realityhandbook

As part of a dream-sequence, I was working through composing a fairly elaborate plot for a comedy movie. It centered around the son of a famous hotel mogul (I was calling him James Ritz)—loosely based on Paris Hilton.

He was recruited to be a secret agent. Through his family's connections he was able to get access to important people. The reputation he had as an out-of-control party animal (crashing cars, etc) was actually just cover for the fact that he was actually on missions.

A joke in the movie involved the discussion of "Double-O Zero" status, and why it wasn't just contracted to "Triple Zero".

I had run a piece of software with a name like "dragon", which was able to interactively do rough cropping of graphics on a text terminal. It was running on an image I didn't have a way to view in its original form. So wanting to demonstrate this for someone who was in the room with me on an image they already knew, I tried to load up the Google Logo as a sample.

(Note: Though I've never seen such a program, it would be quite possible to write one. In fact, when I did a search for "jpeg to ascii" converters, I found one called jp2a. In its samples, it offers precisely the demonstration I tried in the dream—conversion of the Google logo:

       .......                                       .':.             
    .::'....':xd.                                     dX'             
  .ld.        ..       .                              oX.          ...
  ;O'              .c;..'cxc    ;,...,c;.  .:'.,lxc.  dX.  ,:'.,dx.. .
  oO.             .ox.    ,x0 .cd.    .cd..ll    l0.  xX. :K,..,::.   
  cxx.      .',cl 'x0      lK'.cx      ;k, lO;  .ll.  dX. o0:         
   ,dkc.      :kd  :kx.   :d;  ,ol.   .lc.  .''lk'    kX'  oOo'...    
     .;:cc;,,',,.    .;;,'..     .,,'...   ''',:lxo. .','.  .,::;.    
                                         .oc.     dO                  
                                          lk;....'c'                  
                                            .'.... 

...so it's apparently a pretty obvious "first test" of such a program.)

When I did this test, however, the conversion began to spit out a lot of extra data. This provoked me to load the image into a non-browser, and I saw it had a lot of stuff in it besides the picture.

me: "A ha. Someone must have patched Firefox to pass this off as a normal image. Let's look at some other images..."

I tried to type in "http://images.google.com" but accidentally typed in something more like "http://video.images.google.com". The computer I was typing on suddenly went into a full screen mode of a fancy video website with a red background—it was very non-Googlish, even though it was on the Google domain. It was then that I noticed that the computer had become very flat and futuristic, with no keyboard...like a Crunchpad:





me: "Whoa. This...changed right in my hands. So I'm in a dream? That's weird, because I didn't lay down or anything. I must not have been awake before either."

I put the computer down and walked over to the girl who I'd wanted to show the image to. She was sitting on a sofa.

girl: "Why don't you try grabbing your eyes?"
me: "Grabbing? Well, I can touch them without much of a problem, I've learned to put in contacts."

Wetting my fingers a bit with my tongue, I reached up under what felt like glasses and tried to gently touch my eyeball. When I did so, my body seemed to physically flip over onto my head, and the view I had split into shards. Some of the shards were yellow and blue hues, while others were normal.

girl: "Not really what I meant by 'grab', but... ok."

There was some fairly innocuous popular dance music playing—it wasn't anything I listen to (picking a random artist it might be like, I'd say "Shakira".) To try and keep myself in the dream and not focus on the visual anomalies, we got up and started dancing close.

me: "What is the nature of this world? Sometimes I don't know. It's so random, that I wonder if I am actually alone inside my mind. Like maybe this is the default state of the universe, and that life as I know it is just me fooling myself into thinking I'm not alone. Who are you? Is it even possible for you and I to stay here long enough to figure it out?"

She thought for a second.

girl: "Think of the Ocean. From the outside it can seem kind of Heavenly, but if you're a creature born into it...it's kind of a Hell. Random and cold, swimming around trying to fend for yourself, no obvious purpose given to you. I'd say that one should certainly be skeptical of any society that patterns itself after the ocean."

I was walking down a street with something like Google Street view on a mobile phone. I was holding up the phone and comparing the scenery as I walked past the "real" location. There was a small lag, so I'd be watching the thing I'd just passed on the phone's screen.





Somehow I arrived in a room and began talking with some guy about technical things, we were discussing something called the "COTE" project. It was something for compiler infrastructure. He showed me a ball that was part orange plastic and partly what looked like transparent glass. Etched onto the glass inside of a square was the word "HOOD".

guy: "The logo guys want us to change it, they think it's more clever. By calling it 'hood' they want to suggest it's what's 'under the hood'."
me: "Really I... I don't know what this is about. Where I'm from...there's a lot of commercial software. I'm opposed to commercial software, what is it like here?"
guy: "Hey, you're not that Jobs fellow, are you?"
me: "Steve Jobs? No. Perhaps you're thinking of Richard Stallman"
guy: "Oh, right... yeah, Stallman. I was thinking you were too cute to be him."

I surveyed the room.

me: "Look, whatever technology this is ... I can sit here and talk to you, with awareness of the fact that I am asleep. I have technical knowledge. I can relate information."
guy: (sympathetically) "No one pays you much attention, do they? You try very hard, but aren't getting a lot of credit for your work."
me: "I'd agree with that."

He hugged me, and a woman in the room joined in to make it a group hug.

woman: "You just need new friends—a new crowd. I'll be your friend, like I said. Remember when we shook hands at the base?"
me: "Um. No, not really. Well maybe. Was that the dream with the weird bathrooms?"
woman: "That's it."

(Note: There was a vague feeling of memory at that instant in the dream, but now that I'm awake I can't connect it with anything.)

As I awoke, I was paralyzed in bed. A voice spoke out to me:

voice: "Why did you go to Korea without any prior planning?"

I couldn't speak—but I was trying desperately to say that I had never been to Korea (which I have not).

I'd lost some kind of fight, and after the loss had just kind of floating around playing dead. People were watching.

woman: "He can see us, you can tell. I've seen other people on that level do the same thing."

Annoyed, I landed and got up and followed her into the next room. I smashed a window out with my fist, and it popped easily.

woman: (alarmed) "What are you doing?"
me: "Does it matter? I mean if all this fighting is just a level in a game, then what's the problem if I knock in a window?"
woman: "Not in here, just in there! It's a virtual reality, but what it does is mainly remind me how much more important the real world is."

She gestured to the room we had been in.

me: "All right, so that room is a holodeck? Show me the hardware...where's the console?"

She opened a cabinet and gestured at some equipment. It was hard for me to figure out quite what it was.

me: "Who makes this stuff? Where did it come from?"

She showed me some company logos. One looked like the head of some kind of purple alligator-type thing with a bunch of pointy teeth. Another one was called "Robot Can't See".

me: "Robot can't see? That's not a name for a company."
woman: "The full name is 'Excitebot .cantsee link error'"
me: (exasperated) "Excite is a web search engine. Bot is a term indicating the automated way in which it visits pages. Someone is either purposefully or accidentally interpreting an error code as an actual thing."

At this point several people had run up and were talking to me, they were in uniform and had colored paper attached to their outfits. They were showing me things and asking what I thought.

uniformed man: "Large pizza, $16.99, does that look right?"
me: "That is what I have typically seen where I'm from."
uniformed girl: "If you need anything, ask. I was in the military, I can help."

I introduced myself by name, at which point a large number of rendered bouncing objects ran into the room. They looked like classic video game characters, and were on the attack.





The uniformed people tried to fight them off and keep them away from me.

uniformed girl: "I don't think we're going to be able to put these in the furnace."

One of the bouncing characters that had slipped by them attacked me and woke me up.

I was in a situation that seemed a bit like a room in a psychological institution.

man: "I want you to tell me the dirtiest thing you are thinking right now."
me: "What? Hm. Well it's not dirty, but those cats have big eyes."

There was a bit of a digression as I spoke to the four cats that were sitting next to the man, who then turned into clocks. We had a conversation about the sound of their alarms, and how mechanical things were preferable to organic things. The interviewer who had asked me about dirty thoughts eventually reappeared.

man: "Name two decades."
me: (amused) "The... ummm... roaring twenties. And, oh, the '80s I guess."
man: "The 1840s haven't happened yet!"
me: "I said nineteen eighties, and I assure you that from my perspective they have happened. If I had something to type on, we might have a better way that I could check to see I'm telling you what I meant to convey."
man: "If we're going to continue this, you're going to have to field your tone."
me: "I don't know what you mean by that, but being able to type might help that too."
man: "Fine, here is an entertainment system."

He handed me a boxy silver device. A small solid-seeming block of metal—as if it were a battery—slid out of it. Though it didn't seem to have any seams on it, it was able to open and reveal a keyboard and screen.





As I was fumbling with the device and looking at it, a woman who seemed to have some authority came in.

woman: "We have orders to stop this interview. Come with me."
me: "I want to bring this computer."
woman: "No. Well, fine, I guess."

Everyone else in the room backed away. A crowd seemed to have gathered.

me: "What, so someone just comes in while you're talking and says 'hey, we're going to take this person away' and you just stand there? Lame. What disappoints me about people is not that they don't make sacrifices—I mean, Jesus wasn't going around asking people to die on crosses. But you've got to stand for something."

After I'd walked away from the crowd, some young Asian guys ran up to me and put a gray-looking plastic thing in my hand, and then they stabbed me with something.

I was riding on a bus, and looked at the seats. They were rows of very simple chairs, which were rigid and boxy and espresso-colored. They looked just like my desk chair.





me: "The chairs have changed here!"
man: "I guess that shows there are reasons things get changed...for you."
me: (laughing) "Yes, always for me."

The person driving the bus was a woman who turned to address me.

bus driver: "They've changed because you were right. An unauthorized account was found, and now we can get this all back in order. It will take a bit of time, but they're already working very fast...as you can see."

I looked closer at the chairs, and they'd been tagged with some various colors.

bus driver: (chuckling) "What you're looking at is the origin of the word 'Keane'...if you were wondering about that."

(Note: Keane is a band I listen to, whose story of their name does sound a bit suspicious to me.)

me: "So these chairs...they're like what I have at my desk. There's the wood one, and then another webbed one like an office chair."

I poked a nearby other chair which had a webbed back, to use as an illustration of what I was talking about. Then I realized it was the exact model of the second chair I have.

me: "...whoa, yes. Exactly! That's the one. The fabric of the seat kind of smells though, so I've not been sitting on it. Anyway that's what I have as of the moment... that moment being erm... 2009. In... June. Let's say the 29th or so?"

The man looked kind of pleased and nodded as if to say "that's about right".

man: "What we have here is a perfect example of what I would call Feng Shui Qua"
me: (puzzled) "Feng Shui You mean like...furniture arrangement?"
man: "Yes, look at the floor. The placement of the nails. She spent 12 hours on that alone."

(Note: There is a term in Feng Shui that I did not know before, called 'Feng Shui Kua'. New word, looks relevant, I'll call that "verified"!)

I looked down at the floor, and noticed that it seemed we were now in a room where a lot of construction was going on. A marble sink was being installed, it had a very ornate shape.

me: "Uhh. Okay, looks nice."
man: (chuckling) "Do you think the sink is going to hate me?"
me: "Hopefully not. Um, I tend to not get very good responses to questions about Life, The Universe, and Everything. But you guys have been nice so far. Can you offer any insights on the general question of 'What's up, like, with me?'"

They looked at me and then I woke up.

I was in the loft apartment where I used to live. Though I didn't have much in the loft when I lived there, it had been redecorated with a modern kitchen and television. On a wall where I'd had a painting I had made, there was a large 3x3 grid of colors dominated by green and white (which I understood as representing one face of a Rubik's cube). The TV was showing a music video intercut with pictures of a monkey holding a videocamera.





My dog from childhood was there, and he followed me to the elevator in the hallway. I pushed the button to go to the roof, and also tried the close door button—butnothing happened. Noticing there was a keyhole for a circular key, I fished in my pocket and found a key that fit. When I used it, the door closed and took me to the roof.

me: (to self) "I guess now is as good a time as any to do some matrix training...and just jump!"

I jumped off the roof and did a successful landing. Looking back, I noticed my dog running back and forth on the roof...so I gestured to him to jump too. I caught him like someone had thrown me a football, and set him down on the ground.

Two extremely large mean dogs that looked like huge rottweilers were on the ground, who began to run at me to attack. When the first came at me, I grabbed it's face and pet it until it turned nice. I did the same with the second.





A couple of people came up to me. One man who looked like Agent Smith from the Matrix, and another older guy who was holding several folding chairs.

"Smith": (to me) "Nice job, Kane. You're getting good, but you have to learn more combat."

(Note: I heard the name as in David Carradine's character in Kung Fu, whose name I thought was spelled as "Kane"...but turns out that character's name was spelled "Caine". Upon waking and looking at it, there are many such characters—including the Biblical Cane, considered the progenitor of evil.)

chair guy: (to me, indicating Smith) "I'm not going to be as easy on you as he was!"

The man handed me one of the folding chairs, and kept the other two for himself. One he poised to use as a weapon, and the other one to use as a shield. I tried to whack him with the chair he had given me, but it collapsed awkwardly.

chair guy: "You have to fold it like this, so it makes a point."
me: (frustrated) "That doesn't work when I try it. Maybe if you explained what's going on instead of showing me something to blindly mimic. I find that—for instance—in learning dance, it's better to explain the rules and invariants rather than try and memorize specific steps."

The man seemed to change into an Asian woman, and began a sentence. She was grasping for words.

woman: "But... but... but..."

Noticing she was attractive, I looked at her body. She took notice of my gaze.

woman: "Not THAT kind of butt. I mean to say..."
me: "I'm going to wake up any moment now. This is a poor way of learning anything, in a general sense, anyway. Can you help?"
woman: "This is how it always is."
me: "With other people? Well maybe if there was more data it wouldn't have to be that way. You might not know everything, but you clearly know something--share your data. What if I were to be hit by a bus tomorrow? Would this stabilize?"

They seemed to get angry at my questioning.

me: (annnoyed) "I don't want to fight people with folding chairs for no reason for two minutes each night for a year. Maybe mastering the Matrix is about not wasting my time with people who won't answer my questions."
woman: (looking at me angrily) "Rupture!"

They attacked, and started pinching me viciously. I held out pretty reasonably for a while considering the level of discomfort. I decided to respond by eating my attackers...but had a hard time deciding what flavor they should be in order to make the experience pleasant.

I was in a situation where I was watching a Simpson's movie. The plot was that Mr. Burns had survived into the future (perhaps through cryogenics or other life extension) and was surveying all the places he could go and conquer. Bored with the pedestrian options of living in the future, he had elected to time travel into the past.





The part of the movie I was watching had Mr. Burns wearing a futuristic suit, with his face made out of a solid white plastic. He was flying in a space ship toward past earth.

Mr. Burns: "Yes, who knows what this parallel Earth we will be encountering will be like. Perhaps they evolved a little differently, they might have craniums like the cro-magnons. And we have technology from the future that is beyond their wildest comprehension. We have seen Bruce Willis movies they could not even fathom, like The Liquidator! They'll have no idea what hit them, Smithers!!!"
Smithers: "Sir, we're at the coordinates where Earth should be... but there's no planet here."
Mr. Burns: "No planet?! What do you mean?"

The scene switched and I could see that the planet was actually there, but this parallel Earth society had been tipped toward Mr. Burns arrival from the future. They had banded together and shifted Earth out of normal matter and into dark matter.

(Note: I find it interesting how the idea of protecting Earth may be a reason why alien communication is not possible. See also: Queen Eggs and Stanford)

There was some video-game type thing I was playing in which you were supposed to deliver messages from one point to another, using an animal. A floating blue pencil would indicate the direction you had to take your message, and you were able to use some kind of drug (like putting ether on a cloth) to get other animals to join your party. The bigger the animal and the more of them you had, the more likely they could stampede and get your message through.

However, there was a rule by which purple animals could knock off other color animals. I was watching some kind of demo showing a purple rhino charging through a stampede of blue animals unhurt. Its intention was to stop all the blue animals from reaching certain doors, but one purple rhino could not do this alone.





me: "A-ha! This is what I've been looking for! Watch this purple rhino thing."
woman: "You seem to think this is of great interest..."

This transitioned to where I was traveling with someone who seemed like a nurse. She went to a place that looked like a ticketing or information window to talk to someone behind it.

I idled around the open room, walking up to a man who seemed to have a red triangular hat with a number on his head. Walking very close to him, I tried to figure out the number.

me: "Hm, what have we here? 1272? 1727? 1722. Blah. Well, it's a triangle, and it's red anyhow."

The man looked at my leg which seemed to be exposed by wearing either shorts or a short gown. He pointed to the hairs on it, his finger stopping around my knee.

man: (frustrated) "ALMED? What happened, did Robi break again? ALL the reserves have been cured, not one remains. Alameda Medical is a monkey museum. Why are you digging this up!?"

I don't remember if it was me or the nurse who said "Because we found something."

The nurse's business was finished at the window, and I began to follow up a narrow spiraling staircase. The stairs were spiraling inside the building. As I walked up the steps I could see the carpet changing colors...orange, blue, red.

me: "How much further do we have to go?"
nurse: "I don't know."
me: "Well I'm going to wake up soon. Don't you have some idea?"

At that point we reached a floor, but then we walked a bit and started descending another staircase. Again the colors were changing. I made it down to another level and then fell and blacked out.

I'm pushing forward with the long-overdue migration of my dream work from LiveJournal to realityhandbook.org.

What makes this so important is that I think there is a certain "guilt by association" with LiveJournal. Google seems to bury anything from livejournal.com under other results—you often can't even find them from google.com, but have to explicitly use blogsearch.google.com (how many people even think to use that?) Beyond Google, the average person seems to have a bias against any link with livejournal.com in it—the way you would look down on someone with an aol.com email address.

It is my intention to import all the current entries. Then I will ensure that all posts here on LJ have been updated with a header, that warns readers this is no longer the main repository—and gives the appropriate realityhandbook.org URL for that entry.

I will most likely disable comments here. However I will try and ensure commenting with OpenID (or whatever) is painless enough. Possibly I will continue to synchronize new entries in both places.

A big issue here is to think hard about how to really grab people who visit the site. What should the front page look like? Is there content I should emphasize, or bury? A video? I'd like this to be done right... is there a site I should look to as a role model for engaging people with such a complex message?

I was looking at a pile of old broken things—including a TV—in the living room of the house of one of my grandparents. Walking into an adjoining room, I began to collect pins and nails that I had seen on the floor. They'd been hurting me and I decided to contain them into a little plastic container.

When I returned to the room, things had been rearranged—and there was a newly sealed box for the TV. I looked at it, and my (deceased) grandfather was sitting in a recliner looking at it. Feeling emotional, I teared up a bit.

me: "It's just sad. I guess there was a time when you bought a new TV and it was exciting, before the stroke and when all you could do was flip through channels."
grandfather: "Well these things happen. And it hasn't turned out to be all bad. Why—morris here just turned 20."

It seemed like a fairly normal cat, but its teeth were somewhat awry. I reached out my hand to pet it, but it moved away, and spoke.

cat: "No."

(Note: Morris might not have been the name of the cat and it might have been another age. Also these grandparents always had dogs, so its weird there'd be a cat on that sofa.)

me: "Ok, another example right there. Cats can't talk. People can't talk to the dead. So what's going on?"
grandfather: "I'll see that we do more to get hammer out... the, uh..."
me: "The mechanics of these interactions."
grandfather: "Yes. We'll see what we can do. And also, see what we can do to get square on why you and I are unique in this."
me: "I think the question is: Why is everyone else not square about this. It leads me to wonder what's gone wrong. What's being hidden, and for what purpose?"

The grandfather figure seemed to transform into a big grey cat/rat thing and looked at me closely, bringing its face right up to mine.

big cat: (scornfully) "Hateful."
me: "Yes, I have been."

(Note: Have been trying to work on that.)

I was on a dancefloor of some sort, dancing with two girls and one guy. We were enjoying the music, and at one point, I dropped to do a weird move and began to hum.

guy: "Well, the move is cool... but never add your own soundtrack."
me: "What are you talking about? Of course you can."
girl #1: "Yeah, that's the best part!"
me: "Right on!"

I pulled the girl who had said that in to dance with me, but things got awkward. Contextually I kind of felt like there was a situation where the other girl was my "girlfriend" and so this was being deemed inappropriate.

Realizing I didn't know these people at all and was dreaming, I started to stomp off. They followed after me. We wound up in a car, I was in the back seat with girl #2.

me: "You like to use the word 'ego'. Can't you let go of it? On a dancefloor it's just a trivial inconvenience, but my point is that in the scheme of things—it can be life or death. Practice not being a trivial person in these scenarios and it will apply elsewhere."
girl #2: "Sounds great in theory...I mean, Marla says she's a hedonist. And it works about 1/3 of the time. The rest of the time, she goes nuts."

(Note: I don't know anyone named Marla, and that might not have been the name used.)

me: "Whatever. Hm, hey, despite being asleep I can totally read this magazine here. It's something from Stanford University. Are my hands moving?"
girl #2: "Nope, you look totally asleep to us."
me: "Great. Okay, I'll read it to you."

I began to narrate the section headings as I flipped through it. They were written in white text in the upper right corner of the page. Girl #2 seemed to have her own copy to compare with me. I turned to a page which had a logo for a corporation called "ELX"...it was in white on the page—but a small photo of a cement barrier had the McDonalds logo above it in white, and the ELX logo in red beneath it.

me: "Oh, ELX. What are you? Red? White? Get your act together, people, we don't have all day!"
girl #2: (laughing) "Yeah, yeah...check out the stuff for ECA."

I turned the page and saw some crazy renderings of the Electronic Arts logo in 3D. It was modeled after the classic version—not the current "EA" logomark:





me: "Oh, yeah...the Cube/Sphere/Pyramid thing. Saw it when I was a kid, but they aren't using that where I'm from anymore."

(Note: I never noticed the profound similarity of the "C" in the old ECA logo to the AT&T "death star" logo until just now.)

Conscious that I was dreaming, I was laying on a bed and scanning over something like Google News. At first I didn't have a lot of control over it, and headlines scrolled all over. I caught bits and pieces as they passed.

(Note: Although it's rare that I take the interpretation that what I'm looking over are fragments of things that I've seen during the day out of the corner of my eye...I did start wondering in this case if that was what I was looking at.)

Though still feeling glued to the bed, I managed to gain control of a search box. The screen was seemingly next to me—as if it were projected from above onto the sheets. My fingers traced over the surface as I used something like an image search:





A ton of thumbnails went by when I entered my last name. I was able to highlight one image (not of me) but it didn't seem that clicking on it would open it. Looking around, I managed to notice there was a large black computer with "SEATTLE" written on it. My attention was directed to a computer window somewhere that had a lot of information, like:

Password for SEATTLE: *****
To reboot hit ctrl-alt-delete
To change users hit ****
(etc)

I hit ctrl-alt-delete. When I did, a badly-mechanized voice spoke aloud:

voice: "System PC1EXOR is now shut down. System unavailable."

(Note: PC1EX0R is not exactly what it said, and the window with information had actual password and other stuff...not asterisks. I rebooted because I was feeling too incapacitated to do much with those details.)

As the computer rebooted, it showed a couple of warnings. I didn't catch them all, but I did notice something like WARNING: Telephone services may be temporarily interrupted in MICHIGAN, and DELAWARE. I watched the screen and had a feeling of dread as the computer seemed to be hung on a message about unencrypting.

me: (out loud, to no one in particular) "What am I involved in? How did all this happen? What am I?"
inner voice: "Don't panic, this is just something I install on all the systems I work with. Can't be too careful."

My feeling of dread continued as I went through a spectrum of physical sensations, while the system booted into something that looked more like the introduction to a D&D text adventure than an operating system. There were skull graphics and gray tones, but otherwise it resembled old C64 software more than the Windowing OS I felt I'd been using...





The skull graphics—though they were probably just part of the dungeon/adventure theme—made me feel more dread. I wasn't quite sure what was going to happen when the loading was finished, or what this had to do with interrupting phone service. It was very Matrix-y, only no Morpheus or anyone to speak with.

I popped into a situation where I was running up some stairs, and ran into a man carrying something in a bag through a doorway on the floor above. My motor controls were completely screwed up.

me: "I can't move normally, can you help?"
man: "It's the brushes they use to clean the outside walls. Causes this static-type attraction, we're trying to fix that."

He reached out a hand to help. But it seemed every time I took a step backward, he was forced backward. If I went forward, so he was forced to as well. Standing further away seemed to alleviate the jerky coupled motions, and I began to compensate for the weirdness.

me: "Okay. I actually think I can figure this out, but...I'm used to gravity going up and down, all the time."
man: "We're certainly a neighborhood that can tolerate a bit of variety!"

I introduced myself and held out my hand to shake. He shook it, though he held his palm relatively flat.

man: "Ah, you've got a hook on that shake. I guess I'm too old and don't do it that way."
me: (jokingly) "I'm getting pretty old myself. But all my angles are, hm...still acute, you might say."
man: "Ha ha! Ah, yes. This Kryn woman you are staying with, she has said you are very clever—good with that. And good with the other sort of thing, too."

(Note: It seemed he was suggesting I was good in bed, following on my joke. I have made it an agenda to try and be more witty and at least have some fun with that.)

We were walking downstairs in what looked like a very fancy and well-decorated apartment, when a woman joined us and was looking at me. She frowned at me.

man: "Hey, hey. It's not that she doesn't like you! She's just worried you're going to get hurt."
woman: (strong unidentifiable accent) "Yes! Dear me. Kryn, well...she might not worry. But a lot of the rest of us don't think you'll be able to survive interstellar travel. You'll be pulled all apart...like, like lemon or something! And we'll all just be there watching—terrified and not able to do anything—like oh-my-GOD!"

She made distorted faces to convey her point. I pondered what I thought about being torn apart in some kind of space travel operation, and awoke.

I'd been looking at an advanced software system which was made by Nokia and had the codename 'Holiday'. Becoming lucid, I was trying to ask those around to provide me with help in validating my experiences... but began to fade out.

As I faded, it was as if I was talking to my own disembodied head that was in bed with me.

head: "Do you have any questions for me?"
me: (frustrated) "If I am to die, what will happen after that? Is there a nothingness? Does the outcome depend on whether I kill myself or die naturally?"
head: "To answer that question, it's best if you see the serpent. Do you see the serpent?"

I looked away and lost track of the head. The only thing I could see were my hands, where opposing fingers had seemed to criss-cross in a weave pattern.

me: "I don't see a serpent, but my fingers look all twisted up."
voice: (laughing) "Well if you don't see the serpent, that means I'll have to send you a serpent so you have one."
me: "I don't get your joke."

At this point I seemed to levitate up through the ceiling into a strange room with colored walls and tall ceilings. There seemed to be no doors or windows, but there was a single shelf that was at the same height on all the walls. A lot of objects were on the shelf—what looked like steampunk dollhouses and other assorted things.

me: "This! Ah, this room... I remember it!"
voice: "Oh, you remember now? So I guess we'll just have to call this the 'I remember it' room from now on."

(Note: This may have been a remark indicating that it's a room of greater importance that I should have known by a different name. Another possibility is that my claimed memory was being mocked as I'd never seen it before—because I now can't match it to anything I've seen before in a dream.)

me: "But when I was here before there was a window, a circular one, to another room."
voice: "It's still here, look."

At a spot above the shelf there appeared a round hole. Through the hole was another room that seemed to be painted with clouds. At that moment I felt a strong confidence that this was related to the clouds in the music part of The Hercules Pill.

me: "Last time I did some music. I'll try that again."

I began starting some rhythms going in my mind, and layered a few more while letting the others proceed automatically.

voice: "That's pretty good. You are probably noticing a sensation that your arms are moving much more slowly than you are used to."
me: (waving arms) "Seems normal to me, actually."

At this point the visuals dropped out and I almost woke up, but was more laying down in blackness.

voice: "Oh, dammit."

I managed to spin up some visuals and noticed a couple of plastic looking toys. One was a red dinosaur, the other more nondescript. They could move and talk, and the red dinosaur said something that I don't remember.





me: "Are you who I was talking to earlier?"
dinosaur: "Sure, yes. Same thing. Doesn't matter. The three of us should just have sex."
me: "Three of who?"
dinosaur: "You, Taber, and me. I'm Cobb."

I started to laugh fairly hard while looking at these two weird toys.

me: "Well, in that form...I don't think it's my thing."
dinosaur: "Sex!"

At this point the dinosaur came forward and sunk its teeth into my hand. It was fairly painful but did not wake me up. The other creature came and bit my other hand. I kept as calm as possible and kind of pushed them up against a wall...what was biting my hands turned into more of human faces. I pushed them off and they looked like ordinary people.

me: "What *ARE* you?"
'Taber': "I'm Taber, and I'm what they'd call a Home Adept."
me: "What's a home adapt?"
'Taber': "A highly specialized household adaptive."

(Note: In retrospect that sounds a bit contradictory.)

me: (to 'Cobb') "Are you also a highly specialized household adaptive?"
'Cobb' "Yes."
me: "And myself?"
'Cobb' "You are one of us, too."
me: "Hm."
'Taber' "Your reaction was tasteless."

(Note: I do not know the meaning of this remark, but looking at it after the fact I can throw in a few guesses. It could refer to some biting back I did while we were fighting, or it might have been anger at the notion that I rejected sex with dinosaur toys, or maybe I wasn't enthusiastic enough about being told I was a highly specialized household adaptive.)

(Note: I've not been doing a lot of dream documentation lately. That doesn't mean I haven't been having them, it just means that I've prioritized other things.)

I was having a fairly coherent run in a dream of being able to type on a keyboard and get what I typed to come up on the screen. Some of the things I was looking for were the usual searches—for my own name or URLs of pages that I have maintained for a long time. None worked. At one point I got tired of doing that and thought I might search for some other things.

Going to the URL bar, I typed in "google.com". Doing so went through a redirect to a website labeled "1/666"; it was still a search engine, but had all kinds of advertisements and a brown background.

me: (to myself) "Argh. Who does this?! Well, we know who does this, but maybe what I mean to say is 'why don't we kill them'. Oh right, right...higher road and all that."

Inspired by the recent announcement of Google Wave, I typed in "future of google apps" into a video search engine. The hit for that was a video that just had four colored dots on it. I couldn't really stay focused on what was being said, so I just skipped ahead to look if the video developed at all—but it was just the dots in different positions.

(Note: The four colors might have been yellow, red, green, and blue—as from the Google and Chrome logos.)

Clicking on another video, I watched what appeared to be a demonstration of storyboarding software for comics. A narrator was speaking while it was being demonstrated, and I started to feel the sensation of laying down.





narrator: "...and by automatically creating patents on every permutation of ideas. The intention is to flood the system—because if they cannot determine which patents are 'authentic' and which are 'illegitimate' then they will have to admit that locking up ideas is a failed concept."

I was walking around a room with a lot of people wearing costumes, reminiscent of typical "cosplay". There were also giant life-size printouts on cardboard of people dressed in costume, as if promoting a Television series or video game. I was looking at one that was of a woman character I didn't recognize.





For some reason, I approached a guy who seemed to be dressed like some kind of tiger and kind of pushed on him. I was wearing an all black costume of some kind, and introduced myself under a fictional name I sometimes use.

tiger man: "You know, you could change your name if you want. It costs money though."
me: (becoming lucid) "There's something wrong...."
other guy: "We were sorry when we heard about you getting kicked out. It was a surprise though, because we didn't even know you worked for Marvel."
me: "I don't! There's this whole identity problem, it's that property sale in California."

(Note: For several months I actually was dealing with a real-life situation where a real-estate transaction had been attributed to me, ostensibly because someone else had the same name as I do and didn't pay their property tax for some reason. Or perhaps some thicker plot—given all the other stuff I deal with.)

This view switched to where I was running into the reception area of a legal office of some kind. A robot at a desk was displeased to see me and began a rant.

robot: "Arrgh! No! No, you are not welcome here! I'm not going to keep letting you in. We are going to be focusing our future time on our clients, the people who pay us, and NOT someone who is suing them. In fact, I've been working on a sign."

A sign flipped onto the wall which said 'all are welcome', but underneath had exclusions saying 'except for...' my name and another someone called 'Wibble'. My perspective transitioned a few more times until a man behind a desk in a big open area whose face was looking over a monitor was nodding and smiling.

desk man: "This Happy Feet thing is a real victory for us, oh my God."
me: "In what way is it a victory?"
desk man: "After the settlement this is totaling around 300 billion dollars in your pocket. There is a lot you can do with that. You can ship a lot of things from great distances, there are some really amazing cars—you wouldn't believe it."
me: "I'm not buying cars, I will start a school."

There was applause from somewhere.

me: "As it stands, a fictional school may have saved my life. And I think it would work much better as a real one, with some measure of oversight so people in it don't go insane."

Applause happened again, and I found myself in a room with a lot of people seated in rows of chairs in front of a judge-type person. There was a gold paneled sign that said FOX Court. There was some joking around among the people in the room, including the judge implying that they were going to lay down on the floor and take a nap before the next busy meeting. The judge would occasionally ask people whether they knew how to write a particular kind of compiler or software.

When the room was dismissed, I followed a group down a hall. A smiling young blond guy patted me on the back and seemed encouraging.

me: "I'm going to wake up, is there anything I can do about it?"
blond guy: "Things are going to get easier from here."
me: "Nothing seems easier."
blond guy: "You just have to be develop awareness of what 'pushes your buttons' so to speak. There's a panic reaction but you can control it. Pushing out is something you need to be able to do, because...it's kind of like when you're web browsing and there's an error or infinite loop. You need a way to trap it and go to a higher and more secure level, but you don't need to trap everything."
me: "How can I control this panic that wakes me up from dreams? Am I going to have to like, meditate for 100 years or something? Aren't there any drugs?"

He looked disappointed, and began walking. I followed.

me: "...or vitamins? Or something?"
blond guy: "There is something you can 'take', so to speak. Try glasses!"

We entered an open area that seemed something like a bright basketball court crossed with a shopping mall. He handed me a pair of glasses, they bent and wobbled a bit but I put them on.

me: "Practice for... focusing?"
him: "There's this really squishy sensation that you get and it's disruptive on your eyes. But since you're used to wearing glasses, you can deal with it in small doses. What causes that sensation is a property which happens to be the most widely distributed physical phenomena in all zones. That's divergent air gravity. Let me explain."
me: "I'm very interested, but wait...I'm going to wake up, like what I'm talking about...can't you get this to me while I'm awake somehow?"

I was following someone through a snow bank, and not wearing any shoes. I realized I'd left my shoes and a number of other things behind me. Leaving the group, I went back to get them... only to realize that I'd lost my way and it was getting dark. After falling down an embankment, I just sort of settled into the idea that I was pretty much lost and going to die.

Resigned to this, my point of view shifted to where instead of being like I was experiencing freezing death first-hand I was looking through a viewfinder on a video camera.

me: (to self) "Hrm. Well, if I'm going to die, I might as well get a look at myself."

I rotated the camera to point it at me. I saw something that looked like an Asmio robot, driving a truck with a camera mounted on it that looked somewhat like a utility vehicle that was built out of LEGO.





me: "Oh. One of those. Those things that are everywhere, but you just don't see them."

My point of view shifted once again to where I was inside a kitchen in a very well-decorated house. There was a man there who I seemed to be in mid-conversation with, as he lifted me out of a wheelchair and onto my feet.

me: "...aaaa! This is ridiculous. I hate human bodies. Moreover, I hate humans."
him: "No you don't."
me: "Yes, I do. I'll grant that everyone is different. You have to give everyone a fair shot, some are better than others, no one is perfect. All that. But by and large, hate 'em. I'm thirsty, do you have any soda?"

(Note: I was somewhat dehydrated when I woke up and actually thirsty.)

We opened the door to a large stainless steel refrigerator. It was mostly empty, but there was an aluminum can of 7-up sitting on the top shelf. I grabbed it and drank it, as I followed the man down a hallway. We walked up to a strange looking gate that he raised a hand to—and it opened to lead us into a bedroom. He went to the floor to unlock a hidden panel and pull something out of it. I focused on petting one of the two cats that were there.

me: "I have questions about how I go on talking about things that don't make a whole lot of sense. Take that humans rant a moment ago—because honestly I don't know anything about the alternatives to human existence. Why do I feel like I know this place, or know you, when I have no clue what I'm talking about? And why is your cat wearing a robe, that's just weird."

A dog started biting my foot.

me: "Your dog is biting my foot and going to wake me up."
man: "I'll talk to him about that."
me: "Okay, great, but my question stands. Who am I to you? Given that my memory starts in 1975 and between then and now I've never met you, how do you see us as relating to each other at all?"
man: "I want you to go to the box office and see a movie."
me: (excited) "Yes, what?"
man: "The movie Happy Feet."

The stress of trying to stay in the dream was beginning to wear on me, and I've not had the least bit of interest in seeing Happy Feet

me: (frustrated) "Happy Feet? Okay. But why?"

There was a pause.

man: "It makes a point, about how your circumstances can..."
me: "So you're not actually telling me anything besides 'go learn a lesson'. Thanks, but I'm always learning lessons. And your 7-Up was flat and I don't think that was a full 12 ounces so look into it."
man: (thinking) "Oh, that's probably several years old."
me: "Unopened it should keep just about forever. This dog foot thing hurts terribly, bye."

(UPDATE: I went and read the movie synopsis for Happy Feet and it turns out it's not just about a tapdancing penguin. That part I knew. The part I didn't know was that his rare tapdancing talent—which causes him to become something of an outcast—becomes the key to communication with humans when he's kidnapped and put in a zoo:

After narrowly escaping from two killer whales, the penguins finally come face to face with a legion of huge commercial trawlers, all laden with fish caught around the Antarctic coast. Mumble follows after them fearlessly, leaving his friends behind to bear testament to his legacy.

(...) Mumble ends up in a penguin exhibit at a marine park (closely resembling the Penguin Encounter at SeaWorld, a massive zoom-out hinting at the one in Orlando, Florida), and fervently tries to communicate with the "aliens" (humans) who surround him. When his pleas fail, Mumble nearly succumbs to madness after three months of confinement in the sterile glass prison.

When a child taps on the glass wall one day, Mumble is woken from his stupor and dances in response, whereupon the child appears to run away. He becomes disappointed until she comes back with her mother. Soon, a large crowd gathers around the exhibit, taking pictures and telling their friends of this marvel. He is released to the wild, now with fewer of his fluffy down feathers and a tracking device strapped to his back, and leads the "aliens" home to his native colony. The other penguins, formerly skeptical, are now convinced that the aliens do exist.

Soon, a research team arrives and films the penguins dancing, and dances along with the rhythm. They bring this footage back to the human world. Different governments debate what to make of this footage and a worldwide debate ensues. They soon realize that they are overfishing the Antarctic waters, and conclude that perhaps the penguins were trying to communicate that to them. Antarctic fishing is banned, and the fish population recovers.

Given that I didn't know any of that bit and thought it was just a musical coming-of-age penguin story with mediocre animation, I'll give that the "verified" tag. Because that's rather uncanny.)

I was speaking to what appeared to be two small heads stuck on the ends of fishhooks that were pierced through my pinky.

me: "Did you know there's life on other planets?"
head #1: "There are a lot of galaxies out there in the sky, it would seem likely."
me: "But not just likely, it's actually real. I've been speaking with someone lately."
head #1: "Is he interested in mental telecommunication?"
me: "I'd say nearly pathologically so."
voice1: "Isn't that you?"
me: "Partially, but then there's who's speaking to you now."
voice2: "Are you his girlfriend?"
me: "No, I am him, but something else too.'

The heads seemed to dissolve, and I found myself in a room with a woman I recognized.

woman: "Hey Mr. Tazer Surgery."
me: "What do you mean by that?"
woman: "I'm just reminding you that the Taser Conference is coming up, and it's an important technology that cannot be falling into the wrong hands."

(Note: The Taser corporation, which makes stun guns, does seem to have conventions. The next one is in July. Obviously I am not going.)

me: (annoyed) "Why am I hearing this from you instead of them? If I'm as good as they say I am, then can't people start being a bit more direct in asking for my help."
her: "Well you know as well as anyone what the problem is. Not enough diamonds."
me: "There are a lot more problems than that."
her: "Naturally."

My perspective switched to where I was speaking to some unusual looking people who were wearing breathing helmets. They went from looking nearly human with pig-like noses to being almost like purple hippos wearing the breathing helmet. It was as if they were in an atmosphere they could not breathe.

hippo: "...so you're a shockingly good match, though about $200,000 or so outside of what we were looking to pay. Tough market right now, all focused on this-or-that bleeding edge animation you know."
me: "Well I'm flexible about the pay."
hippo: "Let me compose the letter and get this started right now."

He raised his hands in the air and began a typing motion but there was no visible keyboard he was typing on, kind of like the virtual avatar "I'm typing" animation in Second Life.

I was in a very apocalyptic scenario, with some people who were trying to get together to leave a ravaged area. One person stopped to ask if they could go back and get some of their CDs.

me: "No, keep moving."

Someone pulled out a remote control and pressed play, causing some classical music to start playing from one of the buildings we had left. He turned it up all the way.

person: "I'm glad that at least I left that disc in the player. So Beethoven is still out there, tilling the cosmic silence...I guess he always will be."
me: "If you were going to create some kind of sound beacon, then we should leave a sign saying which direction we were going in case anyone is attracted by it. But I don't know how long the power grid will be working here."

When I awoke, I decided that "tilling the cosmic silence" was a pretty interesting thing for him to have said.

I was wearing some sort of rocket-assisted roller-skates, and careening around a course that was part indoor and part outdoor. At a portion on the indoor course I forced myself to stop. Rather than go the normal path I was "supposed" to, I began climbing up some curtains where I found what looked like a security system or environmental control panel embedded into the wall.





For some reason, I started to push the buttons like crazy. Then I hung on the curtain, and looked down to see a perplexed security guard in uniform come look at me. He went away and a girl I felt I recognized came out and waved me down.

(Note: This person reminded me a bit of the girl with the white hair from "The Company")

girl: "What are you doing?"
me: "I figure if I push enough buttons it will eventually signal some kind of alarm, and people will find out I'm here. And people will know about this technology."
girl: "How will technology help anyone? People would just disappear into their own holodecks and never talk to anyone else. At least this way we'd have communication."
me: "There will always be communication, in the form of trade—people will always want new things."

Our conversation shifted to where it seemed we were still talking, but I was in some kind of dorm room looking at a morphing piece of paper. I was seated at a desk and someone else was sitting next to me, reading something else. A crude pencil sketch of the Firefox logo appeared on the paper, and the girl's voice seemed to continue.





voice: "The region where we are located is here. It's in the same shape and orientation relative to Earth as the Firefox Logo."
me: "How high up is it off the surface?"
voice: "No, it's not in 3D space. It is folded in another dimension, but that's the shape. Wait, don't let the person sitting next to you see that or know it's from me. Turn the paper over, I'm going to fill it with some garbage...let them see that. Then move away."

I turned the paper over, and it filled up with ads and other things. I got up from the desk and moved to the other side of the room.

voice: "Here is an equation, show this to Paul."

(Note: I know several Pauls and didn't know who was meant by this at the time, though it occurs to me that I know of a physicist named Paul who studies the area and might be able to follow a dimension-folding equation. The equation itself was not very "tall" but it was very wide, and had a lot of symbols in it...I specifically remember one that looked like a small cursive lowercase "L")

me: "That equation is just too much for me to remember at this point, I'm going to wake up soon. If you'd shown me earlier I'd have had longer to focus. Do you have any way to trace or contact me, like via a phone or email?"

A phone next to me on the desk rang, I picked it up.

me: "Hello?"
voice: "Hi!"
me: "Well, I mean, here it seems you can make words appear on paper. That's not what I mean...I'm talking about calling me after I've woken up."