Carl and Mae (what do you mean I’m not a lap dog?)

Mae on my knee

Mae under my work table

Mae with remainder of her rope toy

Ephesians 2:8-9 English Standard Version (ESV)

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

I have always had a substantial interest in my dreams because past experiences have taught me they are far more than what most researchers know.

For example, when I was younger, I used to frequently have lucid dreams, and once I became lucid in a dream I could go anywhere I wanted just by thinking about it.  I wanted to understand if I could get real information about places I went to so I devised an experiment.  The experiment was simple, I would go somewhere I hadn’t been but that was close enough to drive to, make a mental note of the surroundings and write it down upon wakening, then drive there and see if it matched what I saw, and it did.

Many of the things you see on Eskimo North today I first saw in dreams in the early days of my BBS.  Back when my computer was a Trs-80 model III, a little 2 Mhz box with 48k of RAM, a screen that was black-and-white with a total of 16 lines of text, 64 characters wide, and block graphics that had a resolution of 128 x 192, each block could be on or off and actually it wasn’t real graphics, it just characters that divided the cell up into a 2×3 grid with an ASCII value mapped to each possible combination.  Well, it wasn’t actually ASCII but it was ASCII values with the high bit turned on.

While I had this simple machine with text-only applications, e-mail, messages, and some text games, I kept having dreams where machines were networked together and you could talk all over the globe, and where there was full motion high resolution colour video and audio and people interacted across great distances this way, and people of common interest found each other this way, and it was these dreams where I saw the potential for this technology that drove me to create what I saw.

So the first thing I do when I wake up is try to remember my dreams and if they aren’t completely trivial, record them.

I watched a program on Nova about dreams, how there are actually two types of dreams, those that occur during REM sleep (it used to be we thought we only dreamed during REM sleep), and those that occur during non-REM sleep.  And it seemed that one type seemed to involve memory consolidation and the other projection into the future.  There was no mention of the type of lucid dream I described earlier which I think are the most interesting of all.

They also said that people tended to dream more when they are depressed, not my personal experience, I seem to have about the same regardless of my mental state though there are nights when every time I wake up it is out of an intense dream, and there are others where I have no memories of dreams at all, last night was one of the latter.  Sometimes I find the converse to be true, it’s easier to be in a good mood when I see some clear path for moving forward, more difficult when I don’t, and dreams tend to help with that.

On Facebook there is a Fox story regarding the suspension of Brian Williams for six months because he’s telling a story about Iraq in a way in which NBC doesn’t approve.  I tried to comment on this three times, and each time my comment disappeared so I thought I’d bring it up somewhere that Fox doesn’t have control over.

Fox News Story regarding Brian Williams

I just assumed this was Fox because it was a fox story.  It seemed so like them, but this is NBC.  What is the world coming to.

My cold has reached a point where it seems to change over several hours.  There will be times now when I can actually breath through both nostrils, speak without snot gurgle, and generally feel well, and times when my right side plugs up bad, generates mass quantities of mucous which then runs down and irritates my throat and screws up my voice.  This seems to change over about a three hour period.  At least mostly I’ve been able to sleep.

Initially I was on a sandy beach with a geography similar to Golden Gardens only much more expansive and sandy with sand going partially up the hill to the West.

Then up on the hill to the West as the sand faded into normal soil there was a big Chinese housing development that wasn’t finished on the Northern portion.  Oddly, this development included some liquid fuel piping infrastructure such that something like gasoline could be distributed to each unit’s parking space.  The Northern portion had this piping already in place but did not have the housing units completed.  This made it an ideal place from which to steal fuel, something not lost on the Russian Gangs.  These guys were into stealing it in massive quantities to sell and make money.  They were also into preserving their enterprise by eliminating anyone who might happen to find out what they were up to, which I did.

I had some kind of personal helicopter device, it was a device you strap on and it had enough fan power to lift an individual very high, way above the clouds. It had enough thrust that it could lift three people, (me and two hanging on) several hundred feet.  It was a green hybrid helicopter device, it ran off of gasoline but it had a battery pack that would keep it going for several minutes after the small plastic gasoline tank that held maybe a quarter, ran out, so that you could come down gently instead of suddenly plummeting to the ground.

To the South of the beach and Chinese housing development was an urban area of mixed hi-rise housing and commercial buildings in a state of semi-decay.  Some buildings were occupied, some were not.  Some buildings and lots were under construction.  Other lots and buildings were in a state of decay, unoccupied, windows and sometimes parts of walls broken out.

I was in the North-Westerly most portion of the Chinese housing development when I came across a young woman, maybe in her early 20’s, thin, long dark hair, perhaps of Italian descent, who was obviously distressed in an otherwise mostly unoccupied portion of the complex.  Seems that we shared a common problem, both of us had observed the Russian Gang stealing fuel, and they had observed us observing them and had a desire to put us out of our misery.

I used my personal helicopter device to lift us both out of there and set us down in the urban area to the North.  It was there I met her male partner, a young man, also thin and dark but with short hair, wearing a black long trench coat.  We collectively decided to go on a escapade of thrill trespassing using my personal helicopter device.  The initial plan was to set down on the rooftops of some of these semi-occupied buildings however we didn’t have enough lift to haul three people to the top, instead settled for landing on a balcony about 27 stories up.  We weren’t sure if that floor was occupied or not.  We came to kind of a dead end with no external view.  Fortunately, my personal helicopter device came equipped with a drilling device that would drill about a six inch hole through just about anything.  We drilled through walls and found one that was external.  Then we drilled a bunch of holes and kicked out the remaining wall and used it to launch from and go back to a place on the ground.

Once on the ground, I found a place that sold batteries for my personal helicopter device that would extend the electric only operation to about fifteen minutes.  This was great as it would just about double my total flight time.  I woke up out of the dream at this point.

Full screen this video, stare at it for the specified 20 seconds, then look at someone’s face, or your hand.  This is cool.

My voice is better, not normal, but not gone or totally froggy as it was.  The left nasal passage is totally clear, right side still partially blocked, but no more blood and the mucous production is slowing down.  Another month or two and I should be good.

I woke up from a ZOMBIE DREAM this morning.

The rules for infection were the usual, you had to get bitten.

Killing them required Windex.  That’s right, the window cleaner!

Bothell had been infected, so had Portland.  We had just completed a weeks vacation in Portland where in the process of trying to find a rental truck we encountered them.  I dunno how I discovered Windex would kill them but I did.  But unfortunately, I quickly exhausted my supply of Windex, and by this time the whole city was pretty much taken over so going into a store there to look for Windex was a no-go.  Instead, we were trying to get out of the city and look for an uninfected store in the suburbs to buy out their entire inventory of Windex refills and sprayers to battle Zombies but that’s when I awoke from the dream, when it was just getting fun!

Well, the earlier part was fun too, see we had taken a cruise ship to Portland of all places, but acquired so much junk at various surplus and antique stores we had to rent a truck to move it all from our hotel room to our ship for our return journey.

I dare anyone to psychoanalyse that!

Tonight was a lot like last night, slept in about 1-1/2 hour fits interspersed with periods of having to get up and clear my nasal passages.  Around 3:30am bloody snot in abundance from the left side, but now I can actually get air through it most of the time.  Voice is getting better.  This cold is moving from the unbearable to the merely annoying.

Today had to report to my CCO, only two more times and the 2nd time will be my out take where I’ll get to return to something akin to a normal life again.  With any luck I might actually be healthy by then.