I don’t write about dreams much, because I don’t have them very much. Or at least don’t remember them very much. And way too often, I probably shouldn’t share them with the public anyway. But anyway, here’s what I remember of the one from last* night…it was wierd, because there was actual dialog in it, which is exceedingly rare for my dreams.
It started out that I was following some poorly hand-scrawled directions….no street names, just “left turn, right at the next intersection, right again at sort of a T”…which seemed to sync up with what the intersections actually looked like, so I knew I was headed in the right direction; so far, so good. (And it definitely wasn’t in Boston, because it was always no more than 2 streets intersecting at once, and they were all named.) I came to some little commercial/industrial park, containing a huge sprawling apartment complex and a few other assorted buildings…now I just had to find Apartment 3B. OK, now I remember what I’m doing here. I’m meeting up with No* for the first time. Here’s where I realize the directions I poorly transcribed don’t specify any kind of an address or building name of any kind, just an apt. number. But I figure this sprawling apartment thingy has to be it, because I’ve run out of directions. But it looks like this area might have several different apt. buildings, this one seems to continue back into the landscape indefinitely (it’s very low twilight, nearly nightfall by now, so I can’t really see it well, but next to it is a different, unrelated, non-apartment-looking building, which the street/parking lot continues around.) For some reason, presumably to see if there’s more than one building I’ll have to search for this address, I continue around the corner where, sure enough, beyond the unrelated building there are rows and rows of apartments, but it appears to be all part of the same building from the other side, physically connected.
Here’s where it starts becoming a canonical Tim-dream. We jump instantaneously from me driving around and finding this other piece of building to (me presumably parking, getting out of the car and walking toward the only open door I see on this part of the building) while at the same time (I’m running as fast as I can toward that first piece of building, realizing I’ve almost certainly overshot the entrance / main doors, if any. That piece of building looked more “main” than the segment the other instance of me parked at. Running only because it’s a long way back around to that part. Next thing I know, running-me is starting to wonder why he’s running, when he drove here, after all. Running-me doesn’t remember parking and doesn’t know why he’s running, only that he should still have a car, and as far as he knows, still be in it. Running-me then starts wondering why he’s running toward this other segment when it’s all the same building anyway, and starts running back the way he came, toward where walking-toward-the-door-me is walking toward the door. Now, a little bit of reality is starting to trickle in from the world of non-sleep; running-me is realizing that I have known No* for quite some time now, and therefore wouldn’t be having to follow bad directions to meet her for the first time, and that she definitely doesn’t live here.) (That’s another rare thing, for the sleep- and non-sleep worlds to intermix like that.)
Walking-me walks through the door and into the hallway, looking for Apt. 3B, but the first door I pass is unmarked. The first thing I notice about this place is how poorly and eerily lit everything is…shouldn’t the hallways in apartment buildings be reasonably well-lit, and shouldn’t the light diffuse somewhat uniformly off the narrow, off-white walls and low ceiling? It was more like in my first attempt at creating my own Quake level, where the lighting parameters were a little goofed up and all sources were rendered as a radius of bright bright flickering light around the source, fading to almost total darkness within the span of maybe a foot outside that radius. The second thing I noticed was the carpeting. I’m not exactly an interior decorator extraordinare, but the carpeting together with the lighting made all the hairs on my neck stand at attention and gave me the feeling that I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. If you brought the paint-mixing machine at Home Depot home for the evening, fed it some bad clams and it yuked all over your carpet in several gaudy, vomitrocious seventies-remnant colors, that’s kind of what this carpet looked like, a full-body dinner exorcism in reddish-brown, vibrant orange and bile green.
Against my best judgment I continued onward (not far) and found myself in a dead-end, my eyes beginning to adjust to the lighting and make out the detail in the dark corners; there was a small bunk bed here and some college-student furniture. And a guy behind me, who came seemingly out of nowhere, welcoming me to his place. Apparently this narrow thing wasn’t a hallway at all; somebody actually lived here. Middle-aged, balding and undefinably but unmistakably not-all-there. I didn’t recognize the guy, but he claimed to have known me for quite some time… and was so glad that I had come here to be his friend. This man struck me as someone who didn’t have a lot of friends…and the ones he did have might well be cut up neatly in pieces and stored in Formaldehyde in a box of underneath his bed. It felt like he would be delighted to make me one of them.
This thread kind of ended there, but meanwhile, another me (how many of me are there?) had just finished climbing to the top of a tall hill on the other side of the parking lot, to find him(my)self standing in front of some kind of (in dreamland) unmistakably DOD building. Overengineered, full of superfluous glass and unnecessary angles. The architecture kind of reminded me of a stealth bomber made out of glass, wood and concrete. The scene was in the colors of the DOD’s SBIR site, with a blue, pink and gold sunset in the background criscrossed by an unlikely number of contrails. Interestingly, it seemed to be getting earlier and earlier, because it was pitch-black night when I was driving, barely twilight on reaching the apartments, and now brighter still. (The trivial explanation is that it was actually morning, not evening, but it really “felt like” evening, in the way that only dreams can feel like something.)
Same night, different segment, I dreamed that my BRAKE boards had come in at work, sometime when I was out (on vacation, or some kind of short trip). While I was gone, someone had carefully cut all the chip footprints out of the boards, leaving them full of neat little square holes where ICs would normally go. (Maybe this is the overworked engineer equivalent of the dream where you’re taking a final and realize you’re in your underwear.) There was a footprint for a huge Zoran Camera On A CHip, also neatly cut out and laid aside, making it pretty much useless. (Double bad, because having such a layout on the BRAKE boards to begin with means I would have been doing some extreme, employment-jeapordizing goofing off on project funds…)
*”last” night being defined relative to the datestamp I gave this (7/16/05)…now that I’m getting around to blogging stuff. Date on LJ may not be valid.
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