbors, everything you could hope for. They never even did bring us pie and that’s fine. We were happy to be thought worthy of pie delivery.
But that was a long time ago, and different renters have come in, and left, a couple times over. We’re sure that the last set of renters left. We noticed them less and less, then we noticed we didn’t notice them at all, and that’s how someone leaves, right? We’re not completely sure there’s new ones there, though. The evidence for is that someone goes in and leaves lights on, and there’s sometimes a car in the driveway at some implausible hour like 4 am. The evidence against is there’s not a curtain in the entire building and we dont see furniture either. But someone’s gone raking leaves there. It has to be at least someone who knows what they want out of the place. The point is that I don’t know our neighbors, if we have them. Any interactions we’d have with them would be our first, as far as I know.
So the dream scenario starts with me in the dining room, puttering away on the computer, probably writing this essay only even later. And then looking out the back to see that something’s knocked over part of the fence. This would be very annoying to have to deal with, so I did not. At least not until I looked again later and saw the whole fence was gone. That would be a problem I couldn’t ignore, which is why I did. And before you get all smug about how you’d be more active about this let me point out that you’re a lying liar who’s lying to yourself, by whom I mean me. If someone came in and stole your backyard fence you’d do anything to not deal with that too.
Which is fine except that a couple minutes later, I saw that the neighbor’s house was gone. More, all the houses down the block were gone, replaced with what looked like the clubhouse for one of those golf courses they make retirement communities out of these days. This annoyed me since we have some pleasantly old houses in the neighborhood, getting on a hundred years now, and they might be utterly ordinary Dutch Colonial things but there’s value in having an ordinary neighborhood in kind-of respectable shape. Plus it’s ridiculous to put in a golf clubhouse without a golf course. But on most of what had been the neighbors’ driveway was now a pool.
Recounting this makes me realize that if the neighbors’ driveway had been replaced with a pool, then there’d be no good place to put the ladder for when I change the storm windows out for screens in spring. Our houses are close together and we use the neighbor’s driveway under the well-established legal principle of “I dunno, we’ll do this in the middle of the afternoon when they’re probably at work, if they exist”. That I was not worrying about how to take the storm windows down should have warned me that I was not in my rational mind. Whatever conclusions you draw about me, as a person, from knowing that self-assessment, are correct.
Anyway I was willing to put up with the neighborhood going missing and the fence being stolen, especially with the nice fountains spraying out of the ponds. This until I felt the water spraying on my back. Now the walls of our dining room were gone and I had to say something. I knew that our neighbor was responsible, somehow, and also knew who our neighbor was, and got a bit shout-y. The neighbor tried to point out that he’d left many of the walls in our house intact. Plus now we had the benefits of a covered patio for our dining room, which didn’t satisfy me because I was thinking of the heating bill. “Where do you get the nerve to STEAL our BUILDING WALLS”, I shouted. As I remember I put in the word “building” in order to make clear I was not this upset about the fence going missing, in case someone would mistake a wooden fence for a wall. And I wanted “building’s” but couldn’t make that work.
Also, and this is a real thing that really happened for real, in reality, I was yelling loudly enough in my dream that I was also saying this in real life, waking up my love. After listening a while to find out where this was going, my love woke me up. This was disorienting, and then I realized: oh, yes. Realizing that all this was a dream answered most of my questions about the situation I was in.
Anyway, if all this is a harbinger of the relationship we’re to have with our neighbors, if and when they exist, I think we must say they are very alarming neighbors indeed. I shall have to insist on actual pie delivery before they swipe any walls.
I just wanted people to know that yes, I saw today’s Mary Worth. And yes, it is that wonderful. It is not quite so wonderful as to make me jump the comic in its queue. I expect Sunday to share what’s going on in The Phantom, weekdays continuity. But today’s was a wonderful Mary Worth and it might be a shame to let it just sit there an extra month without attention. When I next do a proper recap of the plot of Mary Worth it should be at this link.
What’s happening is that Estelle, rebounding from being taken by an online romance scam, has been dating Wilbur Weston, Chartersone’s leading sandwich enthusiast. Wilbur is not even slightly over his ex-girlfriend Iris. But Estelle and Wilbur set up a double date with Iris and her new, young, handsome, financially successful boyfriend Zak. Wilbur prepared for this by combing his hair and getting too drunk to function. Estelle took him on the double date anyway, because what could she have done? Apologized that Wilbur wasn’t up to this tonight and reschedule for “sometime later”?
Anyway, after the fiasco, the disaster, and the embarrassment, she went home and had this dream about what it might be like to have a life with Wilbur.
I can barely exaggerate how wonderful the comics snark community has found this. The first panel, the one-eyed cat Libby peering over a sleeping Estelle, is nice enough. But that second panel? That’s … wow. That’s … you know, that sure looks like it’s a riff on something but I can’t place what it is. If you have any ideas, please let me know. Trying to think of what is driving me … oh, about two-thirds as crazy as you might think. It’s not that urgent.
I have seen in some comment threads people snarking at how Estelle, a retiree and comfortably past the age of menopause, could be having a nightmare of having four children. These commenters are correct: there is no logical way that Estelle could have children with Wilbur, and I hope that before the story is out we shall see Estelle file a Report of Factual Inaccuracy or Inconsistency with the Bureau of Dream Management. (And to step my snark back a bit, my love has several times woken up from a dream upon realizing that details in it did not make logical sense. So, dreams, you know? What the heck?)
Anyway, I don’t know how long this dream sequence will last. It’s only on its second day now. If it could keep giving like this, then we’d have to say it could not go on too long. But there’ll probably be a limit, and we won’t see Wilbur’s Four Children again. On the other hand, Popeye’s nephews started out as a dream-story quartet of children and they were eventually promoted into real-cousinhood. Maybe someday we’ll have people asking the difference between Welber, Walber, Wulber, and Woolber.
So it was an ordinary enough dream. Mundane, even. I’d had a long time after work going around to different Target-class stores buying things like you sometimes need but don’t ever find interesting. And then I got home, where I was living with my parents, in the house that was more or less my father’s parents’ home only with way more hills and religious statuary than it ever had. There, I was met by my father, who was practically rocking on his feet and giggling at how wrong I was in thinking I was going inside and unpacking. Well, why not? I finally got out of him that we had to go off and see someone, and, all right. That’s a thing that happens. But I insisted I needed, at least, to go to the bathroom first and my father was insisting no, no time for that, but he wouldn’t tell me who it was we were going to meet.
Anyway, if I know three things, then one of those things is that if I dream that I have to go to the bathroom then I should wake up and go to the bathroom. And by then it was late enough in the morning it wasn’t really worth going back to bed to see how things turned out. And yet the fire of curiosity has been lit.
So. Would whoever it was that it was so all-fired important my parents and I go off and meet the other dream-morning please drop me a comment, and let me know who you are, and what it was we had to see you about? Thank you for your consideration.
But apparently there’s going to be some incident deep in the midst of winter where it’s one of those nasty snowy days. Also, apparently I’m going to have one of those cars that looks like an SUV but is small enough to tell yourself you’re not just buying an SUV. The snow, of course, will need to be dusted off in order to safely drive and I’m one of those people who does dust off the top of the car even when it’s deep into winter when everybody’s given up. The inconvenient thing was that the car was parked in the living room. No problem that the snow off the car was getting dusted onto the floor, which by the way is wood and really shouldn’t have that much snow on it for that long. But I was thinking how annoying it would be getting the car back into this great parking spot in the living room right between the bookshelf and the little tower we have with the record player and satellite TV receiver and all that. It’s a pretty tight spot, even for a small car. Plus on the TV was one of those morning news-chat shows where you get a little bit about what to dread today, and then a human-interest feature about some guy in Alaska who’s having trouble getting a permit for some ridiculous thing for some ridiculous reason, and then they show you how to make an omelette. This means something, but I have got no idea what.
But who am I to dispute clear messages from the dream world? Anyway apparently sometime in the near future I’m going to be stuck driving from building to building across the west side of town looking frantically for the one place that has the laundry chute to the basement. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and of course I have checked. The laundry chute to the basement is still in the bathroom. Well, and the other half is in the basement. I guess there’s more parts between the two, but they’re not ordinarily accessible. I shouldn’t have to go to the west side of town for this. If I find myself there I should bring my dirty clothes back home and bring them upstairs so I can toss them down to the basement efficiently.
Sure, according to the clear directions of my dream, it was going to be one of those frustrating days where I duck into the used-book-store for a morning coffee and the chance to smell decomposing paperbacks. And just stepping in I’d see that now it was 7 am, like an hour earlier than it could possibly be and that I’d already be late for work, and every minute that I spend there I’m a half-hour later although every clock moves backwards three minutes, the way you’d expect. Well, before you know it, I’m up on the roof of the old church, balancing everything I have just barely as I sit down to some serious writing. And then there’s a bunch of crows on the next roof glaring at me. Plus there’s this ostrich who keeps projecting her head out from the building and through the cupola windows to come just close enough that I think she’s going to snap at my hand. But the worst part is that in the dream I was putting on paper exactly the letter needed to reconnect with that estranged friend. And when I woke up I couldn’t think of a single word I had written. But at least I had it right for a little bit.
Half (a subchannel of the first Half and not, I’m like 40% sure, my subconscious working up a joke about half-and-half, but I’m going to leave that idea out there because it makes a list like this seem that much more believable)
Monocle
SingTime Express
Gulp
Source: Journey To The Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer, Eldon C Hall.
I have to explain right away what kind of dream I mean here. I don’t mean dreaming about how to alter your life so everything is great and happy and wonderful forever and ever. Those are all the dream to be an accomplished celebrity, and the trouble with that is you have to accomplish something worth celebrating. That’s a big pile of work, and even after that, you have to get really lucky, and after all that, you’ll just want to do something else anyway. And anyway the part you really want is people saying, “I’m sorry for all the times I wronged you”. It won’t happen. They’re waiting for you to apologize for the same thing.
What I mean is the kind of dream you have between when you lie down at night, trying to sleep and thinking about all the people who wronged you, and when you wake up in the morning because someone, somewhere, in the neighborhood has a dog. Dreams are a good way to distract from the feelings of helpless and loneliness and it’s a pity people aren’t trying that more.
The fundamental unit of dreaming is to deal with a thing that is also, somehow, another thing. Let me show. Start with one thing, such as a living room. Now pick another thing, such as a dining room. Imagining a place that’s both a living room and a dining room probably won’t explode your mind, what with having heard of efficiency apartments. But remember, there are some people reading this essay who don’t know how to dream to start with. We have to work up to the more complicated ideas.
Take as much time as needed with the living-room/dining-room dream. Explore its implications, such as whether in this context you may set a fork on the throw pillow. Or set a throw pillow on the serving plate. No: that serving plate is too nice for a throw pillow. Try one of the nice souvenir pillows that you keep locked up in the breakfront because they’re too nice to put on the sofa. But wait: why are you putting the nice serving plate on the table when it isn’t even Thanksgiving? It’s too nice for that. Because it’s a dream. You can take all the nice stuff out for that even when nothing special is going on.
Suppose you’ve gotten good at the living-room/dining-room dream. Now you can advance to more complicated things that are also other things. For example, imagine a public library that’s also a friendly dragon. What are the implications of this? Are the books the dragon’s teeth? Or scales? Do you have to venture warily into the dragon’s mouth to get your card renewed? Might it be necessary to go into the more advanced parts of the dragon’s digestive system in order to get the DVDs you’d put on hold? No, of course not. The dragon is a public library only to meet certain zoning requirements. Left to itself the library would rather be a griffin. Now you can have adventures in arranging exemptions to municipal zoning policy. These go well, because you are having a dream, which does not have to comply with open-public-meeting requirements.
Now, you may occasionally hear about really wild dreams. Like, ones where a chance hop out of the excessively large convenience-store/art-museum by your rabbit tips you off to a plan by some gangsters in an Adam West Batman-style Dive Bar (it’s tidier than the efficiency apartment your parents had when they first got married) to finally rub out Shemp, of the Three Stooges. And then you have to help the Fun, Pleasant Batman and Robin on a chase through New Year’s Eve Boston to keep the Stooges alive and maybe make their big show(?). These should be left to the advanced dreamer, one who has experience with all the legal clearances required for this kind of scenario. While you’re learning, stick to imagining people telling you how sorry they are for wronging you. It’s way easier to get the rights.
Do remember, though, there’s no truly wrong way to dream. Whatever things you want to put together are fine. And there’s not any wrong details to expand upon. So make sure to write down all the salient details of each night’s dream, so you can compare them with other people in your dreaming circles, and see who wins.
I suppose this is properly speaking a dream. But it’s a cryptic note from the dream world. It was mostly just a “graphitic content” warning for the dream to come. I’m excited by what that means. My guess is some of those neat charcoal-sketch animation like you see in Disney cartoons from back in the 70s that nobody cares about, or cared about when they were making them. I like the aesthetic.
Another Blog, Meanwhile Index
The index popped up seven points today as some leftover chocolates were found and the whole trading floor agreed that things just don’t get better than this.
I’m busy dealing with a thing at work where something that hasn’t changed in a year-plus and that I didn’t know was being used for anything suddenly stopped working quite right, and looking over the project I can’t figure out how it would ever have been working quite right based on the now not-quite-right scheme. So instead let me share this with you: It’s an Estonian blog dedicated to characterizing all the appearances of pigeons in movies and TV shows. Yes, it includes discussion of the pigeons’ symbolic import and relevance to the plot. You’re welcome.
Another Blog, Meanwhile Index
The Another Blog, Meanwhile index shot up over 22 points today following a confusing dream in which Rhode Islanders seemed to have some broadly accepted conspiracy theory about how they were fomenting localized heavy storm cells? That doesn’t seem to add up. Rhode Islanders are used to storms, that’s why they’re there.
But I fear is: a lengthy dream in which I am trying to finish an anecdote about some very slow women carrying tiny dogs who were extraordinarily slow in getting on the bus. A small bus, the kind you use to get from the airport terminal to the car rental place. And there was something about their slowness in getting on that was leading to some real killer of a punch line, but I couldn’t get to it. My audience was, I suppose fairly enough, thinking this was a boring story and wasn’t willing to trust that I was getting somewhere. If there is a lesson from it, I suppose it’s that I must be ready to issue subpoenas to demand people wait for me to signal the end of an anecdote before judging it.
And, in fairness, I will need a way to signal the end of an anecdote. I’m considering getting a small flag reading “END OF ANECDOTE”, or perhaps a highly portable musical instrument on which I could play a distinct note. Or perhaps something in a dagger, held close to ready — but not actually pointed at anyone on purpose — and set down when my story is done. Maybe I need another opinion. How do you folks signal when you’ve reached the end of an anecdote and that the audience may now have a reaction to it? Bonus points if it’s something that can be created using only things that could be found around the house. Thank you.
Another Blog, Meanwhile Index
The index rose eight points today on early reports that the new computer was working all right and we figured out how to get data out of the Time Capsule backup that was supposed to be running all along and it turns out was.
Last week’s dreams would do pretty well for that: “Suspension Ping-Pong” is a viable play title. And “The Insincere Seagull” swings too. But last night’s? That was one that just didn’t have any disturbing elements, really. There was just a lot of shuffling up and down cramped stairwells and a lot of confusion on my part about why I was involved in the process of picking a comedic weather reporter. It also featured overnight news polka artist and all-purpose comedian Barry Mitchell explaining to me that a joke he’d used when he got into the business of comic weather reporting was a good one. “The kind American audiences like, that’s funny but that the more they think about it makes less sense”.
I remember that in the dream I also found the joke amusing, but all that’s left of it is the punch line “dog whistles”. (I mean literally the thing used to get dogs’ attention, not the thing where you insist someone’s crazy for hearing a racist comment when you say something racist.) Probably I thought too much about the joke. I had no idea why I was part of any of this. But I haven’t known why I was part of anything I was part of since my undergrad commencement. And that I knew was going to on whether I was part of it or not, but if I was part of it, I would hear a speech by Senator Bill Bradley. I guess that’s what I needed back then. So even not having any idea why I was there in the dream wasn’t disturbing. It was just what I’d have expected.
As I say, though, there’s not any disturbing elements in this dream. Just shuffling around stairs and pondering what kinds of jokes really sell.
Another Blog, Meanwhile Index
The index fell one point as traders were all giggling about that Samsung store in Singapore that caught on fire. “I bet the manager was quoted as saying, `Shut up’,” said one analyst who did not in fact place such a bet. And then they felt bad they didn’t check if anybody was hurt in the fire before passing around jokes about it, and don’t you feel a little bad about that grin you had now? I don’t think anybody was hurt in it.
So you know that extreme ping-pong sport where the competitors and table are all suspended from a beam extended from a skyscraper, far above ground? Sure, we’re all interested in that. OK, so apparently the dream world wants me to see a documentary about the crews that set up and test the harness and frames to make the game safe and playable. Including some daring footage of how they lasso a steel beam to get the first elements installed. And I’m not all that bothered by heights, but you want to see people tossing cables out to grab a steel beam 400 feet up some North Korean(?) skyscraper and I’m starting to get nervous.
The dream also included some relevant segments from one of those odd little 20-minute making-of documentaries narrated by that deep-voiced guy which they used to make for 60s and 70s films so that … decades in the future Turner Classic Movies would have some filler. I don’t know what their business model was. Anyway, they included clips from that because a lot of the fundamental technology for skyscraper-suspended ping-pong was developed for the famous(?) zipline sequence of John Wayne’s Chisum, a movie that I will now go my entire life without seeing, thank you very much.
I understand it might be odd to make a life choice, including a small one like whether to ever see Chisum, on the basis of a dream like that. But it was a documentary in my dream and therefore must be accurate.
Another Blog, Meanwhile Index
The index rose twelve points today out of fears that — wait, no, it doesn’t rise on fears. It rises on hopes. Must have got something caught in the copy filter. Let’s try again. The index rose twelve points today out of hopes that there were grasshoppers in the basement and getting up higher would avoid the issue. Ah, yes, I see where the ‘fears’ comes in then. Some people are just afraid of grasshoppers, is all. That’s normal-ish. Carry on.
So to the seagull in my dream who was trying to apologize by delivering a fully functional rocket to my backyard: I appreciate the gesture. It’s a most impressive gift. And I do appreciate the work gone in to getting a Saturn I — not a V, not even the more hip I-B but an actual Saturn I as used in flight testing and development from 1961 through 1965. It’s a true connoisseur’s choice of rocket vehicle. Nevertheless, while I’ll accept presents as tokens of reconciliation they are not, by themselves, reconciliation. It is harder to deliver a simple “I’m sorry” from your own beak, but it would mean something that no present ever could, and I promise to accept it with as much grace as possible given our history. And I do thank you for the gesture.
Still, on another level, I can’t see any way to launch the blasted thing from my backyard, what with how the goldfish pond isn’t nearly deep enough a water trench for the necessary sound suppression. Not to mention not being deep enough for the goldfish to come out well afterwards. Plus who’s got a launch gantry in mid-Michigan anyway? I’ve got too much stuff just hanging around to show to accept something that hasn’t got practical use.
Another Blog, Meanwhile Index
Traders showed a sharp loss of confidence today when they learned that contestants on The Price Is Right are not drawn randomly from the audience but are instead screened while entering to see if they’d probably look good on camera and have a bunch of people cheering specifically for them.
So It was something of an anxiety dream, all the frustrations of running around the house packing our rocket ship with everything we’d need after the end of the world. It’s hard enough getting ready to move, and when you figure you’re going to have to leave stuff behind and never get it back you know there’s going to be no end of double-checking that you have all eight hundred kinds of USB connection. I mean, once the world comes to an end when do you expect to visit a Best Buy again? Plus there’s getting my parents’ cats to behave and not go running into debris piles. And then the tension just ratchets up and up until the moment comes where we launch, escape the end of the world, and then it turns into a road trip to Baltimore. Which is its own kind of hassle because, you know, I’ve been to Baltimore and I’ve never been to the Udvar-Hazy Center and it would be so easy to go there, wouldn’t it? Why can’t we go there instead? But I’m too shy to insist, even in my own dreams, because of course. There’s no justice. I leave behind my camera’s USB cable.
Another Blog, Meanwhile Index
The index dropped four points as the start of the post-Valentine’s-Day sales on both shares and on the chocolate shop down on Michigan Avenue. Also, ooh, are they going to get the three-foot-tall chocolate bunny for Easter out soon? Hold on, I’m going to go check myself.
It was your typical sort of dream, by which I mean typical for me. One of those long, rambling, confusing dreams shuffling back and forth between offices as cramped and overstuffed as a used book store’s aisles are. I was doing the best I could to help a friend interview for a job he wasn’t actually qualified for but could probably get up to speed on fast enough that people wouldn’t catch on. The way all of us do.
But dragging me down was one of the people with an actual job there, who kept demanding I explain how it was Ogden Nash wrote such a fantastic book explaining nuclear fusion. And to be fair it did look like a great book. Even in the ancient, falling-apart copy they had, all the illustrations were still animating very well. Had to agree the publisher had a lot of confidence to publish a book quite that lavish. She wanted to know when Ogden Nash was going to publish another science book and I had to say, I was pretty sure he had died. Even found in the preface that the book hadn’t been quite finished as Nash died just after turning in the first draft in December 1956. I felt like a bit of a heel dashing her hopes for a follow-up book on brane theory. In the non-dream worlds, Nash died in May 1971, so my powers to accurately pluck dates out of nowhere seem not to extend to writers of amusing verse.
I have no evidence that Ogden Nash wrote any science popularizations of note.
Another Blog, Meanwhile Index
The Another Blog, Meanwhile index woke today to find it was the close of trading and it was seven points higher than it was that time yesterday. It has no explanation for this mystery.
So I was having this pretty nice standard-issue dream when I suddenly got a text message from The Left. That’s unsettling since I don’t really text-message and I’m not sure how I would get it. But then I had to get up and go to the bathroom. I guess that’s fine; I’m not sure what I would say to The Left. “I love when you work on stuff that tamps down the brutality of life?” I bet they get that all the time.
Meanwhile like a week ago my love dreamed we were in the San Francisco zoo and couldn’t think how we got that far away. The dream me couldn’t offer any answers. My love, looking for a rational explanation of why we’d be there, asked, “Have we been to any amusement parks this trip?” And the dream me answered, “No, I don’t think so.” And I love that the dream-me, like the real me, takes so much edge off anything he says that he’ll leave room for plausible doubt on the question “have you been to an amusement park on this trip?” That’s so me.
Another Blog, Meanwhile Index
The Another Blog, Meanwhile index suffered its steepest one-day decline yet, dropping 13 points or over 9.9 percent in a conversion to decimals that is not helping, Lisa. We would investigate the mood of traders more except they get all growly and bite-y as anyone approaches and for now it’s probably best if we just hope tomorrow has a little less bad news and DON’T BITE AAUGH.
OK, OK, dream that seemed like it went on for two hours or more. I will take your advice. Never again will I try to sneak out naked to the mall’s movie theater with a bunch of archeologists. While there’s probably someplace I could get some respectable cover there, I wouldn’t have any place to keep my wallet so I’d have to watch the movie from the changing room. Also there’s so many venues for embarrassment with the archeologists, especially when people challenge their key findings and they have to fly, cross-country, to Seattle by way of Los Angeles, which just makes for two hecks of long trips. I don’t even know why the movie was controversial to the archeologists. Maybe something in it presented the Nuditarians in a light not generally accepted by current research.
I know I haven’t had many dream-world updates lately but that’s just how these things happen. There was a pretty detailed one this week, though. Apparently it was some sort of long-form documentary program about the differences between North American and Pacific Asian giant monsters. Turns out, it seems, that there’s a tendency for North American giant monsters to have many more sets of limbs and wings than their East Asian counterparts. And this apparently reflects longstanding cultural practices. Lest you think that’s an unchanging fact of life, though, apparently the Asian giant monsters are looking to add more sets of claws and wings to become more competitive in the world market. And somehow this documentary didn’t describe any of this as a new arms race.
It was a perfectly nice flying dream right up to the point that the swan or whatever it was decided to land on my back and freeload on the ride. I can’t blame the swan for its decision. It’s a sensible enough decision on its part. It’s just that swans turn out to be pointy in surprisingly many places. The narrator did his part to shoo the swan off, but the swan was paying no attention. Maybe the narrator was added in post. I don’t think it was Morgan Freeman narrating. I suspect I was doing the narration myself, since I got to talking in my sleep loud enough that my love nudged me awake and expressed concern about what I was going on about. I don’t know what the swan made of it all.
I spent a considerable part of that dream trying to work out exactly which crazypants episode of Star Trek: Voyager it was. It was yet another episode where Tuvok comes down with temporary insanity. This time I’m pretty certain it was meant to teach an endearingly sincere but klunky message about toleration. It just did it in the form of Tuvok being caught in a quasi-hallucinatory state where he shifts between the starship and being maybe in the past, maybe shifting back to Actual Planet Vulcan where he’s gradually realizing he’s too enthusiastic about hunting down the packs of cyborg Vulcan kangaroos rampaging through the endless desert. I think the cyborg Vulcan kangaroos might have had antennas, which suggests they might be an invasive species, possibly from the Andorian worlds. No, they didn’t display any ice powers.
Anyway, the cinematography on this was just fantastic. I mean, this was clearly the episode of the year where they were trying, with a deliberate color design and on-location shooting with deep focus so you can do stunts like have the attention on some tiny thing in the distance and have someone walk in the near foreground, crisp and sharp. I think they might’ve been using 70mm film for some of it. So I’m a little disappointed I didn’t see how it all turned out, but I’m going to go ahead and suppose that Tuvok came to decide he didn’t want to be prejudiced, but rather wanted to come to hate people individually and for his own reasons, not those he picked up from society.
I think it was an episode from before Seven of Nine joined the show. I’m pretty sure they rescued Neelix from the cyborg Vulcan(?) kangaroo mob, unless it turns out that he only died in a hallucination or something like that. That’s to be expected I guess.
I’m sorry to go back to the dream-well so often but there’ve been a bunch of updates recently. So, suppose I have some vaguely related young kid, the kind that’s at the age where he communicates mostly with enthusiastic shouts or muttered words barely coaxed out. I admit that’s kind of how I talk too, although without the enthusiasm, because I got over enthusiasm when I was in college. Anyway, the kid’s question is, “if I had a brother how would I know which to choose?” It’s important enough to be repeated until I give an answer. And I don’t want to put any pressure on you all but I kind of get the sense that if I give the wrong answer the world may end. So, you know, any advice you’ve got, I’ll consider, but if it does end the world I’m naming sources.
![[ As Estelle dreams of being married to Wilbur ... ] Panel of sleeping Estelle being watched over by Libby the cat. Next panel: a dream-future family portrait of Estelle and Wilbur, with four identical pudgy babies, each wearing boxing gloves and with the eyeglasses and hair of Wilbur.](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/mary-worth_karen-moy-june-brigman_15-november-2019.gif)
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