Plaidophile

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Last night I dreamt that I was completely unprepared for my Japanese class final next week, and that I'd completely forgotten to go all semester. This was a dream I would often have in the time running up to finals in college and grad school, probably as a way for my subconscious to remind me not to miss a final exam.

Of course, the stupid thing is I'm not even taking a Japanese class — many of my coworkers are, though, and their final is of course next week.

I didn't die. I did have a strange dream about Muni though — due to a miscommunication with a couple friends I ended up in a part of town where it would have taken me 15 hours to get to the place I was supposed to be in half an hour. The place being some sort of "beneficial mad science" convention.

I still feel a little queasy but not like I'm going to make a mess all over the place (on either end), so I guess my lunch plans are unaffected.

I dreamed that for some reason I bought an apartment in an old Victorian building with a cake shop. The cake shop owner would constantly take liberties with my personal space and stuff, such as coming into my apartment and disconnecting my laptop so she could hook hers up to my monitor. She thought this was okay because she was working on an elaborate tangerine cake for me.

The previous owners had decided to partially renovate the bathrooms, and put up ugly paper-backed photo-laminate paneling, which had to go. Dr. Beverly Crusher beamed down from the Enterprise to help me assess the situation.

Also I think the cake shop owner turned out to be Dr. Crusher's mom or something.

I dreamt I was in a team cooking reality show (along the lines of Hell's Kitchen or Chopped). There were several teams of 5. Our challenge was to taste several sandwiches and then to perfectly reproduce one of them within a time limit. The one we selected was pretty easy because its contents were along a theme (red rye, red onions, beets, red lettuce, and so on). While my teammates happily accepted my input, when it came to actually doing anything, every task was so trivial that I kept getting pushed out of the way, and I ended up spending the whole challenge working on something completely unrelated. So of course, both the presiding chef and myself were concerned about me not doing anything, and I felt that my position on the show was in peril.

I had a fairly disturbing dream that I'd had a stroke. As a result, I could no longer draw any of my characters anymore (specifically I kept trying to draw Tamu but he kept on coming out like Homer Simpson). So I tried going down to the liquor store to buy some gin and instead I ended up paying $40 for a 6-pack of Tequiza, and when I got back to my apartment I couldn't remember what floor I lived on and the elevator had been turned into some sort of cable car which made a circuitous path through nearby office spaces and it was all very confusing. Then I thought someone had drank all the Tequiza and I couldn't really comprehend if the bottles had any contents or not, so I went back to the liquor store and the salesman was all, "No, see, that's a bottle of Tanqueray, and it's full!" and it was. And then I somehow got back home and my roommate drank it all anyway.

A young alcoholic developed diabetes. He needed to get an insulin pump, but this was stolen by an escaped convict who had recently become a pirate after coming across a derelict airship. Somehow I got caught up in the middle.

At first I was apparently friends with the pirate (who, incidentally, had a wooden leg and an eyepatch, but he was still wearing his orange prison jumper) because I thought the young alcoholic was a bit of a dick. But then I realized he was dying and couldn't get another insulin pump. I pursued him (mostly by hovertrain) until we both ended up at my parents' house. There was a long negotiation involving much cannon fire and me hiding behind a scrawny tree, but I appealed to his humanity (with the help of a friendly neighborhood sniper), and asked him (via SMS) to please give up the insulin pump; "consider it a charitable contribution, although I don't think you can take a tax deduction on it."

He realized the error of his ways, and left the insulin pump behind as he flew off to plunder loot from those who deserved a good plundering.

In the new Star Trek movie, the crew of the Enterprise lands on a cartoon planet, which turns them into cartoon characters. In particular, Chekov becomes Timon (from The Lion King) and starts singing the hook to The Lion Sleeps Tonight, badly. This attracts the attention of the local predators, and a swarm of raptors converges on them. (Of course they are feathered, and driving in off-road vehicles.)

I watched it on TV, and due to broadcast licensing issues with the music, Chekov/Timon couldn't even sing the actual Lion Sleeps Tonight hook which made it even funnier, somehow.

I had these dreams last night:

1. I was at a dinner party somewhere in California with several of my friends from Seattle, including Libbie, Will, and Jenn. For some reason Will was going through my luggage and he found some gray-market estrogen, which he proceeded to do lines of (cocaine-style), and then he licked the mirror when he was done. Then I went back to the hotel (which was based on the one I was staying in), and in my room someone had left a two-piece bikini. It was too small for me, though, and the housekeeping staff (played by my friend Allison back in Las Cruces!) said it wasn't mine anyway. I looked in the bathroom and it was entirely filled with various clothes, mostly in a big pile on the floor, some hung up on hooks, some on partial-body mannequins, and more and more kept on piling in and was about to bury me, so I ran out of the bathroom. The other side of the bathroom wall was a gigantic wall-sized control panel for the air conditioner, which was really loud.
2. I was wandering around downtown San Francisco, and saw some guys fooling around with a payphone, attaching stuff to it. I recognized them and what they were doing from the current (in-dream) cover story of Make Magazine — they were hooking up a pre-paid cellphone to it so that people could make calls to it, as a work of interactive art. They had put one cellphone (some low-end Nokia) into a pedestal in an illuminated cut-out on the top of the phone with an instruction panel, and they had another cellphone (a Samsung) in a Commodore DS-10 VoIP Gateway Box, which looked a lot like a C64GS. Hooked up to it was a slimline version of the Amiga 1200, which the main artist (who was Finnish) was using to reprogram the phone. I chatted with them about the DS-10 VoIP Gateway and asked if it only worked with the Samsung ("no, it's a generic connector that works with all Korean phones, Samsung and LG") and we lamented about how it never actually existed, since Commodore went out of business several years before VoIP was even invented.

I dreamt I was living in a piece of "edutainment" software. My job was to help the two young goldfish (who were living in a deep river) keep their ecosystem in balance. Apparently they liked burying the Chaos Emeralds (which they stole from Sonic the Hedgehog) under giant planks of plywood which they couldn't lift and so I had to solve their dumb puzzles to know where to position this specialized plywood-sheet-lifter. Also I lost the clues for how to unlock the padlocks they put on the last plank, but fortunately the locks were cheap and/or there was a bug in the game so I could force them open by just putting the key into the second hole first.

Apparently, when goldfish get all seven Chaos Emeralds, they are rewarded with electric guitars. Their electric guitars are tiny and hard to play and have built-in cheap reverbs which you can't turn off.

I dreamt that I was poking around on the Dreamhost control panel and found a little tutorial about how to make a metallic bezel for tables on your webpage. They had a little table-design applet and an accompanying video to explain the process — after designing the table, which involved manually coming up with a connectivity graph, they would use this graph to set up an electroplating rig (by hand) and lovingly plate the table bezel by hand and then take a digital photograph for you to use.

Snake was in a convenience store with his retarded pal Goro (who was working in the sanitation department) to buy some ice cream, when Superfly Johnson and CJ held the convenience store up. So it was up to Snake to sneak around the shelves of overpriced candy and bust heads.

(Goro like ice cream.)

Last night I had a dream that someone (my identical twin sister, I think) was lecturing me that dreams were meaningless.

Then I got a haircut at the community college. It was terrible. Then I got to the house that I had just bought and discovered I had an infestation of informational pamphlet droppers.

Last night I had a dream which was pretty convoluted and I don't remember much of it, but one salient plot-point was that for whatever reason, the ACM kept on sending me SIGGRAPH proceedings even though I was no longer an ACM member.

The bizarre thing was when I got home today, I had a large padded envelope from the ACM: which had the latest SIGGRAPH proceedings in it! (Specifically the "full conference DVD-ROM" set with all the papers, sketches, art gallery, and who knows what else on it.)

I haven't been an ACM member for two years and when I was a member it was pretty unreliable as to whether I got the proceedings or not (sometimes I wouldn't get them at all, sometimes I'd get two or three sets). Now that I haven't been sending them money for a while, I'm actually getting this stuff that I don't care about anymore. And having a dream about it before it happens. Peculiar.

I was up a bit early and so I decided to watch cartoons. The cartoon which came up was some version of Superman, except Superman's voice was that of Brock's (from Venture Bros.). He was building a flying cage platform to capture the active-resistance hippie robot drones (with laser beams) which were about to wreak havoc on Republican City, with the assistance of about 12 army men who he had flown up to the flying platform personally. In some brilliant move, Superman decided that sitting inside the cage trap was the best place for him and the army men when the robot drones arrived, and started shooting at everything.

"Oh no, now I'm going to be depressed," said Superman. "I should fax in a prescription with my SUPER FAX POWERS." He closed his eyes and put his fingers to his temples, and Aquaman-style 'thought waves' came out. Then the robot drones were in the cage and powering up to shoot everything, and he flew out the escape hatch above.

"Hey, wait!!!" shouted an army man.

I was trying to find my way to Peter Jackson's gaming party somewhere in the middle of nowhere near El Paso, TX. Because the people I was with were being totally unhelpful, I decided to try to find my own way instead.

I was running through some random corn field when I met Cherry.

I had a pretty long and complex dream last night.

My subconscious has gone into game design mode again.

So, since I've had this cold/sinus infection/bronchitis/blah stuff going on, I've lately been taking a Sudafed Nighttime before going to bed, which makes for a rather interesting experience. It's basically a sleeping pill with pseudoephedrine (which is a bit of a stimulant which I sometimes take to get high even when I don't need a decongestant).

The thing is that, well, I don't know if this is normal, but when it starts to kick in, I get hypnagogic hallucinations, only without the sleep-paralysis precursors. So it's like I'm dreaming while I'm really awake, and not just in a half-awake state.