Red Rum Bicycle Space Planet

I'm at work.

I'm not in my cubicle in the library or anything resembling the university where I work in real life. This place looks something like a hotel complex.

But it's not like a traditional building.

The walls, windows and floor have the contours of nature, almost as if this were a natural space. There are trees, foliage and grass, but spots might be filled in with an odd-shaped window or there might be a light fixture protruding from a boulder.

I am in a room that resembles the layout of a bar. I sit at the bar working on some paperwork.

My old friend from grade school, Scott, is sitting next to me.

We talk about old times. He's working for the university now.

Scott is now blind. He tells me a story about how he saw someone murdered at the university by a gunman on a bicycle. He describes the man - overweight, shaved head, acting somewhat retarded, riding a teenager's bicycle.

For some reason that isn't quite clear, Scott tells me that he felt a pain in his eyes and he hasn't been able to see since then. I feel sad for him.

Scott changes the subject, talking about a project we are working on.

The room was already crowded when I first found myself sitting at the bar. Now, it seems stifling - people keep coming into the room. They are everywhere.

There are more and more people trying to sit at the bar. Some people in the room sit in chairs with notepads in their lap; others stand, holding computers and talking on cell phones.

The cacophony and press of the people feels overwhelming.

I have to get out.

I push my way through the crowd, trying to move towards an exit.

Soon, I find myself in a corridor and another area that resembles a conference room, full of people. Then, I am in something like a large cafeteria, again, completely filled with people.

I look out a large window in the moss-covered rock walls. I long for the open space outside.

As I look, I notice that we were moving. The ocean surrounds us and there's a landmass in the distance.

As I listen to snatches of conversation, I begin to understand that my workplace is a kind of floating island - it must be five miles long. All of us have been placed on this "ship" to work for a period of a few months as the "ship" makes it's voyage.

I finally make my way towards a door and open it. The door closes behind me.

I am outside - it is steamy hot, the kind of humid tropical weather so typical of the South in late Summer. I smell the ocean. It is finally quiet; the only sound are the waves lapping against the side of the vessel.

I am on a path that leads to a tall building, just up the hill. I feel I need a walk and some time to think, so I start walking and follow the path.

Eventually, I come to the building and go inside.

It is the hospital side of the campus. There are large, roomy hallways and rooms. I walk and walk, not seeing any people in the building. It seems deserted. There are no windows in any of the rooms.

I think I should get back to work. I make a turn and find myself at two large double doors. Through windows in the door, I see the path that brought me to the building. But, outside, it is night - the sun was gone and there are two moons hanging high in the sky. It is snowing and some of the snow has drifted in the path.

I try opening the door, but it is locked.

"You shouldn't go out there, you know."

It hear a voice behind me.

I turn and see a woman, dressed in a nurse's uniform.

"This planet doesn't work like yours," she says.

There is a small compartment next to the door; the nurse opens it and takes out a space suit. She offers it to me.

"You'll need this," she says.

I take the space suit and look down at it, confused. I look up and the nurse is gone.

I put on the space suit, struggling to make it fit over my clothing and carefully placing the helmet on my head.

The helmet locks in place and some lights on the helmet and suit come on. I can hear the suit steadily pumping oxygen to me.

With the suit fully on, I try the door again and it opens.

I slowly and carefully walk outside.

It is difficult to walk - the gravity has changed and I have to struggle to take steps. If I move too quickly, I begin to float.

The wind blows hard and snow comes from somewhere. There are no clouds in the sky and I can clearly see the stars and the two moons.

Finally, I come to the building that I started from. I open two metal doors, step in and they close behind me.

I am in a tiny room, almost like a decompression chamber.

I take off the space suit and move forward through another set of doors.

I am back in the room that looks like a bar. It is still packed with people, but the room is dark and quiet - everyone is asleep on the floor, in chairs, or leaning over on the bar.

I quietly walk around the room, looking at the people and trying to understand.

Then, I see it - through the window.

There is a man with a shaved head, wearing a short sleeved t-shirt with large red and white stripes. He looks to be about forty. He acts as if he were retarded in some way. He is riding a teenager's "banana seat" bicycle on a path outside the window.

It is the murderer that Scott had seen.

I duck down, peeking out at him from the corner of the window.

He stops, looks in the window, and takes a rifle out of a pouch hanging from the handlebars of his bike.

He aims and shoots, breaking a hole in the thick glass of the window, the cold air rushs in. I turn and see a man that was sleeping at the bar; he has been shot and is dead. No one in the room moves or wakes up.

The man on the bicycle presses another button near the trigger of the rifle and a bright red light comes from the barrel of the gun - it is some kind of high-powered red laser.

On the moss covered rock wall, he slowly etches a message, letter by letter.

It reads "RED RUM".

He puts away the rifle and peddles away.

Then I woke up.

rand

Update, 7/30/2007: I told this dream to a friend last night who noted that it mixes up themes and images from three different Stanley Kubrick movies - "2001", "Clockwork Orange" and "The Shining". I hadn't noticed that...

Hermeneutic World's Fair Avatars

I am at a conference.

I'm in a large meeting room space. People mill about, waiting for the session to start. A series of PowerPoint slides are shown on two large screens at the front of the room.

According to one slide, this a conference on Race and Class Issues in the Hermeneutics of Genomic Virtual Spaces.

It is being organized by my employer. My boss is supposed to give the first presentation, but she isn't there.

She has given me a copy of her PowerPoint slides so that I can give the presentation. But I am also aware that she has given the slides to six other people and told each of them to give the presentation as well.

I stand at the back of the room, rather uninterested and uninvolved in the whole thing.

An administrator from the university stands up and brings the crowd to order. As people take their seats, she begins to speak, going through my boss's presentation.

The crowd becomes restless, shifting in their chairs, coughing and looking over the program.

A couple of people in the crowd float away.

Then a few more. And a few more.

Soon, only five or six people are left in the room; the rest have floated away through the ceiling and disappeared.

I notice that the people in the room are strange - some are real people, while others are Second Life avatars.

The administrator stops the presentation, a little unnerved, and announces that the conference is canceled.

I walk out of the conference room. It appears that I am in some kind of high-tech hotel. There are little Internet kiosks scattered here and there and a few people - both real and Second Life avatars - wandering around or chatting with each other. Some have devices resembling iPhones or laptops; others have devices that look like something out of the 1960s version of 'Star Trek'.

Both the "real" people and the avatars have little "bubbles" that appear over their heads as they chat, indicating what they were saying, sort of like instant messaging.

There are walls made out of glass or some other material, from floor to ceiling, that allow me to see outside. The hotel is part of some type of large complex with futuristic buildings. Outside one wall, I can see something that looks like the Biosphere; going down the hall further, I can see buildings that resemble the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 New York Word's Fair. Beyond that is a structure that looks like the Eiffel Tower.

I continue walking and come to a large door with a space on it to place my hand - I put my palm on the device on the door and it beeps and blurps, opening automatically with other assorted technology noises.

I walk into a large, multi-story hotel suite as the door closes behind me. The place looks run down and dilapidated, much like it hadn't been remodeled since the 1980's. There are people there, but they don't seem to pay any attention to me. They look like tourists and have eighties hairstyles and clothing.

I walk up a flight of steps to the second floor of the hotel suite. I go around a corner and suddenly find myself in a small, dimly lit room.

"This way," a man says.

The man is dressed in a kind of uniform. There are other men around me.

We are all dressed in older-style suits and ties. We wear fedoras with a small card in the headband of the hat that reads "PRESS".

The man in the uniform is conducting a tour.

He directs our attention to a window on the wall. But it isn't a window - it's a one-way mirror that allows us to look into a large auditorium filled with people.

There are dozens and dozens of people in the auditorium - men, women and children of all ages. Each is dressed in 1930's clothing. They sit in the audience, listening to a man on stage addressing them. He is dressed in modern clothing.

The tour guide explains that these people all went to sleep in a kind of suspended animation at the end of the 1939 New York World's Fair. They are being updated on what had happened in the world since they had been asleep.

The guide notes that this group of people first went into suspended animation at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in the 1890's and they wake up during each world's fair.

For some reason not understood by scientists, they slept through the New York 64 World's Fair, Expo 66 and the Knoxville World's Fair.

The speaker in the auditorium shows them objects and technology of 2007, explaining how the things worked.

The audience seems interested, but not very animated.

The speaker tells them about advances in television - that there are now over 500 channels available and that there are big tv's that look like movie screens that hang on the wall of the average American home.

The crowd seems surprised. They talk to each other excitedly and enthusiastically applaud.

And then I woke up.

Czechoslovakian Bathroom Weather Report

I am in a hallway in a school. It is similar to the elementary school I attended.

It seems older, with narrow halls, lots of wood trim and many classrooms. There are worn tile floors and walls painted in dull, unappealing institutional colors.

There are college students everywhere, studying for some type of final exam. They sit in the classrooms at creaky wooden desks and tables. They sit in the floors in the hallways and in doorways. I have to step over them as I walk.

They read textbooks and their notes in silence. I watch them as I slowly walk around the hallways, hearing only an occasional cough, the turning of a page, or squeak of a highlighter drawn across the text of a book.

I am supposed to help the students if they have a question.

I have an urge to go to the bathroom.

I really need to go to the bathroom. Now.

I walk down the hallway to a large dark wooden door. I turn the brass doorknob and walk inside.

The room I enter is very spacious with high ceilings. There are large older styled windows with worn wooden trim.

Czechoslovak flags, dozens of them, are draped all around the ceiling.

The room is filled with rows of wooden bathroom stalls. I walk to one and open the door, hearing the spring on it creak.

I step inside and the door shuts behind me. I notice there are no walls separating one stall from another. To my left and right is a row of older-styled toilets, a wooden door in front of each one.

Other people are there, sitting on some of the toilets. They look straight ahead, blankly, sitting in silence. One person reads a newspaper, slowly turning the pages.

Some of the people are women; some are men.

I don’t seem to be concerned about them.

I unzip my pants and take a leak, the sound of the flowing water echoing in the large room. I flush the toilet.

I turn around, open the stall and walk back out into the hallway.

I look back at the door of the bathroom.

A fancy brass plague is on the center of the door.

"This restroom donated by the Republic of Czechoslovakia," it reads.

I continue walking through the hallway. The students are still there, studying quietly.

Once in a while, one of the students asks me a question.

I point to something in their notes or their book.

“Try that,” I say.

In a corner of one hallway is a classroom. I walk inside, stepping over the students studying on the floor.

I see a television mounted in the corner of the room. It is tuned to CNN.

The students crowded in the room continue studying and pay no attention to it.

On the television, a man stands pointing at a map, giving a weather forecast.

"In this area of the country, it will be sunny and mild. But we’re also expecting a slight chance of inter-dimensional shifts," he says, pointing at the east coast.

I walk further into the classroom to a desk sitting next to a window.

A student sits there, graphing some type of mathematics problem on an old computer. He seems frustrated, his brow tensed, concentrating and adjusting his glasses.

He looks up at me.

“What should I do?” he asks.

I point at the graph on the computer screen.

“Try that point,” I say.

The student types something into the keyboard. The screen of the computer slowly refreshes, redrawing the graph.

The graph forms a perfect circle on the screen.

I hear a loud clap of thunder.

One of the students in the middle of the classroom stands up from his desk. He points at the window next to me.

“Look!” he yells, “It’s the Swiss Alps!”

I turn and look out the window.

Strange clouds and fog are moving into the schoolyard.

In the distance, I see the Alps, surrounded by heavy clouds. It is slowly drifting towards us.

Then I woke up.

Bleach-Blonde Performance Artists Collective Disaster

I am at work at my university ... but it isn't my university.

My co-workers and I are in a building something like the student center on campus, combined with a fine arts center I used to work in at a different university.

Our offices are in little cubicles in rooms that seem older than the rest of the building; they have big wooden doors and bright open windows all around the space.

It is a sunny day and the warmth of the sun streams in upon us.

My boss is there, conducting a meeting with several of us.

It is time for lunch.

I exit the room and wander around the building, chatting with my coworkers as we go our separate ways.

I find myself alone in the hallways of the building. I continue walking, aimlessly.

I stand in an area something like the main entrance of the art gallery side of the fine arts center I used to work in -- there is an open walkway around the top, on the third floor, that looks down into an open area in front of the gallery. From there, I can see into a glass-enclosed rehearsal space.

The room is something like a dance studio, with mirrors all around and a black floor. There are three people in the room, rehearsing some type of performance art piece.

One of the men there is a wonderfully cute man -- he reminds me a bit of Jason (but it isn't). He wears a black t-shirt and black pants. He has a neatly trimmed beard and his hair cut is close on the sides.

The top of his hair is longer and falls to one side. The longer part of his hair, on top, is bleached blonde.

He directs an actor and musician in a performance piece. It uses keyboards, excerpts of some CD's and miscellaneous props. It reminds me of a modern take on ancient theater; in parts they put on masks or play a handheld instrument and do some kind of chanting, like a Greek chorus.

I just stand there, watching them for a while. Then, I decide to move closer.

I am on the second floor where they are, standing in the hallway near the performance space. I look on as they rehearse some more.

The rehearsal breaks up and they walk out of the room. The man who is sort of like Jason smiles. He says hello to me as he passes by, carrying out a bag of instruments. I smile and say hello back to him.

I do not know him or who he is.

They leave the hallway and I am alone again.

I decide to walk down to the ground level. I stand in the open entrance in front of the gallery and look at the strange wooden bird-like sculpture hanging from the ceiling, three floors up.

I glance outside through the large windows of the lobby.

It looks dark, like some great storm is coming up.

I hear all kinds of alarms and sirens suddenly going off. It starts to grow even darker.

I see people rushing around outside. I walk out of the lobby towards them.

"Go home!" a man yells at me.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

The man tells me that some kind of lynching happened this morning. There are riots breaking out in different cities all over the country.

He tells me they have called off work. Everyone has been ordered to go home.

I decide to go for my car that’s sitting in a far away parking lot.

I head out on to the lawn in front of the arts center, then onto a sidewalk. I keep walking through different parts of the neat campus, then through neighborhoods and city streets.

The clouds grow darker; I hear alarms and sirens and, in the distance in all directions, I see buildings on fire. Some people rush by me, in a panic.

For some reason, I do not feel afraid or concerned. I am just confused about why this is happening.

Turning a corner on a little city street, I run into the sort-of Jason performance artist again.

"It looks dangerous out here," he says. "Why don't you come with me?"

I agree.

We walk together, talking about the performance piece I saw him rehearsing. He tells me what it was about and the intention behind it.

Soon, we arrive at a kind of brownstone, the type of building you might see in older parts of New York or San Francisco. We walk inside the building into a living room.

The room is filled with all manner of bric-a-brac and artwork, from floor to ceiling.

There are several men there -- some older, some younger, some thin, some bearish. All wear black t-shirts but have different types of pants ­ camouflage, blue jeans, dockers.

They all have haircuts similar to the sort-of Jason that brought me there. They have different hair colors, but all have the same longer bleach blond hair on top of their heads.

Sort-of Jason introduces me to a man who seems to be the leader of the place.

The man is about my age, a little taller than me and heavy set. He is blond and has a beard.

He has a similar haircut to the other men there, but the long hair on the top of his head is dyed black. (Or, perhaps, it is the other way around - he is naturally black-headed and dyes the rest of his hair blonde.)

He welcomes me there. He turns to one of the other men and chats about some type of underground magazine they are putting together.

Another man walks up and the leader answers some questions about an exhibit they are staging.

The leader tells sort-of Jason to show me around.

The house has several spacious rooms, all pretty much like the living room. It is an older place with high ceilings and wooden floors; some of the rooms are studios for painting, drawing or sculpture, while others are like recording studios or video editing facilities.

All the men seem to be working -- preparing dinner, assembling some kind of artwork or just moving things around the house.

Soon, we are back in the living room and sort-of Jason turns me back over to the leader.

"We've been watching you closely," he says.

"You have?” I ask, “Why?”

"We have an opening in our little group here,” he says, “We've been watching your work and feel you'd be perfect for us."

He explains that this is an artist's collective, or commune, and that they all work together and live in this house. He said they all make decisions together, as a group.

"We try to comment on the world, but do not wish to remain a part of it,” he says.

I wonder what he is talking about. I don’t exactly consider myself an artist.

He explains that I what I do can fit nicely with their work. He says I might learn something there.

I tell him I have to think about it.

"We just had a space open up,” he says, “We wouldn't want to offer it to anyone else until you have an answer."

"We try to balance things out,” he says, “We could use a Democrat here."

Then I woke up.

Classroom Rune Goat Lunch

I am in a classroom. It looks like a room in my old high school.

It is a nice day and the sun streams through the windows.

I stand at a chalkboard with a class full of students. These are not high school students ­ these are men and women who are all adults, their ages varying quite a bit.

The students all sit in rapt attention as I stand at the board lecturing. I draw some strange symbols on the chalkboard, discussing the significance of each symbol.

I glance down at my watch. It is noon.

"Let's take a break for lunch," I say.

The students in the room rise up from their desks. They head out a door in the back of the classroom, murmuring and chatting a bit with each other about the lecture.

I know that they will be going to some type of cafeteria or restaurant for lunch.

But, at the same time, I know that I am not supposed to eat there.

I look to my left.

Standing at the front of the classroom is a goat tied to a chair.

"That's lunch," I think.

I walk up to the goat. I look down and have an ornate long curved knife in my hand.

I cut the goat's throat and drag it in front of my desk.

I take the knife in both of my hands.

I chop off the goat’s head. The goat’s body falls to the floor.

I carefully place the head, blood gushing from the base of it, on the desk.

I get down on my knees and use the knife to skin the goat.

I look up and see a little mound in front of me. There is a spit and a fire is slowly burning.

I drag the goat's body to the mound.

I insert the spit into the goat and place it above the fire.

I notice as I turn the goat on the spit that there is a strange thing in the center of its belly -- it is like a hole, a couple of inches in diameter, to its insides, almost like a round window.

Around the hole, impressed into its body, are two circles. Between the circles are strange rune-like symbols, similar to the ones I drew on the board during the lecture.

There is good fire going and the goat is cooking pretty well.

I look up and see a hole in the ceiling. The sky shows through the hole -- the smoke drifts through the hole in the roof to the outside.

The goat is ready.

I rip off some of its flesh.

I look over at the desk. I see the head of the dead goat just sitting there, staring at me, blood steaming down the front of the desk.

I have to eat the goat, but the thought of doing so repulses me.

I need to eat the meat, but I cannot bring myself to do it.

I wonder why.

I think it’s a cute goat -- it would be like eating Bambi or something.

I feel sad for the goat.

Then I woke up.