My Crazy, Wild, Wonderful Dreams

How can I describe the dreams of last night?

There was a ship, an army transport with walls impossibly high, where I suffered under a psychotic drill sergeant who wanted to throw my belongings and me over the side and into the steel-grey floor of the world, and where I chatted with angels and gods on the fantail.

Discontinuity

That took me, in some way I wish I remembered, to an art museum like the Californian one, but different and darker and heavier, where I played a children’s card game with an evildoer (in a huge black marble room with a stone sculpture of pagan gods) for the fate of the world. Then he took me (we weren’t finished) to a huge black stone, with lines in it like the London Underground and huge colored zones, and challenged me to figure out where in the network of torture chambers my good friend Charlie was being held. After much thought, I picked the Red Zone, and my parents and I started out for

Discontinuity

For the airport, where a friendly policeman escorted us through the hallway on one side of the Pit and asked chummy questions about where we’d come from. I left them at an old-style computer lab, where a voice cried out desperately that no one had ever used it, and would I please be the first? I jumped over the pit to the floor below and landed on a floor of glass. I looked through a telescope and saw a man with three ears and two heads, and when I reassured him that he was okay, he turned into toasted cheese and covered the planet Mars. I ran to the secret underground computer chamber, with walls made of sandy rock like Indiana Jones’, and looked through all my belongings from the year 2009, and opened a drawer that told me it held the fate of Germany inside and it must not be opened for fifty more years. I had to write something and put it in the drawer I became aware of the world expanding around me, perceived that there was wind and rain and clouds and trees and sky and

Discontinuity

I was outside the compound, firing mortar shells in and dodging return fire out, as part of the Eagles-Giants football rivalry turned warfare. I guess I was on the Giants’ team, because I finally got lucky and scored a direct hit on the Philadelphia Museum of Art, blowing up a priceless painting of Abraham Lincoln that I’d somehow seen before.

Reset, reset, reset

I made myself go back to the place I’d started and go shell the museum again, but this time without blowing up the painting. But this time I walked into the compound and through and out of it, into the rain forest outside, and found

Reset

(The dream just started resetting every so often from there. I have no idea what I found the first time.)

The second time I was a French sculptor with my wife. I ran out of the garden and turned left at the primal stone, then turned for the hill over which the sky was breaking. I found a cult of women trying to make themselves immortal in a complicated ritual involving the blood of Prince Fielder, but I seized a sword and changed the flows so as to make Prince immortal instead, and he looked at me with huge brown eyes and said he wouldn’t thank me. Then I crept up the hill and became a chauffeur, watched the royal court get squashed under a falling pillar and then killed the jester in a knife fight.

Atop the hill was a cult of women who worshiped the Adele penguin, and I guess I got to choose who was the high priestess. I cycled through photos of all of them, but woke up before making any final decision.

Shantih shantih shantih

One Hundred Fireworks In The Night

Yesterday evening, I found myself on a US Airways jumbo jet, bound from Phoenix, Arizona to Milwaukee. For a long time, I had dreamed of flying over the country on the night of July 4th and seeing all the fireworks below. I brought binoculars and a camera with video capability. The following are the notes I scrawled in my copy of The Elegant Universe, in the margins of Chapter 4 where Brian Greene talks about quantum probabilities. 

 Huge, perfect circles of light that would bloom into being for a second or two and then disappear forever. Some were small, barely visible even at short distances; others were plainly visible and enormous, the size of my thumbnail in the binoculars even at hundreds (probably more like 12-75 at most) of miles' distance. Up close, they must have been hundreds of feet wide.

Sometimes, the town was totally invisible to the naked eye, noticeable only by the brief flashes of white and red brilliance. Tiny sparks and balls of light coming suddenly into being and disappearing without a trace of their passage. (I saw at least two towns that way, streetlights visible only upon examination with binoculars.)

If all the conditions were right, the town near to me and the fireworks large, I could see astonishing details. One giant ball, as big as the Moon from the Earth, turned bright red and sparkled for five or six seconds before succumbing to darkness, its remnants crackling and popping in the air like cosmic glitter.

Smaller towns usually had just one or two sources of light, but larger cities could have 4, 5 or even more. One large city had at least eight, twinkling dots that flickered on and off like fireflies. One massive city had dozens! Dozens of sources flitting in and out of existence like luminescent ghosts. Flashing and popping all over the city.

Another enormous city boasted at least forty point-sources, flickering all at once like a perpetual grand finale. As each borough or suburb or municipality sent up its own fireworks, the cumulative effect was indescribable. (It reminded me of watching meteor showers on Washington Island, random rays of light streaking across the sky, appearing and vanishing like heavenly blind-man's-bluff.) The entire city was sending up bursts of radiance, on and off throwing their messages out into the dark. I think we passed through the "finale zone" as we were going over that city, where everyone in the entire place was sending up their final celebrations at about the same time. It was a cacophony of light, silent and beautiful and full of joy.