Found my databank of the past archive!
Crimsonblog went under a while ago, but I managed to find an archive of my blog there. Here are the most important entries:
2/25/2006
Dreams
1) It was the winter after this one when the Bush Cents started appearing. They began in twos and threes, tossed into fountains and scattered in museums. But then more intense things began. All the cloned dinosaurs in the zoo were killed one night, and hundreds of pennies with Dubya's image on them were scattered everywhere around the murder scene. This was the work of a time traveler from the future who was trying to warn us that in a very short while, Dubya would stage a coup and take over the US government permanently. It was at this point that I traveled to the future and saw this time for myself. Not very much had changed for the lower classes, because their lives had always been hard. It was the middle classes who were most severely hit. There was no public health care, no insurance, and so very serious illnesses were left untreated or treated at home. I asked one man what year it was, and he stared blankly at me as if that knowledge had been erased from his mind. I asked instead, "what year were you born?" He answered without hesitation, "1959." I asked how old he was, and he said "53." "Ah, so it's 2013," I answered, and had my answer. Dubya's image was not only on pennies, but every coin and every bill. I told the man that that was a sacrilege against Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. He didn't know who I was talking about.
2) I was a paralymic athlete, a downhill skier with spina bifida. I was in a race that involved jumping over trains. I wasn't in the lead, but the people who got down to the bottom of the hill before me were so caught up in celebrating that they didn't realize they had to ski back up to the top of the hill to finish the race. I won gold for this reason.
9/18/2005
Dreams
1) I was a girl named Chang Xiao and I lived in a town in China. I was some kind of genius and had invented a new form of calculus and several computer programming languages. I was due to leave town on a trip around the world the next day, but the problem was, the chief of my town was gathering every piece of money down to the last coin into a big bucket, to be redistributed in equal amounts to each person. I needed to keep the money I had (about 250 something-or-others) for my trip, and so I hid it. The chief was wandering about the town the night before the collection, and I followed him, making sure he wasn't going to catch me and my money.
2) Dan and I found ourselves in a quaint "Grover's Corners"-type little town at night. We walked towards main street but heard a parade coming. I knew that any midnight parade that I dreamed about would be really scary, so we headed back in the direction we'd come from. There was one act of the parade that somehow made it back where we were, and it was a skeleton dancer. She covered her boniness up very well and pretended to be alive, and my parents wanted her autograph. Her bones clacked as she picked up a pen. Then she handed us a piece of paper with a candle on it and wanted US to sign. I said "NO! NO! NO! NO!" very loud several times and she backed away. I whispered to my confused mom that I thought she was trying to trick us into signing our souls away to her.
8/8/2005
A spontaneous memory
Year: 1299
Name: Kalisul
Location: What is modern-day west China
A man on horseback rides right towards me and runs me through the throat with a spear. I'm wearing a yellow shirt and red skirt or pants. Stepping backwards from the moment of my death, I'm in a one-room house with my black haired four-year-old son and baby daughter on the left, looking fearful because of the attacking men outside. There is writing above the door. I don't know why I go outside to my doom: certainly it is safer in the house. My husband is a big oaf of a man, and I don't love him.
When I was 9, my wrists were slit in a ritual, and I survived. I don't know why they did it.
4/26/2005
A Memory of a Past Life, Not Mine
He's an old academic, spry for his age. He wears a black robe. He runs across a European university campus past a cathedral, in tears, not because of any real tragedy but simply because the implications of his latest scholarly ruminations are overwhelming. He sees the stars as being in a bad alignment. The year is 1589.
4/25/2005
Dreams
I was a man training far below ground with some kind of energy gun. I knew ahead of time that I was going to die that night, and I assumed it was due to some weapon misuse or malfunction. I kept yelling at everyone to make sure their guns were off before we put them away. One guy still forgot, and shot me in the leg. Surprisingly, it didn't hurt, even though these laser guns had been ripping through metal like it was paper. I left work and was in the elevator with one other man when the cord broke and sent us falling to our deaths. The report I heard afterward was that they couldn't tell where my body ended and my companion's started, so they buried our remains together.
So, I walked around a bank as a ghost, trying to make people feel my presence. I found that children could see me very plainly, and they were not afraid of me because I just said, "hi," and explained that all I wanted to do was talk to them. I found two thirteen year old boys. One of them could see me and one of them could not. I told the one who could see (and hear) me that age has nothing to do with the ability to see ghosts, that it's only a matter of being young at heart. He nodded, but his friend still couldn't see anything.
4/19/2005
Dreams
1) There was a meeting of people who were generally considered to be cognitively disabled, but they all had the unusual ability to sing harmonies by themselves.
2) I developed a hunch that the late pope had posted on WebAmici under a screen name that looked sort of like a complicated password: "lwc4..." I began to suspect it was him after realizing he had known Rome and Vatican City really well, and that we hadn't heard from him in a while. Rastislav and I traveled to Rome and got an audience with some high falutin' cardinal who told us how the young Karol Wojtyla had invented an interesting gadget. The cardinal wrote out the name of the gadget and then underlined several letters that spelled out the screen name that the pope had been using.
We went to a room where people were standing and remembering the pope, and as I stood there, I felt his spirit approach and enter me. I turned around and started speaking in a man's voice. People were already scribbling down notes as evidence of a miracle. They asked me, if I was really the late pope, which hand would I use to accept a cup of tea? I said I didn't know, so they handed me a cup of tea, and I took it with my right. Everyone gasped in amazement and praised God. Then they offered me a cup of water, but I refused, telling them that I would break the contract with death if I accepted pure water from a living person.
4/13/2005
Dreams
I was in a strange building that consisted of a long hallway and very high rafters. I was joined by Nick Drake, Phil Ochs, and Danica, and we were focused on exorcising Moaning Myrtle, who had taken residence high in the rafters of the building. There was a food court nearby, and I was advised to learn Chinese to speak to the waiters at the Chinese restaurant there.
4/3/2005
Dreams
1) Dan and I were riding on a motorcycle and I realized we didn't have any helmets. I asked Dan to pull into one of the towns we were passing so we could buy a couple. He stopped into a sports store and started trying on regular bike helmets. I told him that really wasn't enough. The owner of the store started sexually harassing me and I tried to call Dan but I couldn't shout.
2) I was in the Cathedral, which was an even bigger building than it actually is, and I put blankie and a sweatshirt in a cubby. When I returned a minute later, they was gone, and I realized the staff must have taken them away to be washed.
4/1/2005
A Nightmare
Dan and I were sleeping on a new kind of bed that had a fold-out leaf to hold a second mattress. I slept on this leaf but wasn't sure how stable it was. The bed was about twice as high as our real one is. There were all of these ghosts swirling around the room, and I was in the midst of them out on my mattress. Dan didn't seem affected by them on the main part of the bed. There were people who said that our room had "drop 18" and "drop 13" properties, and it had something to do with the ghosts, but I couldn't get them to tell me what exactly that meant.
I finally managed to get off of the leaf and back onto the main part of the bed, and I screamed for Dan to wake me up. I didn't know how many layers of dream I would have to punch through to make my voice actually heard. At one point, I thought I might have woken up, and I asked Dan if I was awake. He said, "I suppose," and I knew I wasn't.
2/16/2005
Dreams
Over the course of the last few nights...
1) I was playing with Anna as Inga. Wonderful. She was so adorable.
2) Apparently, the reincarnation of Emily Dickinson is currently at Pitt. Also, in addition to being Phil Ochs, Dan was simultaneously Nick Drake. I hovered throughout the dream.
3) The Sodexho worker went crazy when I tried to steal his personal stash of bok choi, which he had been keeping in a food tray in Eddie's. He kept screaming for people to following him up some stairs that he was going down.
2/10/2005
Dreams
1) I figured out that I could write a Javascript program on paper, toss it into the sky, and the universe would answer by dropping really awesome things (such as a floating popcorn machine) into a swimming pool.
2) Southeast Asia was collecting funds for tsunami relief in Europe. An Indian family cleaning out their house was trying to decide what charity items to send to the United States. In Europe, they were debating whether to place more sanctions on the US, and I said, "please, be my guest. Save the world by keeping us out of it." The world was trying to pull itself back from the brink--hell, even Israel and Palestine were making peace--and yet Bush remained the last loose canon.
2/3/2005
Dreams
1) Marie, Anastasia and their mother were involved in a dream that had very little plot. They were on a porch and were burying something.
2) Soldiers were marching through the neighborhood and were going to try to stay in our houses. I asked, "Isn't there something in the Constitution that forbids this?" and then realized that the 3rd Amendment only forbids the quartering of soldiers in houses against the owner's consent during peacetime. Dan found a massive screen that covered the front windows of the house, thus making it look unoccupied. This would hopefully keep the soldiers out.
1/22/2005
Dreams
1) A woman got violently mad when the girls in the "mentally defective" ward of her asylum made a huge mess. I helped them clean up, and when the woman came back, we convinced her that she had been hallucinating about the mess, and this pissed her off even more.
2) A black man overheard my talking bad about the government and said, "I know where you're planning to go." I guessed, "flee to Canada?" and he told me he knew of a better place. He took me into this hotel building up to the 22nd floor, and when we got off, there was a whole other level of world at that height that was not visible from the ground. This was called the "Respect" level and it was formed from all sensible people who wanted to create a new, separate place for humans to live before the ones on the ground destroyed themselves. I looked around, was tempted, but thought this utopia in the sky would turn out to be extremely boring.
I was more interested in floor 5 of the building, which seemed to be a place designated for Indigo and Crystal children. Things started to get strange, though, when I discovered that the adults running the "hotel of human evolution," as it seemed to be, were planning to sexually exploit the Indigo children.
3) A woman was experimenting by going into both male and female bathrooms and trying to use the stalls, showers, etc. She eventually turned out to be this famous actress who ended up in all the tabloids for supposedly being gay, transgender, whatever label they wanted to pin on her, just because she had been curious about men's bathrooms and their uses. There were many incredible, elaborate, beautiful showers in all of the bathrooms.
1/17/2005
Dreams
I found Theresa Taylor's house. Her mom was in the kitchen with their dog, Kia, who was a very friendly white thing with thick, bushy fur. Kia made two small poops in a "dog box" in the house, and an enormous poop in the yard when I took her out.
1/16/2005
Dreams
1) There was a tall wooden bridge that collapsed, and its pieces fell in a large fan on the land near it.
2) Dan's family's house was gigantic; the master bathroom alone had four toilets and five bath tubs. I looked out a window and saw an amazing view of the other part of the house, which was on the water and was composed of about 100 round turrets painted different colors. The sun was setting over the water, and I saw that the alignment of different turrets was in accordance with the planets of the solar system. The highest point corresponded to Jupiter, and the 10th planet was also taken into account far on the end. Four other planets beyond the 10th were also there. I took two pictures, knowing I would never have them for real because it was a dream, but the taking of the pictures in the dream secured the image in my mind.
1/6/2005
Dreams
1) There was a pig the size of a car lying at the intersection of Cornell and Brighton, in Albany. I examined it and found it was not quite dead, but getting there. I decided to call animal control.
2) There was a hiking trail with lots of lovely garbage/salvage junk strewn around. Lots of people from the WebAmici board were there.
3) I was at a dinner party, and I sang "Welcome to My Greatroom." Another man at the party sang this song (I have written the gist of it, not the lyrics that were actually in the dream, because exact transcription from dreams is very difficult for a piece this long):
I chop down the laurel trees
In summer and fall
I use my big axe
To cut the trees so tall
Before I start working
I call up to ensure
There is no one in the treetop
That I could injure
But one day I made
An error, I fear
I called in the treetop
Only wind did I hear
So I began chopping
And my confidence grew
And I tumbled from the treetop
When the trunk split in two
The moral of this story
If you live by making whacks:
When you tumble from the treetop
Don't fall on your axe
1/10/2005
Dreams
Germany, early in WWII. I could tell that the Jews around me were disappearing and being taken away. I had what was known as "representation," some kind of legal protection because I had gotten it early enough. I was browsing in a shop, and there was a large handful of amethyst crystals that I wanted. Another lady in the shop wanted them too, and she struck a deal with me that she would let me have the crystals as long as I expressed no interest in a pile of seemingly nonvaluable ribbons. As it turned out, one of the ribbons had real diamonds in it, and as I protested, the police showed up. One of them asked if I wanted to die or live but lose my "representation." I knew that if I lost that protection I would go to a concentration camp, so I chose to be shot right there. Moments after I was shot, I reconsidered, and the dream rewound itself into an alternate scenario in which I kept living.
In this second part of the dream, there was a PE class for girls, and each girl wore a shirt with her religious affiliation printed on her underarm. During jumping jacks, one girl barely raised her left arm at all. I whispered in her ear that I knew why she did that, and we left the class. We were in a shopping mall, and there was a quick way to get to the other side of the mall. However, because I was using a wheelchair at this point, we had to go the long way around to avoid the stairs. It was an old-fashioned steel wheelchair, but it didn't seem that different than a modern one in terms of maneuverability or weight.
There was a waterfall at the mall, and for some reason I ended up climbing the waterfall in my wheelchair. I pulled myself hand-over-hand, and the waterfall seemed endless. There were some men who shouted that I was almost at the top, but the top never seemed to arrive. I finally got off on a side ledge and ended up back in the mall.
1/2/2005
Dreams
These dreams have accumulated over the past few nights...
1) I woke up, and felt my body still asleep. I lay there for maybe five minutes, knowing that I could wake my body up by moving my index finger, but I chose not to for.
2) There were little tiny houses that one could buy for $6000. They were about the size of a van, but were fully equipped with everything, in the minimum amount of space. Some even had a DSL hookup.
3) As Inga, I wandered around a strange kind of amusement park. v|*
4) At Pitt, I was thinking about auditing Siska's astronomy class, which had a sign language interpreter in it for a deaf student who was taking it. I ended up behind the school in a strange kind of shanty town where there were many ghosts flying around. The Tower A lobby had been turned into a library.
12/22/2004
Dreams
It was the last day at a strange private school whose principal was obsessed with her students complying with the homeland security department. I was making some kind of anti-patriotic movie, and she started hunting me down. I found that I could masquerade as another student by grabbing him around the neck. By doing that, I could be invisible and make the person say what I wanted.
12/16/2004
Dreams
1) Alex Trebeck arrived in my chemistry class and told us he was going to be doing a chemistry Jeopardy with us in which everyone was going to make money. The problem was that everyone left in the middle of it to go to the bathroom or something, and forgot about the class. Grabowski was confused.
2) I went home, and there were a bunch of people in my room. I realized I had no underwear on, so I went to the bathroom to put some on. My mom's toilet had been removed, and as a result, she was showering in my bathroom. She had the door closed, and so Devon, who was still a kitten, peed on his tail.
3) There was a short scene that involved lots of people of different ages and ethnic backrounds doing some kind of choreographed movie scene that involved them knocking into each other and tumbling every which way. The Strawberry Girl was one of these people.
4) There was a tall building with many floors of different kinds of bookstores that I enjoyed. It was a Pitt building, but Ms. Samonsky was there on one of the art floors.
5) I happened upon Wall Drug, which was a wild, multistory building with little rooms jutting out everywhere. It kind of looked like an airport.
6) There were a bunch of girls practicing volleyball in my yard. They were so good that they were jumping over the net.
12/10/2004
More dreams... aliens?
What happened on December 13, 2001? My diary says that was the night of my winter choir concert when the girls sang "Ceremony of Carols."
As I was falling asleep last night, a voice in my mind said something like "It fits the picture perfectly" and presented me with an image of some kind of web. Rather than shrugging it off, I thought about why a voice might say that picture "fit perfectly" and something told me that I had been abducted by aliens on December 13, 2001. Then I dreamed about flying saucers over San Pablo Ave. in Albany, near Codornices Veterinary Clinic.
12/10/2004
Dreams
1) A Victorian girl lived with her family in a small but comfortable house. She slept in a room with a stone floor and a stone staircase that led very high up. One day, she ran up the staircase chanting some kind of play incantation. When she came back down, she found the house deserted and looking like it hadn't been lived in for years. She was the only one there. Her stone bedroom was completely bare except for her bed, which was a big stone slab. There were cobwebs in the kitchen. People were raiding the house next door, which was also abandoned. The girl gave them refuge when the police siren went off. She locked all her doors. The house kept getting bigger and bigger, with more rooms adding on as she needed a gun room, a forensics lab, etc to ward off the police.
2) Dr. Grabowski gave a horrifically strange test that had nothing to do with organic chemistry. It seemed to be more about opinions about art and how to pinpoint the location of plumbobs and charms as seen in "The Sims." The test lasted for hours and hours, but I was grateful that he gave us plenty of time to finish it. However, before I turned it in, I went through it with him, and discovered that there were many, many pages I hadn't done. He said that was all right because the test was magical and automatically added pages the second time you went through them.
12/4/2004
Dreams
1) I went to this fancy house, and there were three grandfather clocks. I went, "Oh, crap, I haven't had a grandfather clock in a dream in years." I told the lady who owned the house that I was really afraid of their chime in dreams. The upstairs of her house was just a platform that ran around the perimeter of the room near a very high ceiling.
2) There were a bunch of kids doing what was either an art or service project that involved cutting the insides of acorns in half and then mushing them into bits of clay. One of the girls had a Picc line in her left arm.
3) There was a girl at a school who had been classified in the lowest category of functionality, "non-learner." I got really pissed off at this and said to someone who was in charge, "Look, she can dress herself with help. Do you think she could do this when she was born?" He said no, and so I asked,"Then how can you classify her as a non-learner?"
4) There was a swim competition that me, Nancy, KB, and a bunch of other people participated in that involved swimming through a twisting maze of waterways.
11/25/2004
Dreams
In another Russia...
It was the coronation of Tsar James I, 1925. It had been discovered that Nicholas had a son with another woman before his other children were born. Alexei had to consol himself with becoming Prime Minister, though under Russia's post-war government, he would likely have more power than his half-brother, who would only be a figurehead. We walked to Alexander Palace. I had not seen the building in a long time, and whispered to Anastasia that the building I saw in front of me did not look like it. She answered, "of course not. The palace is behind the House of the Treasury."
We held candles in our bare hands as we walked to the front of the hall during the coronation. The hot wax dripped onto my hand. I followed my sisters' example and held the candle far from my body so that the wax did not then fall on my dress.
On the whole, the event was somewhat disorganized. We all arrived at the front of the room at different times. Alexei looked anxiously at us as Anastasia ran up to the front late. I was not sure what he thought of the coronation, since he would never be Tsar. His health had been excellent recently and he was certain he could have ruled for many years.
James stood to our right, not saying much. He was our oldest brother and we had only recently heard he existed. I could tell Olga was angry, because she might have inherited the throne as well.
11/21/2004
Dreams
1) Dan and I were going to sneak into Tower B to use all of the wonderful bathtubs that they have there. They were filming a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in the upper floors of Tower B, and they demonstrated a very expensive shot that involved Picard running up several flights of stairs and then diving down several stories into a pool of water.
2) This little Amish girl transfered to a new school, and they read an article about star formation that somehow managed to straddle the line between science and creationist beliefs.
11/19/2004
Dreams
There was a doctor in Montana who claimed to have delivered Alexei, and had a piece of umbilical cord that he claimed was Alexei's. I thought this was odd, since the doctor seemed to be claiming that Alexei had been born in America and that he had seen him recently. He said the man's first name was Stanislav and that his last name was something that started with a "B." I asked if the man had red hair and the doctor replied, "No, he looked like Genghis Khan."
11/18/2004
Dreams
There was this group of aliens who came to Earth with the intention of stealing a baby carriage. This was a very dangerous piece of contraband on their planet, so they had to go to the utmost care not to arouse the suspicions of the planetary inspectors upon their return. They came in a ship about the size and shape of a bus, but when they got ahold of a baby carriage, they removed a section of their ship's underside and built a hidden compartment there for the item.
11/16/2004
School Games
When my friend Rachel and I were in elementary school, we would play school. She was always the teacher, and I would play various characters including the smart Blue Tonka, the stupid Red Tonka, and the disobedient Kangaroo Tonka. I've remembered that game all my life, but I only just recently recalled the names we gave the characters. WTF? School lessons mainly involved answering the questions that Rachel asked and learning to write De Nelian script, which she had been learning at Magnificent Marin, and which us Cruddy Cornell kids weren't up to learning yet.
11/16/2004
Dreams
1) There was a woman working in a diner in the Southwest or the Rocky Mountains. She struck me as being a simul of mine.
2) Pitt told me I had a $30 traffic violation for driving the wrong way in a parking lot lane, and I had to explain that it was actually Dan's dad who had done that while I was in the car.
3) Some of the cast of The Strangerhood found themselves in an alternate universe in which my friend Nikki Z. was queen of Europe (picture Evita Peron with seductive power over the UN). The day was saved when a dude volunteered his speedboat to help reset the timeline. I have no idea what this plot was about, but the image of the entire United Nations bowing to me and Nikki was very memorable.
There were several characters wrapped up into Nikki's body. She wasn't just herself, but also Winnie Alexander from The Town and that awesome girl from Pitt's College Democrats who gave the College Republicans a real run for their money during the mock presidential debate. Basically, we're talking a superfood bundle of all the charismatic, slightly machiavellian women you can think of.
10/31/2004
Dreams
1) My parents were running a Step Together trip, but they had no idea how to do it. They were too lenient about letting people take their time to get things done, and so we always took forever to get anywhere.
2) There was an elected official from California who could shapeshift into a three-legged horse. However, the leg that was missing kept changing every time he turned into a horse from human form.
D*|*
3) Dan and I were sleeping in a bed in the middle of a subway station. There was talk about how AIDS was indeed transmitted to humans through the apes that were experimented on to develop polio vaccine.
10/29/2004
Dreams
I discovered that one of my simuls was living on Dan's floor. We were trying to verify the fact that we were simuls by comparing past life memories--to see if we remembered the same life. He was kind of skinny with shoulder-length blonde hair and remembered a life as a female navy officer earlier in the 20th century.
10/24/2004
Dreams
1) There was a resistance against "Voldemort," who was really more like George W. Bush. There was a lot of fear because we knew that he could read everyone's thoughts, so even our plans to overthrow him were not safe. Someone said, "If he wins this election, there won't be democracy in this country anymore." Dan replied, "There hasn't been democracy here for a long time."
2) I was sleeping, and my blankie fell on the ground. Suddenly, I could feel it under my back, and I realized another one had sprouted underneath me. I pulled it out and threw it on the ground. Then another one grew, and I hopped out of bed to realize there was a big crack in the mattress where duplicates of my things were growing. I rummaged around in there and pulled out lots of things like action figures, a tape dispenser, etc.
Later, I realized that if I swiped my student ID card at the security desk by myself, it would give me money.
3) The entire Romanov family was flying/running through the trees. They looked like evergreens but had no leaves. Father Gregory was there too, next to Mother. We were running up and down tree trunks and leaping across branches like squirrels. Eventually we came to a place where there were two straight rows of trees, and rather than leap down one row, I decided it was easier to just fly between the two. Father commented, "So, she has sprouted angel wings after all."
Later, we were going down to the dining room for lunch, and the way down involved jumping onto a staircase that had no access from where we were on a walkway above. I went first, and realized that the lower level was about three feet below the upper level, and I was squashed when I tried to kneel. I told Olga to get away from directly over my head to relax the ceiling a little bit and unstick me. She didn't hear me, but when Anastasia jumped down next to me, she shouted up to tell everyone to back off a little bit.
Over lunch, we talked to a relative of ours, who asked, "On which side are you English?" and I said, "Both. Our parents are related."
Mother never praised us directly for sucesses we had--she bragged to her friends about our accomplishments when we could overhear it. I think I would have preferred direct praise, and that is why I sometimes felt like she never paid any attention to me.
10/24/2006
Tight Spaces
Over the past few nights, I've been having dreams about being caught in tight spaces--houses with tiny entrances to rooms, etc. What is this? Did caving leave that big an impression on me?
10/24/2004
The Big Pair
I've been thinking about the "big pair." I know Olga and Tatiana are "claimed" already by Tina and Lauren, but my friends Carrie and Kirsten remind me quite a bit of the big pair.
Pictures of Olga and Tatiana always make me think of them. Wonder if there's anything to that? Carrie and Kirsten have been best friends ever since they've known each other, and have maintained that they're sisters (their mother is the same person in two separate bodies! DUH!). Even people they've never told that they're "sisters" have said that they look alike. They attribute this to the phenomenon of people who look like their dogs--they've spent enough time around each other that their fantasy is becoming real.
10/23/2006
Smoke Signals
After watching the movie "Smoke Signals"...
Joe:
Mother wants to go west with her people to Oklahoma. Father tells her that's nonsense, that because he's white he can protect her from the mandate.
"But who can you protect?" she asks. "My whole family? My mother, my father, my grandparents? Why can't you just protect my whole tribe?"
There is no easy answer.
2/25/2006
Dreams
1) It was the winter after this one when the Bush Cents started appearing. They began in twos and threes, tossed into fountains and scattered in museums. But then more intense things began. All the cloned dinosaurs in the zoo were killed one night, and hundreds of pennies with Dubya's image on them were scattered everywhere around the murder scene. This was the work of a time traveler from the future who was trying to warn us that in a very short while, Dubya would stage a coup and take over the US government permanently. It was at this point that I traveled to the future and saw this time for myself. Not very much had changed for the lower classes, because their lives had always been hard. It was the middle classes who were most severely hit. There was no public health care, no insurance, and so very serious illnesses were left untreated or treated at home. I asked one man what year it was, and he stared blankly at me as if that knowledge had been erased from his mind. I asked instead, "what year were you born?" He answered without hesitation, "1959." I asked how old he was, and he said "53." "Ah, so it's 2013," I answered, and had my answer. Dubya's image was not only on pennies, but every coin and every bill. I told the man that that was a sacrilege against Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. He didn't know who I was talking about.
2) I was a paralymic athlete, a downhill skier with spina bifida. I was in a race that involved jumping over trains. I wasn't in the lead, but the people who got down to the bottom of the hill before me were so caught up in celebrating that they didn't realize they had to ski back up to the top of the hill to finish the race. I won gold for this reason.
9/18/2005
Dreams
1) I was a girl named Chang Xiao and I lived in a town in China. I was some kind of genius and had invented a new form of calculus and several computer programming languages. I was due to leave town on a trip around the world the next day, but the problem was, the chief of my town was gathering every piece of money down to the last coin into a big bucket, to be redistributed in equal amounts to each person. I needed to keep the money I had (about 250 something-or-others) for my trip, and so I hid it. The chief was wandering about the town the night before the collection, and I followed him, making sure he wasn't going to catch me and my money.
2) Dan and I found ourselves in a quaint "Grover's Corners"-type little town at night. We walked towards main street but heard a parade coming. I knew that any midnight parade that I dreamed about would be really scary, so we headed back in the direction we'd come from. There was one act of the parade that somehow made it back where we were, and it was a skeleton dancer. She covered her boniness up very well and pretended to be alive, and my parents wanted her autograph. Her bones clacked as she picked up a pen. Then she handed us a piece of paper with a candle on it and wanted US to sign. I said "NO! NO! NO! NO!" very loud several times and she backed away. I whispered to my confused mom that I thought she was trying to trick us into signing our souls away to her.
8/8/2005
A spontaneous memory
Year: 1299
Name: Kalisul
Location: What is modern-day west China
A man on horseback rides right towards me and runs me through the throat with a spear. I'm wearing a yellow shirt and red skirt or pants. Stepping backwards from the moment of my death, I'm in a one-room house with my black haired four-year-old son and baby daughter on the left, looking fearful because of the attacking men outside. There is writing above the door. I don't know why I go outside to my doom: certainly it is safer in the house. My husband is a big oaf of a man, and I don't love him.
When I was 9, my wrists were slit in a ritual, and I survived. I don't know why they did it.
4/26/2005
A Memory of a Past Life, Not Mine
He's an old academic, spry for his age. He wears a black robe. He runs across a European university campus past a cathedral, in tears, not because of any real tragedy but simply because the implications of his latest scholarly ruminations are overwhelming. He sees the stars as being in a bad alignment. The year is 1589.
4/25/2005
Dreams
I was a man training far below ground with some kind of energy gun. I knew ahead of time that I was going to die that night, and I assumed it was due to some weapon misuse or malfunction. I kept yelling at everyone to make sure their guns were off before we put them away. One guy still forgot, and shot me in the leg. Surprisingly, it didn't hurt, even though these laser guns had been ripping through metal like it was paper. I left work and was in the elevator with one other man when the cord broke and sent us falling to our deaths. The report I heard afterward was that they couldn't tell where my body ended and my companion's started, so they buried our remains together.
So, I walked around a bank as a ghost, trying to make people feel my presence. I found that children could see me very plainly, and they were not afraid of me because I just said, "hi," and explained that all I wanted to do was talk to them. I found two thirteen year old boys. One of them could see me and one of them could not. I told the one who could see (and hear) me that age has nothing to do with the ability to see ghosts, that it's only a matter of being young at heart. He nodded, but his friend still couldn't see anything.
4/19/2005
Dreams
1) There was a meeting of people who were generally considered to be cognitively disabled, but they all had the unusual ability to sing harmonies by themselves.
2) I developed a hunch that the late pope had posted on WebAmici under a screen name that looked sort of like a complicated password: "lwc4..." I began to suspect it was him after realizing he had known Rome and Vatican City really well, and that we hadn't heard from him in a while. Rastislav and I traveled to Rome and got an audience with some high falutin' cardinal who told us how the young Karol Wojtyla had invented an interesting gadget. The cardinal wrote out the name of the gadget and then underlined several letters that spelled out the screen name that the pope had been using.
We went to a room where people were standing and remembering the pope, and as I stood there, I felt his spirit approach and enter me. I turned around and started speaking in a man's voice. People were already scribbling down notes as evidence of a miracle. They asked me, if I was really the late pope, which hand would I use to accept a cup of tea? I said I didn't know, so they handed me a cup of tea, and I took it with my right. Everyone gasped in amazement and praised God. Then they offered me a cup of water, but I refused, telling them that I would break the contract with death if I accepted pure water from a living person.
4/13/2005
Dreams
I was in a strange building that consisted of a long hallway and very high rafters. I was joined by Nick Drake, Phil Ochs, and Danica, and we were focused on exorcising Moaning Myrtle, who had taken residence high in the rafters of the building. There was a food court nearby, and I was advised to learn Chinese to speak to the waiters at the Chinese restaurant there.
4/3/2005
Dreams
1) Dan and I were riding on a motorcycle and I realized we didn't have any helmets. I asked Dan to pull into one of the towns we were passing so we could buy a couple. He stopped into a sports store and started trying on regular bike helmets. I told him that really wasn't enough. The owner of the store started sexually harassing me and I tried to call Dan but I couldn't shout.
2) I was in the Cathedral, which was an even bigger building than it actually is, and I put blankie and a sweatshirt in a cubby. When I returned a minute later, they was gone, and I realized the staff must have taken them away to be washed.
4/1/2005
A Nightmare
Dan and I were sleeping on a new kind of bed that had a fold-out leaf to hold a second mattress. I slept on this leaf but wasn't sure how stable it was. The bed was about twice as high as our real one is. There were all of these ghosts swirling around the room, and I was in the midst of them out on my mattress. Dan didn't seem affected by them on the main part of the bed. There were people who said that our room had "drop 18" and "drop 13" properties, and it had something to do with the ghosts, but I couldn't get them to tell me what exactly that meant.
I finally managed to get off of the leaf and back onto the main part of the bed, and I screamed for Dan to wake me up. I didn't know how many layers of dream I would have to punch through to make my voice actually heard. At one point, I thought I might have woken up, and I asked Dan if I was awake. He said, "I suppose," and I knew I wasn't.
2/16/2005
Dreams
Over the course of the last few nights...
1) I was playing with Anna as Inga. Wonderful. She was so adorable.
2) Apparently, the reincarnation of Emily Dickinson is currently at Pitt. Also, in addition to being Phil Ochs, Dan was simultaneously Nick Drake. I hovered throughout the dream.
3) The Sodexho worker went crazy when I tried to steal his personal stash of bok choi, which he had been keeping in a food tray in Eddie's. He kept screaming for people to following him up some stairs that he was going down.
2/10/2005
Dreams
1) I figured out that I could write a Javascript program on paper, toss it into the sky, and the universe would answer by dropping really awesome things (such as a floating popcorn machine) into a swimming pool.
2) Southeast Asia was collecting funds for tsunami relief in Europe. An Indian family cleaning out their house was trying to decide what charity items to send to the United States. In Europe, they were debating whether to place more sanctions on the US, and I said, "please, be my guest. Save the world by keeping us out of it." The world was trying to pull itself back from the brink--hell, even Israel and Palestine were making peace--and yet Bush remained the last loose canon.
2/3/2005
Dreams
1) Marie, Anastasia and their mother were involved in a dream that had very little plot. They were on a porch and were burying something.
2) Soldiers were marching through the neighborhood and were going to try to stay in our houses. I asked, "Isn't there something in the Constitution that forbids this?" and then realized that the 3rd Amendment only forbids the quartering of soldiers in houses against the owner's consent during peacetime. Dan found a massive screen that covered the front windows of the house, thus making it look unoccupied. This would hopefully keep the soldiers out.
1/22/2005
Dreams
1) A woman got violently mad when the girls in the "mentally defective" ward of her asylum made a huge mess. I helped them clean up, and when the woman came back, we convinced her that she had been hallucinating about the mess, and this pissed her off even more.
2) A black man overheard my talking bad about the government and said, "I know where you're planning to go." I guessed, "flee to Canada?" and he told me he knew of a better place. He took me into this hotel building up to the 22nd floor, and when we got off, there was a whole other level of world at that height that was not visible from the ground. This was called the "Respect" level and it was formed from all sensible people who wanted to create a new, separate place for humans to live before the ones on the ground destroyed themselves. I looked around, was tempted, but thought this utopia in the sky would turn out to be extremely boring.
I was more interested in floor 5 of the building, which seemed to be a place designated for Indigo and Crystal children. Things started to get strange, though, when I discovered that the adults running the "hotel of human evolution," as it seemed to be, were planning to sexually exploit the Indigo children.
3) A woman was experimenting by going into both male and female bathrooms and trying to use the stalls, showers, etc. She eventually turned out to be this famous actress who ended up in all the tabloids for supposedly being gay, transgender, whatever label they wanted to pin on her, just because she had been curious about men's bathrooms and their uses. There were many incredible, elaborate, beautiful showers in all of the bathrooms.
1/17/2005
Dreams
I found Theresa Taylor's house. Her mom was in the kitchen with their dog, Kia, who was a very friendly white thing with thick, bushy fur. Kia made two small poops in a "dog box" in the house, and an enormous poop in the yard when I took her out.
1/16/2005
Dreams
1) There was a tall wooden bridge that collapsed, and its pieces fell in a large fan on the land near it.
2) Dan's family's house was gigantic; the master bathroom alone had four toilets and five bath tubs. I looked out a window and saw an amazing view of the other part of the house, which was on the water and was composed of about 100 round turrets painted different colors. The sun was setting over the water, and I saw that the alignment of different turrets was in accordance with the planets of the solar system. The highest point corresponded to Jupiter, and the 10th planet was also taken into account far on the end. Four other planets beyond the 10th were also there. I took two pictures, knowing I would never have them for real because it was a dream, but the taking of the pictures in the dream secured the image in my mind.
1/6/2005
Dreams
1) There was a pig the size of a car lying at the intersection of Cornell and Brighton, in Albany. I examined it and found it was not quite dead, but getting there. I decided to call animal control.
2) There was a hiking trail with lots of lovely garbage/salvage junk strewn around. Lots of people from the WebAmici board were there.
3) I was at a dinner party, and I sang "Welcome to My Greatroom." Another man at the party sang this song (I have written the gist of it, not the lyrics that were actually in the dream, because exact transcription from dreams is very difficult for a piece this long):
I chop down the laurel trees
In summer and fall
I use my big axe
To cut the trees so tall
Before I start working
I call up to ensure
There is no one in the treetop
That I could injure
But one day I made
An error, I fear
I called in the treetop
Only wind did I hear
So I began chopping
And my confidence grew
And I tumbled from the treetop
When the trunk split in two
The moral of this story
If you live by making whacks:
When you tumble from the treetop
Don't fall on your axe
1/10/2005
Dreams
Germany, early in WWII. I could tell that the Jews around me were disappearing and being taken away. I had what was known as "representation," some kind of legal protection because I had gotten it early enough. I was browsing in a shop, and there was a large handful of amethyst crystals that I wanted. Another lady in the shop wanted them too, and she struck a deal with me that she would let me have the crystals as long as I expressed no interest in a pile of seemingly nonvaluable ribbons. As it turned out, one of the ribbons had real diamonds in it, and as I protested, the police showed up. One of them asked if I wanted to die or live but lose my "representation." I knew that if I lost that protection I would go to a concentration camp, so I chose to be shot right there. Moments after I was shot, I reconsidered, and the dream rewound itself into an alternate scenario in which I kept living.
In this second part of the dream, there was a PE class for girls, and each girl wore a shirt with her religious affiliation printed on her underarm. During jumping jacks, one girl barely raised her left arm at all. I whispered in her ear that I knew why she did that, and we left the class. We were in a shopping mall, and there was a quick way to get to the other side of the mall. However, because I was using a wheelchair at this point, we had to go the long way around to avoid the stairs. It was an old-fashioned steel wheelchair, but it didn't seem that different than a modern one in terms of maneuverability or weight.
There was a waterfall at the mall, and for some reason I ended up climbing the waterfall in my wheelchair. I pulled myself hand-over-hand, and the waterfall seemed endless. There were some men who shouted that I was almost at the top, but the top never seemed to arrive. I finally got off on a side ledge and ended up back in the mall.
1/2/2005
Dreams
These dreams have accumulated over the past few nights...
1) I woke up, and felt my body still asleep. I lay there for maybe five minutes, knowing that I could wake my body up by moving my index finger, but I chose not to for.
2) There were little tiny houses that one could buy for $6000. They were about the size of a van, but were fully equipped with everything, in the minimum amount of space. Some even had a DSL hookup.
3) As Inga, I wandered around a strange kind of amusement park. v|*
4) At Pitt, I was thinking about auditing Siska's astronomy class, which had a sign language interpreter in it for a deaf student who was taking it. I ended up behind the school in a strange kind of shanty town where there were many ghosts flying around. The Tower A lobby had been turned into a library.
12/22/2004
Dreams
It was the last day at a strange private school whose principal was obsessed with her students complying with the homeland security department. I was making some kind of anti-patriotic movie, and she started hunting me down. I found that I could masquerade as another student by grabbing him around the neck. By doing that, I could be invisible and make the person say what I wanted.
12/16/2004
Dreams
1) Alex Trebeck arrived in my chemistry class and told us he was going to be doing a chemistry Jeopardy with us in which everyone was going to make money. The problem was that everyone left in the middle of it to go to the bathroom or something, and forgot about the class. Grabowski was confused.
2) I went home, and there were a bunch of people in my room. I realized I had no underwear on, so I went to the bathroom to put some on. My mom's toilet had been removed, and as a result, she was showering in my bathroom. She had the door closed, and so Devon, who was still a kitten, peed on his tail.
3) There was a short scene that involved lots of people of different ages and ethnic backrounds doing some kind of choreographed movie scene that involved them knocking into each other and tumbling every which way. The Strawberry Girl was one of these people.
4) There was a tall building with many floors of different kinds of bookstores that I enjoyed. It was a Pitt building, but Ms. Samonsky was there on one of the art floors.
5) I happened upon Wall Drug, which was a wild, multistory building with little rooms jutting out everywhere. It kind of looked like an airport.
6) There were a bunch of girls practicing volleyball in my yard. They were so good that they were jumping over the net.
12/10/2004
More dreams... aliens?
What happened on December 13, 2001? My diary says that was the night of my winter choir concert when the girls sang "Ceremony of Carols."
As I was falling asleep last night, a voice in my mind said something like "It fits the picture perfectly" and presented me with an image of some kind of web. Rather than shrugging it off, I thought about why a voice might say that picture "fit perfectly" and something told me that I had been abducted by aliens on December 13, 2001. Then I dreamed about flying saucers over San Pablo Ave. in Albany, near Codornices Veterinary Clinic.
12/10/2004
Dreams
1) A Victorian girl lived with her family in a small but comfortable house. She slept in a room with a stone floor and a stone staircase that led very high up. One day, she ran up the staircase chanting some kind of play incantation. When she came back down, she found the house deserted and looking like it hadn't been lived in for years. She was the only one there. Her stone bedroom was completely bare except for her bed, which was a big stone slab. There were cobwebs in the kitchen. People were raiding the house next door, which was also abandoned. The girl gave them refuge when the police siren went off. She locked all her doors. The house kept getting bigger and bigger, with more rooms adding on as she needed a gun room, a forensics lab, etc to ward off the police.
2) Dr. Grabowski gave a horrifically strange test that had nothing to do with organic chemistry. It seemed to be more about opinions about art and how to pinpoint the location of plumbobs and charms as seen in "The Sims." The test lasted for hours and hours, but I was grateful that he gave us plenty of time to finish it. However, before I turned it in, I went through it with him, and discovered that there were many, many pages I hadn't done. He said that was all right because the test was magical and automatically added pages the second time you went through them.
12/4/2004
Dreams
1) I went to this fancy house, and there were three grandfather clocks. I went, "Oh, crap, I haven't had a grandfather clock in a dream in years." I told the lady who owned the house that I was really afraid of their chime in dreams. The upstairs of her house was just a platform that ran around the perimeter of the room near a very high ceiling.
2) There were a bunch of kids doing what was either an art or service project that involved cutting the insides of acorns in half and then mushing them into bits of clay. One of the girls had a Picc line in her left arm.
3) There was a girl at a school who had been classified in the lowest category of functionality, "non-learner." I got really pissed off at this and said to someone who was in charge, "Look, she can dress herself with help. Do you think she could do this when she was born?" He said no, and so I asked,"Then how can you classify her as a non-learner?"
4) There was a swim competition that me, Nancy, KB, and a bunch of other people participated in that involved swimming through a twisting maze of waterways.
11/25/2004
Dreams
In another Russia...
It was the coronation of Tsar James I, 1925. It had been discovered that Nicholas had a son with another woman before his other children were born. Alexei had to consol himself with becoming Prime Minister, though under Russia's post-war government, he would likely have more power than his half-brother, who would only be a figurehead. We walked to Alexander Palace. I had not seen the building in a long time, and whispered to Anastasia that the building I saw in front of me did not look like it. She answered, "of course not. The palace is behind the House of the Treasury."
We held candles in our bare hands as we walked to the front of the hall during the coronation. The hot wax dripped onto my hand. I followed my sisters' example and held the candle far from my body so that the wax did not then fall on my dress.
On the whole, the event was somewhat disorganized. We all arrived at the front of the room at different times. Alexei looked anxiously at us as Anastasia ran up to the front late. I was not sure what he thought of the coronation, since he would never be Tsar. His health had been excellent recently and he was certain he could have ruled for many years.
James stood to our right, not saying much. He was our oldest brother and we had only recently heard he existed. I could tell Olga was angry, because she might have inherited the throne as well.
11/21/2004
Dreams
1) Dan and I were going to sneak into Tower B to use all of the wonderful bathtubs that they have there. They were filming a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in the upper floors of Tower B, and they demonstrated a very expensive shot that involved Picard running up several flights of stairs and then diving down several stories into a pool of water.
2) This little Amish girl transfered to a new school, and they read an article about star formation that somehow managed to straddle the line between science and creationist beliefs.
11/19/2004
Dreams
There was a doctor in Montana who claimed to have delivered Alexei, and had a piece of umbilical cord that he claimed was Alexei's. I thought this was odd, since the doctor seemed to be claiming that Alexei had been born in America and that he had seen him recently. He said the man's first name was Stanislav and that his last name was something that started with a "B." I asked if the man had red hair and the doctor replied, "No, he looked like Genghis Khan."
11/18/2004
Dreams
There was this group of aliens who came to Earth with the intention of stealing a baby carriage. This was a very dangerous piece of contraband on their planet, so they had to go to the utmost care not to arouse the suspicions of the planetary inspectors upon their return. They came in a ship about the size and shape of a bus, but when they got ahold of a baby carriage, they removed a section of their ship's underside and built a hidden compartment there for the item.
11/16/2004
School Games
When my friend Rachel and I were in elementary school, we would play school. She was always the teacher, and I would play various characters including the smart Blue Tonka, the stupid Red Tonka, and the disobedient Kangaroo Tonka. I've remembered that game all my life, but I only just recently recalled the names we gave the characters. WTF? School lessons mainly involved answering the questions that Rachel asked and learning to write De Nelian script, which she had been learning at Magnificent Marin, and which us Cruddy Cornell kids weren't up to learning yet.
11/16/2004
Dreams
1) There was a woman working in a diner in the Southwest or the Rocky Mountains. She struck me as being a simul of mine.
2) Pitt told me I had a $30 traffic violation for driving the wrong way in a parking lot lane, and I had to explain that it was actually Dan's dad who had done that while I was in the car.
3) Some of the cast of The Strangerhood found themselves in an alternate universe in which my friend Nikki Z. was queen of Europe (picture Evita Peron with seductive power over the UN). The day was saved when a dude volunteered his speedboat to help reset the timeline. I have no idea what this plot was about, but the image of the entire United Nations bowing to me and Nikki was very memorable.
There were several characters wrapped up into Nikki's body. She wasn't just herself, but also Winnie Alexander from The Town and that awesome girl from Pitt's College Democrats who gave the College Republicans a real run for their money during the mock presidential debate. Basically, we're talking a superfood bundle of all the charismatic, slightly machiavellian women you can think of.
10/31/2004
Dreams
1) My parents were running a Step Together trip, but they had no idea how to do it. They were too lenient about letting people take their time to get things done, and so we always took forever to get anywhere.
2) There was an elected official from California who could shapeshift into a three-legged horse. However, the leg that was missing kept changing every time he turned into a horse from human form.
D*|*
3) Dan and I were sleeping in a bed in the middle of a subway station. There was talk about how AIDS was indeed transmitted to humans through the apes that were experimented on to develop polio vaccine.
10/29/2004
Dreams
I discovered that one of my simuls was living on Dan's floor. We were trying to verify the fact that we were simuls by comparing past life memories--to see if we remembered the same life. He was kind of skinny with shoulder-length blonde hair and remembered a life as a female navy officer earlier in the 20th century.
10/24/2004
Dreams
1) There was a resistance against "Voldemort," who was really more like George W. Bush. There was a lot of fear because we knew that he could read everyone's thoughts, so even our plans to overthrow him were not safe. Someone said, "If he wins this election, there won't be democracy in this country anymore." Dan replied, "There hasn't been democracy here for a long time."
2) I was sleeping, and my blankie fell on the ground. Suddenly, I could feel it under my back, and I realized another one had sprouted underneath me. I pulled it out and threw it on the ground. Then another one grew, and I hopped out of bed to realize there was a big crack in the mattress where duplicates of my things were growing. I rummaged around in there and pulled out lots of things like action figures, a tape dispenser, etc.
Later, I realized that if I swiped my student ID card at the security desk by myself, it would give me money.
3) The entire Romanov family was flying/running through the trees. They looked like evergreens but had no leaves. Father Gregory was there too, next to Mother. We were running up and down tree trunks and leaping across branches like squirrels. Eventually we came to a place where there were two straight rows of trees, and rather than leap down one row, I decided it was easier to just fly between the two. Father commented, "So, she has sprouted angel wings after all."
Later, we were going down to the dining room for lunch, and the way down involved jumping onto a staircase that had no access from where we were on a walkway above. I went first, and realized that the lower level was about three feet below the upper level, and I was squashed when I tried to kneel. I told Olga to get away from directly over my head to relax the ceiling a little bit and unstick me. She didn't hear me, but when Anastasia jumped down next to me, she shouted up to tell everyone to back off a little bit.
Over lunch, we talked to a relative of ours, who asked, "On which side are you English?" and I said, "Both. Our parents are related."
Mother never praised us directly for sucesses we had--she bragged to her friends about our accomplishments when we could overhear it. I think I would have preferred direct praise, and that is why I sometimes felt like she never paid any attention to me.
10/24/2006
Tight Spaces
Over the past few nights, I've been having dreams about being caught in tight spaces--houses with tiny entrances to rooms, etc. What is this? Did caving leave that big an impression on me?
10/24/2004
The Big Pair
I've been thinking about the "big pair." I know Olga and Tatiana are "claimed" already by Tina and Lauren, but my friends Carrie and Kirsten remind me quite a bit of the big pair.
Pictures of Olga and Tatiana always make me think of them. Wonder if there's anything to that? Carrie and Kirsten have been best friends ever since they've known each other, and have maintained that they're sisters (their mother is the same person in two separate bodies! DUH!). Even people they've never told that they're "sisters" have said that they look alike. They attribute this to the phenomenon of people who look like their dogs--they've spent enough time around each other that their fantasy is becoming real.
10/23/2006
Smoke Signals
After watching the movie "Smoke Signals"...
Joe:
Mother wants to go west with her people to Oklahoma. Father tells her that's nonsense, that because he's white he can protect her from the mandate.
"But who can you protect?" she asks. "My whole family? My mother, my father, my grandparents? Why can't you just protect my whole tribe?"
There is no easy answer.