I love dreaming. The dream mind is an incredible canvas. Some of the crap that happens in dreams just blows me away.
I've had vivid dreams every night for the last three weeks since I moved into the new apartment here. Last night was no exception. Yesterday evening, I was feeling particularly thoughtful. I started reading the book Siddhartha again (I read it once a year or two ago). I also spent a bit of time reading about and sending an email to some friends about about next weekend's trip down to SF to go to the California Academy of Sciences to see, primarily, the planetarium. I read an article about it a while back talking about how state of the art it is, and the incredible voyage through the universe they take you on. I finished up the evening by taking some time, the first in a long while, really, to meditate and try to clear my brain, and then taking a shower.
So the first thing I remember from my dream was an astronomical tidal and weather simulation, literally. I had no awareness of having a body, the only thing in my awareness was this simulation going on in my brain. The simulation, I believe, was an analysis of the effects different, sometimes radical, orbits of the moon around the earth on tidal and weather patterns. It was complete with vector field maps of wind speeds and directions across the curved surface of the earth, as well as the tsunami wave patterns around the globe associated w/ the different lunar orbits. It seems as though there was a lot more stuff going on in the dream that I can't recall now, nor can I begin to portray how incredible it was to experience this stuff in a couple paragraphs. I can't say that there was a rhyme or rhythm to the order or importance in how I approached each part of the simulation; it was probably more like playing in the sandbox doing random stuff than anything, and just as unscientific, as well ;-P.
The next thing I remember after the simulation is being on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. There was a building in the center of eastern styled architecture. There was a deck around part of it right down on the water. There were a few people in the building, a couple that I knew. I and a girl snuck past the others out onto the deck where we lay on our backs looking up at the stars. The sky was crystal clear, the stars were incredibly bright and I was a little mesmerized. It is interesting that I don't know any constellations or where any stars are in the sky, really, and in the dream I couldn't pick out any either.
At some point, I began to see divisions in the sky; perhaps I was looking for symmetries in the stars. I found a line through the sky where each side was a reflection of the other. Soon, I could see them everywhere, and the first that I saw now extended all the way down into the ocean next to me. It was sort of an unreal shimmering, rippling, mirror surface that extended all the way up into the stars. I reached out and touched it. Anywho, this scene did follow a weather and tsunami simulation, and by now the weather was picking up and waves were beginning to thrash against the side of the building. The last thing I remember in this scene is making my way around the deck toward the sliding glass door into the building.
Next, I am in an apartment, presumably my apartment, and there is a really old bum sleeping on the couch. I think I awoke (in my dream) and was thinking about how I was going to get rid of the bum on the couch and how I didn't want to leave him alone in the apartment when I went to work the next day. While I'm thinking this, he begins to talk in his sleep. It sounds like he's praying and thanking god for the nice place to stay and how he's not alone outside any more, pretty much, and then says something about going shopping at Target w/ my room mate the day before. This is about when I actually woke up.
Coincidentally, it was now just turning 3:00AM and as I was taking a leak in the bathroom, my room mate B was just walking in the front door to our apartment after running to the office late night to work on a computer system that he forgot to look at that evening. We sat out on the porch for a bit, drank a beer, and BSed about Linux network monitoring software and my dream.