Last Night's Dream and this morning's followups.
Kids woke me numerous times again last night. Bleh.
Near the end of sleep, I had a dream. I was going to say a strange dream, but all my dreams are strange, and this was probably less so than most.
A group of us were engaged in some kind of recreational event, while at the same time trying to make a deal with some vendor or vendors. Sometimes it was people from work, sometimes it was a Flipside-like thing, it wasn't usually clear. Sometimes it seemed like a buyer's market, where the vendor wanted our business, and other times it was a seller's market, like when Flipside tries to get new land, it's got to convince the landowner that we're going to pay on time and not destroy the place.
But all the time, it was playful and lighthearted. We were having fun, this was all optional, recreational. As I would in real life, I was having a little more fun than most, taking it a little less seriously. Less concerned with closing the deal and more concerned that the deal work for us - and in particular, for us to have more fun later, so I might as well test the waters. I wasn't drunk, but I'd had a couple drinks, and I was being silly with friends.
This was all going along very nicely, for a very long time. I don't remember this part of the dream that well, but it seemed much longer than the part I do remember well. At some point, when I'm joking around with a couple people, I heard some kind of strange sound coming from a filing cabinet. The top drawer on a filing cabinet. In hindsight, I don't recall if it was music or buzzing or what. Might have been my wife's alarm clock going off. But it was an odd sound to be coming from there. So I open up the filing cabinet, and inside is an odd little device.
It's shaped vaguely like a 1950's flying saucer - round, squat, thinner on the edges than in the middle. It's metallic, but dark, like it's corroded or painted with a matte finish of some kind. I don't recall the details clearly, but it was not entirely closed, like there as a little metal piece sticking out of the top that you could tap down. And somehow we knew it was a homemade radio thing, that someone had built and tuned to a restricted government frequency. Like a police scanner, but we knew it was illegal.
I tapped the metal thing down a couple times, like a telegraph or something, and then I heard a man's voice in there. He identifies himself as something like "Agent SG34". Definitely "Agent" and two letters and two numbers. Says he lost contact with another agent (identified with the same type of code, maybe Agent XB21 or something). Keeps asking if anyone can hear him. In comm-lingo, "Can anyone read me? Do you read me, I repeat, do you read me? This is Agent SG34, can anyone read me?"
Still in a playful mood, I'm like "Sure, I read you, do you read me, over" and yeah, he does. And then he starts rattling off important details of his mission. He's in Los Angeles, near LAX, and has lost track of the man he's been following. Spells the guy's last name, it's really long. Starts with an M. He spells so intently that I start writing it down on whatever I have handy. Some piece of paper that had something printed on it (stronger paper than newspaper, maybe a flyer or a page from a magazine), and it also had some hand-written stuff on it as well. I try writing the name down, but rather sloppily. I get the impression that the name from southeastern Europe, maybe Moldovan or Georgian or something. (I'm usually half-decent at guessing stuff like that.)
Hmm....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Georgian_surnames#M
Somehow I could tell that this Agent was standing by a fence outside the airport, next to a runway. I had a very clear image of him, off the side of a road, on foot (maybe next to his car) talking to me. Anyway, he's lost track of the guy, he has "the device" with him - the device had a name and model number with it. This part was clearly inspired by having read this yesterday: http://www.tazachocolate.com/Process/Inside_the_Factory
So the name was reminiscent of the Sollich Minitemper 200FD, but I don't remember what it was. It was something small enough to fit in carry-on. I don't know why I knew that, I don't think it was said. Except that this Agent was pretty sure that this guy had the device with him, and had boarded an international flight, so maybe I inferred it. The Agent clearly assumed I knew what the device was.
I try writing down the name of the device, too. My pencil is dull and weird, and my handwriting is sloppy. And I'm still in a somewhat jovial mood, but it's dawning on me that this is rather serious stuff. I only answered because no one else did. I figured I was better than no one, but now I realized this Agent was counting on me for something.
He asks if I have all that info. Yes I do. He asks for my identification. "Agent, uh... RM uh...17, over" I blurt out, unable to think of anything else. (Not sure about the numbers.) He seems a little suspicious of that, but has to clear the line for some reason. And that was that.
So I start to get in a less jovial mood, and I start trying to find someone to help me decide what to do. Should I call the police and give them this information? I find someone I trust for advice. It was a large black woman who worked doing clerical and office-management type stuff for us. Reminded me a lot of the Office Manager at the first job I worked at. Lots of jobs have had someone in this role. (And often as not, they are large or black or women, often all three.) She's like "You know what to do. You call the police. Get that paper and read that stuff off to them."
So I got back to the filing cabinet, where a couple friends of mine are still playing around, and I find the paper, and I'm like "Shit, I can't read this. Can you guys read this?" and my handwriting is so crappy, and the pencil was so dull, that I can barely make any sense of it. And I forgot the guy's code name and everything. So I'm thinking if I call the police, what the heck am I even going to tell them? And I'm trying to decide if I should call 911 or 311, and do they even do 311 in this area? (Wherever that was - it wasn't something I wondered about in the dream, except to know it was somewhere unfamiliar to me in that regard.)
And then I was awoken rather suddenly. I can't remember if it was one of my kids needing attention or my wife's alarm going off. I know my kids woke me a few times in the night needing something, and I got up to help with whatever it was. I also remember one time her alarm went off and she woke me to tell me what time it was, and to let me know she was getting up to get the kids ready. Because I was up so often in the night with them, I can sleep in if I want to. I mutter something about having had an odd dream, and decide to lay there awhile thinking about what it could mean. So I start really pondering this device, more than the rest of the dream. The friends, the office manager, the police, the Agent, all that seems less important than the device. Like somehow understanding what the device symbolizes will give me some kind of key insight for my life.
As I'm pondering that, my thoughts about it become weirder and weirder until I realize that I drifted off during my thoughts and had a dream in which I was trying to interpret my other dream, but my thoughts were so jumbled and dreamlike that I was left without anything useful.
This repeated itself several times over the course of the morning - trying to decipher the symbolism of the device and falling into another dream. I don't know what that was, nor why I was so attached to interpreting it before the rest of the dream. And I don't really know what the heck any of it means.
Near the end of sleep, I had a dream. I was going to say a strange dream, but all my dreams are strange, and this was probably less so than most.
A group of us were engaged in some kind of recreational event, while at the same time trying to make a deal with some vendor or vendors. Sometimes it was people from work, sometimes it was a Flipside-like thing, it wasn't usually clear. Sometimes it seemed like a buyer's market, where the vendor wanted our business, and other times it was a seller's market, like when Flipside tries to get new land, it's got to convince the landowner that we're going to pay on time and not destroy the place.
But all the time, it was playful and lighthearted. We were having fun, this was all optional, recreational. As I would in real life, I was having a little more fun than most, taking it a little less seriously. Less concerned with closing the deal and more concerned that the deal work for us - and in particular, for us to have more fun later, so I might as well test the waters. I wasn't drunk, but I'd had a couple drinks, and I was being silly with friends.
This was all going along very nicely, for a very long time. I don't remember this part of the dream that well, but it seemed much longer than the part I do remember well. At some point, when I'm joking around with a couple people, I heard some kind of strange sound coming from a filing cabinet. The top drawer on a filing cabinet. In hindsight, I don't recall if it was music or buzzing or what. Might have been my wife's alarm clock going off. But it was an odd sound to be coming from there. So I open up the filing cabinet, and inside is an odd little device.
It's shaped vaguely like a 1950's flying saucer - round, squat, thinner on the edges than in the middle. It's metallic, but dark, like it's corroded or painted with a matte finish of some kind. I don't recall the details clearly, but it was not entirely closed, like there as a little metal piece sticking out of the top that you could tap down. And somehow we knew it was a homemade radio thing, that someone had built and tuned to a restricted government frequency. Like a police scanner, but we knew it was illegal.
I tapped the metal thing down a couple times, like a telegraph or something, and then I heard a man's voice in there. He identifies himself as something like "Agent SG34". Definitely "Agent" and two letters and two numbers. Says he lost contact with another agent (identified with the same type of code, maybe Agent XB21 or something). Keeps asking if anyone can hear him. In comm-lingo, "Can anyone read me? Do you read me, I repeat, do you read me? This is Agent SG34, can anyone read me?"
Still in a playful mood, I'm like "Sure, I read you, do you read me, over" and yeah, he does. And then he starts rattling off important details of his mission. He's in Los Angeles, near LAX, and has lost track of the man he's been following. Spells the guy's last name, it's really long. Starts with an M. He spells so intently that I start writing it down on whatever I have handy. Some piece of paper that had something printed on it (stronger paper than newspaper, maybe a flyer or a page from a magazine), and it also had some hand-written stuff on it as well. I try writing the name down, but rather sloppily. I get the impression that the name from southeastern Europe, maybe Moldovan or Georgian or something. (I'm usually half-decent at guessing stuff like that.)
Hmm....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Georgian_surnames#M
Somehow I could tell that this Agent was standing by a fence outside the airport, next to a runway. I had a very clear image of him, off the side of a road, on foot (maybe next to his car) talking to me. Anyway, he's lost track of the guy, he has "the device" with him - the device had a name and model number with it. This part was clearly inspired by having read this yesterday: http://www.tazachocolate.com/Process/Inside_the_Factory
So the name was reminiscent of the Sollich Minitemper 200FD, but I don't remember what it was. It was something small enough to fit in carry-on. I don't know why I knew that, I don't think it was said. Except that this Agent was pretty sure that this guy had the device with him, and had boarded an international flight, so maybe I inferred it. The Agent clearly assumed I knew what the device was.
I try writing down the name of the device, too. My pencil is dull and weird, and my handwriting is sloppy. And I'm still in a somewhat jovial mood, but it's dawning on me that this is rather serious stuff. I only answered because no one else did. I figured I was better than no one, but now I realized this Agent was counting on me for something.
He asks if I have all that info. Yes I do. He asks for my identification. "Agent, uh... RM uh...17, over" I blurt out, unable to think of anything else. (Not sure about the numbers.) He seems a little suspicious of that, but has to clear the line for some reason. And that was that.
So I start to get in a less jovial mood, and I start trying to find someone to help me decide what to do. Should I call the police and give them this information? I find someone I trust for advice. It was a large black woman who worked doing clerical and office-management type stuff for us. Reminded me a lot of the Office Manager at the first job I worked at. Lots of jobs have had someone in this role. (And often as not, they are large or black or women, often all three.) She's like "You know what to do. You call the police. Get that paper and read that stuff off to them."
So I got back to the filing cabinet, where a couple friends of mine are still playing around, and I find the paper, and I'm like "Shit, I can't read this. Can you guys read this?" and my handwriting is so crappy, and the pencil was so dull, that I can barely make any sense of it. And I forgot the guy's code name and everything. So I'm thinking if I call the police, what the heck am I even going to tell them? And I'm trying to decide if I should call 911 or 311, and do they even do 311 in this area? (Wherever that was - it wasn't something I wondered about in the dream, except to know it was somewhere unfamiliar to me in that regard.)
And then I was awoken rather suddenly. I can't remember if it was one of my kids needing attention or my wife's alarm going off. I know my kids woke me a few times in the night needing something, and I got up to help with whatever it was. I also remember one time her alarm went off and she woke me to tell me what time it was, and to let me know she was getting up to get the kids ready. Because I was up so often in the night with them, I can sleep in if I want to. I mutter something about having had an odd dream, and decide to lay there awhile thinking about what it could mean. So I start really pondering this device, more than the rest of the dream. The friends, the office manager, the police, the Agent, all that seems less important than the device. Like somehow understanding what the device symbolizes will give me some kind of key insight for my life.
As I'm pondering that, my thoughts about it become weirder and weirder until I realize that I drifted off during my thoughts and had a dream in which I was trying to interpret my other dream, but my thoughts were so jumbled and dreamlike that I was left without anything useful.
This repeated itself several times over the course of the morning - trying to decipher the symbolism of the device and falling into another dream. I don't know what that was, nor why I was so attached to interpreting it before the rest of the dream. And I don't really know what the heck any of it means.