Afternoon Astral Projection & Lap Of Luxury

  • After getting not nearly enough sleep last night, I slipped into the study lounge around 11:30 and, after reading some of Greg Egan's Diaspora, fell into a light nap (ideal for lucid dreaming). I awaken in the lounge, other students silently scribbling or reading. Muted sunlight slants in through the window slats, warming my body sprawled on the couch. Then I wake again, still on the couch, fellow students still scribbling. And again. And again. One of those classic dreams where you go through a seemingly endless series of false awakenings. Dreams inside dreams inside dreams. For my own psyche, these inevitably serve as a kind of lesson or selection effect. It repeats until I become aware enough to do something different. So I finally wise up and rise from the couch upon my next iteration. I remember that I have been planning a specific act to perform while lucid. Walking out of the lounge I look for a quiet spot where I can sit in solitude. Unfortunately the couch I am sleeping on is hard and uncomfortable, so I am not firmly planted in the dream reality. I find a place and sit cross-legged with my back against a wall. Closing my eyes, I slow my breathing to my accustomed two breaths per minute. My intention is to practice some dream meditation as a launching pad for astral projection. But the hard couch foils my plans and I wake for the last time in the reality I haven't yet managed to wake up from. (Well, at least not permanently.)

  • Later that night... I am staying with my girlfriend in a luxurious guest house behind a new mansion her parents have bought. The building is white with Roman columns and filled with antique furniture. What we are really interested in, though, is the adjacent bath house. Inside there's a sauna and two huge tubs. Genery gets the big one going with hot water and we climb in for a relaxing soak. Later that night we're going to the theatre.

Midsummer, lousy weather. Me partying with some friends in a park, gauzy white shirts transparent from the intermittent rain. Weather gets worse, really dark clouds gather. Distant thunderclaps can be heard over the ghettoblaster and laughter. My friends don't seem as affected by the rain as I. Suddenly, the storm is right on top of us, and we decide to take the party somewhere indoorsy. It seems like we are in an enormous dream-version of HumlegÄrden, Stockholm, because we decide to head for a canopied café at Stureplan, whis is located a hundred real meters from where we are having the picnic. In the dream, the distance is much greater and on every side of us the view of the city is obscured by small, grassy hills. We begin walking, and suddenly my phone rings. An ex (or something) from way back. We exchange formal greetings.

After that, all conversation is impossible. We both stand silent in different parts of the country, saying nothing. The tone of her voice during the initial greeting spiel comes back to me - she sounded more that a little

I lack a word.

...bereaved? Does she want me to say something trivial, to make her laugh? I can't.

Unable to hang up, I quickly lag behind the others and soon find myself all alone in a great green-gray field in an enormous park in a very big city, with someone I care a lot (A little? Enough?) about on the phone.

Wake up with a severe cold.

Dream about work #42

It was a normal, busy day at work except for the new supervisor-type person that I had just trained seemed to be awfully interested in everything that I was doing, and was more than a little annoying.

My manager came around to tell me to watch three people with high average handle times and I said ok until I realized that each one's AHT was under 10 minutes and 30 seconds. One of such was an old supervisor that had come back and they made him take customer calls again, and he was pissed off so he would hose and close each call he got so that when the customer would call back, angry, into the tech support number it always happened to go to another tech, Alex, who would come to my desk each time saying, he did it again.

So when the going gets tough, the tough get going to the bathroom.

However, this was not your ordinary trip to the bathroom. First of all, this was one of those you better RUN or you are going to do something very unpleasant to your pants types of bathroom emergencies. Second of all, someone came looking for me, wanting to ask me a question. In the bathroom. With my pants down wiping my bottom. I was half embarrassed because he was really cute, and half ready to kick his ass. I wanted to tell him to wait until I was done, but I couldn't. Instead I finished the job with him in there and answered his question.

I went back to the floor and realized that another one of the agents on my team (one that's just a few fries short of a happy meal) had left a note on his computer telling me that he was at lunch. It read:

FUCK OFF HE FERGET JOHN FORGET HE FORGOT TO TEL ME IT WAS LUNCH TIM.

My manager returned to my desk and asked me if I was keeping an eye on that AHT and I told him that it was all under control. As for the little letter, I didn't know what to do about it, so I went on break and told my friends. They were highly amused and they suggested that I laugh at him when he came back. I thought that would be mean so I woke up.


Dream about work #65536
Dream about work #6969

Joe and I are floating down the road. It looks like a normal road, but it's really liquid. We have cork shoes. Joe's back is broad enough to be a pretty good sail, so we're cruising along at 5 knots an hour. (in my dream this is really fast. I have no idea how fast a knot is.) We get on the bus, whose floor is also liquid. It's pretty crowded and people keep splashing the floor around by accident. Finally we find a seat in the back. (the seats are thankfully solid.) Everyone in the row behind us is asleep. Joe starts poking one of them - he doesn't look familiar but when he wakes up he turns in to his brother. "Oh good!" I say. "I can finally return your pinking shears!" I pull a nice pair of pinking shears out of my purse. "Oh, that's great, I'll need these later too." he says, and puts them away carefully in the old leather pinking shear holster he has on his belt. (it doubles as a guitar strap. all in all, it makes him look like a whiz-bang space ranger.) Holding hands, joe and his brother fall asleep again. I'm feeling too bouncy to sleep, so I sit upside down in my seat, feet in the air. I notice that there are fish in the floor trying to nibble on joe's police shoes. I shoo them away by making cat noises. This is immensely tiring; I turn rightside up and lean on joe and promptly fall asleep. Oddly, this is when I wake up.

A man and a woman embrace, ready to kiss. As they draw closer, the man's head withdraws into his torso leaving a gaping black hole ringed with razor-sharp teeth. He lunges forward, engulfing his partner's head and biting it off with a snap. Her headless body collapses to the ground, blood spurting from the ragged wound. Within seconds a new cybernetic head has grown in its place.

Oddly enough, this doesn't alarm me in the slightest though I am a bit surprised.

Scarlet Life played a last-minute special show at the Luggage Store. It was packed and they sounded great, but I spent most of the show in the back talking to Wobbly. Afterwards I wanted to buy a CD from the band but they didn't have any. I told them how I had found a couple of songs on Napster. They were all small nerdy people, like the members of Cubby Creatures (I remember making this comparison in my dream). It was funny, seeing how their look didn't match the look that their sound evoked.

Then I helped Ernesto clean up. It was a Saturday afternoon and everything looked different. The place looked like a ratty basement. Brick walls, ratty carpet (which is not what the Luggage Store really looks like). I took it all in stride in the dream, and assumed it was just because it was a Saturday afternoon. Ah, the incredible credibility of dream facts... you just accept everything in dreams. Isn't that amazing?

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