[dream blog] The Hug

I was working in a spacious, swooping, almost airport-like place made of glass and steel. It had workstations for just a few people with no cubicles or walls separating them, just a lot of open space. It was the kind of unreal, inefficient space they use to shoot business-related stock photography. I think it might have been the workspace that came with some kind of hotel suite, rather than a regular office building.

The walls were all glass, and I'd been seeing strange vehicles drifting through the sky in the distance. Sci-fi stuff. Big, unwieldy metal things with no obvious means of staying aloft. I couldn't believe it. I kept watching them sail over the city, waiting to wake up or to see the strings or to hear about some movie being filmed, or an advertising stunt. I checked around on the Internet, and all I found was more evidence that these things were new, but completely real.

Then there was an explosion outside, and flames in the distant city. One of those air vehicles had crashed, or been shot down, or maybe launched some kind of attack on the city below.

Someone told me about a scientist who'd made a prediction years ago that explained all of this. I think I'd heard of it, too, but written it off as crazy futurist stuff, like almost everything said about the "singularity" towards which our technological development is supposedly heading.

He called it--and this was probably the name of his book or his Wired article or whatever--"The Hug". This was the phenomenon of a single naturally-occurring machine intelligence--a thing just born out there in the primordial soup of infinite information and escalating computing power--awakening to self awareness and grabbing ahold of every computer into which it can transmit its message.

The upshot of all this, or course, was that the entire human race was in a lot of trouble. Maybe not tonight, or even this year, but soon. And things were going to change fast. I wondered if I should unplug all the computers in the office. I wondered if the world was going to turn into that Stephen King movie, Maximum Overdrive, with cars and ATMs rebelling murderously against humanity. I wondered if some of that sci-fi technology that had apparently been released onto the market just ahead of the Hug could be helpful against it. Could I get a ray gun? Would it be effective against killer robots?

Surely everything would turn out okay. Surely someone would figure something out.

[dream blog] Summoning at the lake

Somehow, my immediate family--that is, my parents, siblings, and I--had come into possession (perhaps accidentally) of a text outlining some kind of Lovecraftian ritual. We didn't really know what it was supposed to do (I think it was more of a vague evocation of eldritch powers than a specific summoning) or whether or not it would work, but we were going to try it out anyway. As a family. A night of appropriate occult significance was coming up soon, and also we had access to a cabin on a lake which we thought was similarly significant. I had a little more belief that it would work than my family, and a lot less certainty that it would be a good idea, but I was interested and I agreed that the perfect opportunity to try it was going to come and pass soon. And, anyway, I knew they were going to try it, so I felt I'd better be there and try to mitigate whatever damage resulted from it.

We arrived at the lake in late evening. We were far from any city lights, and the treeline all around us was a wall of solid black, while the sky was a dark and starless blue. The lake itself was black and calm, but there were subtle lights in there from some bioluminescent life, and a rock dropped into the water triggered more of that phenomenon in a tiny, blue-white explosion at the center of the ripples. The whole lake seemed to strain with potential, like a boulder perched on a cliff.

We got to work at once, all of us arrayed across the shore, staggered rather far apart and facing the water, reciting our parts from unbound pages. I don't remember any of what we said. Occasionally, lights and indistinct emanations appeared from the lake at the end of the dock, the point which was the focus of our ceremony. Some of these merely dissipated, while others would stream away from the lake and into one of my family. This had no obvious effect, but still I did my best to prevent it from happening: I held out my hand in a certain gesture, as if in benediction, which--along with proper concentration--pulled the eldritch emanations into that hand, where they apparently dispersed. I felt no adverse effects from doing this, and had no idea just what sort of trouble I was protecting my family from, but by this point I was of the opinion that if we could just get through the ritual with no lasting results whatsoever, I would call it a success. We were getting to see something amazing, and that should be enough.

Eventually, the ceremony did come to an end without serious incident. It was then that we found a package addressed to us: a box wrapped in white paper, with a note. It used language that suggested the whole package was put together and sent right after we completed our ritual--even though that had only been moments ago--and said something to the effect that, since our efforts had gained us nothing of value, the sender wanted to provide us with gifts that might placate "those of an acquisitive nature". Within the box were five smaller bundles, each wrapped in more white paper and marked for one of us.

In a detached, audience-perspective way, I knew where the package had come from. It hadn't been sent moments ago, but instead was left there before we'd even arrived by the mysterious man who had given us access to the lakeshore cabin. He had known we'd perform our ceremony before finding the box, and also that we'd gain nothing in the attempt. His gifts were chosen to satisfy our individual Faustian desires, and thereby prevent us from ever trying this again, and continuing down what he knew was a dangerous road.

Also, I knew that our hidden benefactor was an age-old vampire who had watched over and protected our family.

But the whole package was destroyed before we could take the gifts within. I don't remember how, only that it seemed inevitable.

[dream blog] Outbreak escape

I was some kind of superhero. One of a team of such. We had a whole variety of individual, maybe somewhat low-level X-Men-ish powers (in fact, some of them might actually have been actual X-Men characters), but few or none of us wore any sort of costume. Most of them looked like regular folks, in fact. (Or television's version of reagular folks, perhaps: unusually young and attractive.) I think I might not have been with the team long--or maybe wasn't even an actual member, but just someone momentarily working with them--because I mostly couldn't really keep track of them as individuals, and didn't even know their names.

My power was something about releasing big, very short-range bursts of concussive energy from by whole body. I think there was something else I could do--something more versatile--but I never got a chance to try it.

We were all trapped in a huge shopping mall--or maybe it was an airport, or some kind of shopping area attached to a big hotel--a bright, airy place that was all steel and glass. It was empty except for us, and some ill-defined threat that had somehow been unleashed upon the world from somewhere inside or below that building. This threat also looked like a bunch of ordinary humans, and displayed some kind of minor powers. But they also clearly had the ability to either take infest or replace people. They harried us as we tried to find a way out of the mall while keeping them locked in, and gradually they started to take over our members. We couldn't manage to put them down for more than a few moments.

I couldn't understand why the rest of the team found blasting their way out of the mall difficult, or why our enemy hadn't already escaped. I decided to just use my concussive powers to bounce myself up out of the enemy's reach and knock out a window, door, wall, or whatever. Some of my team would surely be able to follow, and those who couldn't could probably be carried.

Then I was in a different place--maybe part of the same place, possibly the hotel attached to the mall--and I might have been someone different. I definitely wasn't currently superheroing, even if I was the same person. This hotel (or this part of it?) was all dark, wooden walls and smooth marble floors, and it wasn't empty. It seemed to be in ordinary operation. I was wandering through it at a brisk pace, looking for an Internet cafe I'd seen earlier so that I could check my email.

I was caught in a small crowd--mostly an Asian tour group, apparently--outside the elevators when an alarm went off. Something bad but unspecified was going on, and the hotel was being evacuated.

One of the tour group was telling me, clearly with great worry, that he'd found his room broken into and his computer tampered with shortly after some lesser crisis leading up to this alarm had gone down. He said the log files on his machine showed that a large amount of activity had gone on through that machine while he'd been out of his room, and wanted advice about something relating to the computer's serial number sticker.

I was too distracted to be helpful, though. Was this the same problem the superheroes were dealing with? Was this the result of their failure to contain their enemy? Or was that fight in the mall still going on? Or maybe this was happening before that whole scene, and this evacuation would lead to that abandoned mall.

At any rate, the elevators were no longer working, so we all consulted an evacuation booklet. It contained needlessly complex blueprints of the hotel, but apparently we were supposed to open up hidden emergency exits and proceed down a tight spiral staircase to safety. The plan was detailed enough that I could see how some landings of the staircase had been badly spaced, making it necessary to actually crawl on one's belly to fit down the stairs at one point.

We didn't look at the plans too carefully. We all just wanted to get out of there.

I helped open up the exits, and was the first one down. The stairs were gray, unfinished, clearly never used. Worse, they were absurdly claustrophobic. The further down we went, the cruder the stairs got, and there was ever more frequently clumps of dry, gray sea sand scatters over them. Eventually, we came to the place where the blueprints had shown we'd have to crawl, and they certainly proved accurate in that regard. I got through it okay, although I worried about all those behindme.

The stairs opened up again after that, but were still tighter than before. A lot of the time, I couldn't stand up all the way. I worried about running into more pinch points. But, as it turned out, that possibility didn't even have a chance to become a problem: The stairs ran straight into a solid layer of sand.

The crowd behind me was too frenzied and the confines were too tight to dig, and in any case I didn't believe there was anywhere to dig to. And time, we were all sure, was short. The situation was hopeless.

So I decided to wake up.

[dream blog] The pet department

I was in some kind of obnoxiously upscale department store--so upscale, in fact, that it had a wine section, complete with warning about what you're not allow to wear into it, lest you be able to smuggle something out under your clothes.

There was something else in the wine section, though: A fish tank shaped like a six-foot-tall, octagonal pillar. The only creature I noticed in there wasn't a fish, but a rough, dark-green pod-like thing, just smaller than a ping-pong ball. At the front of the thing was a gulping mouth, with six staring eyes arranged around it (two larger ones at the sides of the mouth, and two smaller pairs above and below it). Then the odd, swimming pod unfolded a set of four legs, and I realized it was just a frog or toad (if one with six eyes).

The store also had a pet department, consisting of a large wall covered in more conventionally-shaped fish tanks, all facing the furniture department, containing a weird variety of amphibians, mollusks, and marine arthropods. I think there might have been some fish, as well, because one tank contained a mass of tangled, iridescent filaments that appeared to have tiny fins, scales, and staring black eyes.

The creatures that really interested me, though, weren't even stored behind glass. At about arm level, there was a row of open-air habitats which contained a horseshoe crab, an octopus (both of these oddly unconcerned that they weren't under water), and a huddle of squirming, boomarang-headed diplocauluses (which I assumed to have been cloned from prehistoric cells).

Stranger still were the fat, glassy-skinned salamanders which swam through the air, occasionally alighting on my shoulder or bumbling into my face. I dismissed these with annoyance, not realizing a flying salamander was a much more impossible creature than a land-dwelling octopus.

[dream blog] Snake smugglers

We were spending the day hanging out in our apartment. The light outside was gray and overcast. Throughout the day, I noticed snakes outside. Generally very large ones. Mostly, they were being carried across the street by somewhat furtive, shady-looking men (or maybe it was the same man each time?) to our side of the street.

Then, looking out the window to the apartment building on the other side of the street, I saw what I first took to be the source of all these snakes. A giant--I mean, two or three feet thick--boa constrictor seemed to be writhing behind the windows of the apartment opposite ours.

Then I realized my perception of depth was completely wrong. It wasn't a giant snake across the street; it was a merely large snake just outside our own window. It was sort of hanging from the concrete ledge above our window, but probing downwards, looking for a place to climb onto, and very much in danger of falling.

We opened the window to let it in, and it immediately took a shit on our windowsill the instant it was past the threshold.

[dream blog] Pleasure dome

I was in some kind of exotic, vaguely Middle Eastern (in a very Arabian Nights kind of way) paradise. Whatever it was, it was definitely artificial. Fake, even. It was a shared hallucination or a computer simulation or a magical construct. Very much Kubla Khan's "stately pleasure-dome".

They place was ruled or run by two superhuman beings, male and female. They might have been genies or gods or computer programs. They looked essentially human--beautiful, even--but were huge, maybe ten or twelve feet tall.

I had two companions with me, but they were vaguely defined and I can't remember much of them. One was a woman. The other might have been a rat. Possibly a raccoon.

The three of us were there to steal a palm-sized gem or shiny bauble from the genies. Apparently, if one had both this gem and something else (a secret word, maybe?), one would gain complete control over this false world. We didn't have the other component yet.

The three of us split up and ran all over the sublime garden, dodging the giant, enraged genies and their human-sized servants, all of us looking for a chance to snatch the gem.

Eventually, the rat got it. And it turned out that, even without the second component, the gem did give its holder some kind of power. The rat was able to stop time, or at least the movements of the artificial world and its inhabitants. The three of us were unaffected, and so were the two genies, but their servants froze immediately. I remember seeing my female companion punch out one of the immobile creatures, some kind of hapless-looking humanoid badger dressed in golden armor.

The rat took the gem out of the garden area, running into a wall through some drainage pipe or similar. It caused the gem to shrink down to pea size, and hid it underneath a stone in a tunnel behind the wall. Hopefully, it would be safe there, and we could come back later to pick it up when we had the second component. If we had both items, after all, there's no way the genies could stop us.

[dream blog] The asylum

I was a patient in some kind of mental facility. But I never saw any other patients, and the people running the place seemed to be new to the security system. In order to invite me into the central control area to talk, they had to remotely open various gates while talking to me over the intercom, asking me each time if I saw any doors open.

Eventually, they determined that I was in "group F", which was the lowest security group. It wasn't really a patient risk designation, just the set of rooms which had easiest access to the control center. So I wouldn't get downgraded to group E if I, say, threatened suicide or refused take my meds.

In fact, they told me, group E was reserved for siblings. I marveled at the fact that there were enough mutually-damaged siblings around to fill a whole section of the facility. They told me that there were, but that was only two siblings.

Anyway, I walked into the control center to talk to the people in charge. They seemed like techies rather than doctors. And it turned out they wanted to ask me how one would go about "stealing" somebody else's LiveJournal post. I didn't think they meant copying, pasting, and claiming it as one's own.

Never found out precisely what they did mean, though.

[dream blog] Voodoo gum

It was early evening, with the unfamiliar city darkening around us, when we stopped at what appeared to be a hair salon. Two of us went in to ask for directions.

From the inside, it was clearly not a hair salon. Not anymore, anyway. There was no furniture of any sort inside, just shelves upon shelves of coin-operated candy machines. The cardboard advertisements behind the machines' glass fronts depicted things that looked like tikis or African idols, but rendered in garish, Saturday morning colors. And each one proclaimed the gum inside--it was all gum, not candy--to be named after one abstract concept or another. The price on every machine was 23 cents.

There was only one person working in there, a guy whose responsibilities seemed mostly about keeping the place clean and protecting the machines from theft and vandalism. He told us his mama made the gum, and that if we needed more after the shop closed or had any questions, we could call her up. I was surprised, because I'd have figured his mama--who I pictured as a fat, housebound voodoo lady--would be harder to get a hold of than him, not easier.

Anyway, I decided to buy some lilac-colored, M&M-shaped, candy-coated gum called Achievement. (Which is odd, because that's not really a word that's got a lot of resonance for me. It just makes be think of those idiotic motivational posters. Even at the time, I don't think I was particularly excited about it.) Pumping 23 cents into each machine was actually kind of hard, because instead of a slot, I had to put coins, one by one, into a metal frame with a hole in the side (like a square from a Connect Four game) and pull down a lever that lowered the whole frame into the machine. The coin fell out during this operation a couple times.

A couple stray pieces of Achievement fell out of the machine during this operation, and I tried them out before I finished with the coins. They tasted like Aspergum.

Maybe it was an effect of the Achievement active in my system, or the extra coins I ended up dropping into the machine, but when I finally pulled the lever for the last time, I received two plastic capsules full of gum instead of one. I think there was a rolled-up piece of paper inside each of them, too, presumably with information and usage instructions. Probably should have read that before I took some.

[dream blog] Post-apocalyptic poaching in England

In England--and, presumably, much of the rest of the world--there'd been some kind of unnatural disaster. I think nuclear or chemical agents used in a war had poisoned much of the environment. This might've been a long time ago. People seemed pretty much okay, and society seemed safe and functional. But there was something wrong with the animals.

People from Yorkshire--and that general part of England, I guess the north--had started shooting animals from trains and harvesting their meat. I think they stole people's pets, too. I'm extremely fuzzy on why.

Maybe untainted meat was hard to come by in northern England, so people were poaching it from the south.

Maybe there was something wrong with people's pets in the north, and they needed to be fed raw flesh.

Maybe all the animals were poison and eating them was illegal, but a practice had started in Yorkshire where people consumed the dangerous meat for some kind of buzz.

I remember carrying two floppy, pink slices of meat, which looked very much like they'd just come from the supermarket, and not the hasty, amateurish butchery of some sheep or dog. I don't know who I was. I bought them upstairs to the attic of some gray, rural, English cottage, looking for a big Ziploc bag to put them in.

That's about all I've got.