Yes, grasping the comforter between your legs and contorting yourself so that your head is at the foot of the bed is the path to enlightenment!

What's that? You're naked? Of course! Did the Buddha wear clothes?

yes. well. this night i had a weird dream. i dreamt that i was riding in a big white van in the city i live in with a friends friend and two of his female friends. we stopped at some grassy clearing and somehow i got connected to the internet there. i think it was from a laptop, but i'm not really sure were the outlet was. i connected to final realms - which is the mud i play on - and made a new character. i begun to walk around in the world and came a cross a much more high-levelled character which was really hurt, so i killed him, and took all his eq and all other high-levelled chars on the mud started to complain on me but i didn't really care. i had a cool mithril chainmail armour that gave me -87 ac and nothing could stop me, so i killed one other character too, but then nobody complained at me, i guess they feared me - a level 5 character who kills level 50 characters like nothing - too much to bother :)

aah how i which that dream could come true.

I now, in a way I can't describe, am somewhat bothered by the beginning of this dream- it started out with me logged into a future version of E2 (perhaps, by then, it was E4 or something like that. It left with the same, strange and eerie sense that one gets when they dream in French for the first time after having taken two semesters of the language).

I was looking through the Node Search feature to see if a particular title had been taken yet- "Memory is best served when chilled." The color scheme of entries showed yellow, blue, red, green, orange and gray- perhaps other colors too. At the top of the catergory lists were Person, Place, Thing, Idea, Story, Rant, Audio, and Video. No nodes with the title I'd submitted were in existence, so I took that as a good sign and opened my Dreamweaver 7 program to begin writing the WU.

I don't recall the body of the entry, but as soon as I completed it, I tried to create the node "Memory is best served when chilled"- and then Everything crashed. It was down for two hours and not even the Word Bot was active. Someone had shoved a mean, dark, ceramic blade into the skull of E4 and swirled it around to scramble the circuits, I guess. That was the way Nate's son put it, who was now in control of E4, since Nate had retired and was himself a casual noder in his textronic paradise.

When E4 was finally back up and running, an explanation of what caused the crash stared coldly at me from the screen: "Sorry for the inconvenience," it said in bold text. "The law of averages finally caught up with us here at Everything. Doubtless you've heard that saying, 'If you put 100 monkeys in a room, each of them with a typewriter, and gave them enough time, they'd eventually come up with Shakespeare's Hamlet, even though they don't know a word of English.' Well, something like that finally happened here. Two people came up with the same node title at the exact same time and it gave our very delicate, sensitive database a heart attack.

"The node title in question is 'Memory is best served when chilled', created in synchronicity by NightShadow (long-time user who still refuses to let us promote him to Editor) and daddy_fleir, who has been with us longer than NightShadow and isn't very keen on being in the limelight. While these two gentlemen are indeed responsible for causing our system crash, we are awarding both of them 100 XP on general principle; serendipity is something we appreciate here at E4, and we do not punish it. We leave the punishments to the EDB, whose AI shell is still hungry and has recently eaten my father's avatar as a breakfast snack and has been making noises about going after WonkoDSane next (Wonko has been unavailable for comment in this regard, except to say that we were idiots to give the EDB free will in the first place). Please accept our sincere apologies for not having been able to anticipate how or when this strange conflux of two minds meeting in the exact same place could occur. It did, we were caught flat footed, Dad has hired a team of specialists to make sure it won't happen again. Thank you for your patience."

Well, needless to say, I was shocked. Mortified even. Many, many years ago, in my youth I'd always wondered what would happen if I bumped, physically and literally, into someone muttering the same exact words as me under their breath. It felt like someone had walked on my grave, me still a warm-bodied meat-eater. I didn't bother to try chatting this momentary doppleganger up in the Catbox as it seemed pointless to me at the time, but I did go ahead and post my WU as quickly as possible. I wanted first dibbs on that nodeshell, dammit.

E4 crashed again, almost immediately after I hit the "Submit" button. Who knew?

 

After E4 got back up, for the second time, I was sent a curt and terse message from Nate, Jr. It said that the same message was being sent to daddy_fleir for the sake of synchronicity and that if it happened again, we were both in danger of being evicted from E4 for a week as punishment. "Put the psionics or whatever it is to rest, both of you, and use the Catbox for the next week or so to ask if a nodeshell is being reserved by either of you and fight it out there!" I merely shrugged, sent a reply back ("Okay.") and was about to log out when I got another message sent through the E4 server- it was my friend, who is named after a car, but isn't, and prefers to remain unnamed. "Going to Borders. Wanna a ride?"

My car had been dead for a month and I was immobile. Luckily I was still living off the money from a book deal made last year, so I wasn't exactly bothered by being carless- I just hadn't taken the time to go out and buy a new one. Maybe one of those disposable Hondas that everyone keeps talking about? Sure, they last only a couple years and there's no way to repair any damage done to it because the body is all one part, but for $2,000 I'm willing to take my chances. "Sure," I told her, "I'll go with you if you'd like to come pick me up. Now?"

"Now. I'm in your parking lot." She was using her Net Phone to access E4 from a parking place in front of my apartment. This meant she knows me too well. She knew I'd leap at the chance to get outta the apartment.

"Be right down. Lemme put on some pants."

"Shorts."

"Beg pardon?"

"Shorts. It's hot outside. Enjoy the weather. The park is next after Borders."

"*sigh* Okay, shorts it is. Be down in a minute."

I logged off. daddy_fleir was still logged on, but was still dutifully ignoring me as much as I was ignoring him.

 

My friend and I walked into Borders, looking through the Sci-Fi section first as we always do. William Gibson, that old powerhouse of Sci-Fi, was sitting at a booth, alone and quiet with himself, surrounded by stacks of his newest book, "Rational Code." Apparently he was there on a book signing. My friend and I noticed him and looked at each other with surprise and also concern. Here he was, our liteary hero, and he was sitting alone at his own book signing. A crime had been committed. A travesty was in our midst. The world toppled at odd angles. This should not be. We approached him, the genuis that was William Gibson.

"Mister Gibson-?" my friend started, then clapped her mouth shut in astonishment. Gibson had a laptop, one of those retro-fit jobs that looked like it came out of the late 1990s but was packed to the gills with modern goodies. We recognized him from the back covers of all his books. He was sitting perpendicular to us and logged onto, of all things, E4. He was playing in the kitty litter, or what she and I affectionately called it, otherwise known as the Chatterbox. "Sir?" she said carefully, "You're a noder, too? Wow."

Gibson looked up from his screen, genuinely glad to be graced with the presence of any human being whatsoever. "Yeah," he said with a voice that suited him perfectly, deep and strong. "Have been for a long time. You're noders? Name's 'daddy fleir.'" He held out his hand, expecting one of us to shake it in greeting.

My friend missed the reference entirely, but I caught it like the words were magically appearing in the air, dossed in Day-Glo. I slung my arm around her shoulders quickly and started to turn us away. "Pleasure to meet you, Mister Gibson. Sorry we can't stay, but something just came up. Have a pleasant stay in our fair city. Bye." I rushed us away from him hurriedly.

As I carted my friend away, she protested, sputtering like an old Volkswagen. "But-but... Jay! Are you insane? That was William Gibson!"

"I know," I muttered under my breath, out of the corner of my mouth, through tight lips. "But he's also daddy fleir, the same guy who... oh, hell. It's tough to explain." I reached into her jacket pocket unceremoniously and yanked out her Net Phone, a move that completely baffled her. "Here," I shoved it at her, "Log on and read Nate, Jr's daylog. That'll explain everything."

"What?" It didn't make any sense to her.

"Just do it," I told her. "Trust me."

We stood outside, under the hot sun and degrading ozone layer, as she logged in and began reading. A moment or two later she snapped the phone shut and just looked at me with a strange expression. Finally, she said, "You never cease to amaze me, Jay. All right. You stay here, but I'm going to go meet the god of sci-fi. See you at the car." With that, she left me standing there, outside Borders Books and Media (they changed only slightly over the years).

I took a cigarette out and began smoking it, not caring that it was against the law to smoke tobacco products in plain view of a store front. My nerves were wrecked.

Reoccuring dream theme again. Not being ready to leave a place when the deadline is approaching. Was throwing a birthday party for my son at some cabin/resort area. My cousins were there. All of a sudden it was check-out time and I didn't have anything packed. Packing up to leave took forever, I was completely unorganized and couldn't seem to make headway getting my things ready to get out.

Later the dream switched to my grandparent's house and I was trying to clean up the residue from the party (but it had switched to a Christmas theme), from a small travel trailer. Once again, however, the prevailing mood and actions were a low key panic that the time to be gone was approaching and I wasn't ready, or seemingly ready to be making headway at getting ready to leave.

Dimestore dream interpretation: I don't feel that I'm where I should be at this stage in my life. I have kids, am married, own a home....I'm at a new stage in my life. I should be exiting the teenager/young adult stage, but I don't seem to be able to FEEL like a grownup. I don't seem to be organized, or keep control of my bills, or keep my house and yard like I want to/should. Aha!! I think that's the crux of it. In my dream, I am having to leave a place because someone else says I should. It's checkout time, and I'm not ready, and can't seem to get ready. It's the same in life, society says I SHOULD have my shit together, but I don't and I don't really want to, and don't seem to be able to. Hehehe....guess I'll just ask for an extension.

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