Blue_Opossum

Morning of May 5, 2014. Monday.



My computer (the older one in the front room) does its thing of crashing and shutting down after being on for about a minute until a few attempts at restart by either dropping it sideways a few times or wiggling the CPU and partly broken fan around a bit and adjusting the fishing line reel succeeds in it working correctly again. Still, as is sometimes the case, the “recovery” window comes on, but it is not quite correct. I am used to incorrect random “error” windows, blue screens, multicolored mosaic random messes, and DOS screens of plain text (resulting from the fact that the CPU is malfunctioning until cooled down a bit more), but this one is eerily familiar. It reports (in a rather atypical font) “Your computer has recovered from an occurrence…”

Next, it happens again. The computer is so screwed up that the blue screen strings are longer and part of one hexadecimal value “carries over” onto the side of the vase-like black desk lamp fairly close to the right side of the monitor. It is getting pretty bad when a computer error message expands out onto the surface of another electrical item (a different one altogether), but it seems perfectly normal. Another attempt or two and the “Your computer has recovered from an occurrence…” window displays again.

Where have I heard that before? The desktop is full of identical icons. They are all of slightly painting-like owls, body a quarter turn to my right and head turned facing out towards the viewer. Only one desktop icon is different and it is of a painting-like well on the lower right corner; the “old-fashioned” kind with a rope and bucket and even a little roof. Then it dawns on me that something funny is going on. I must have the “Owl Creek Bridge” virus (which I do not think is a real one). Thus I realize that my computer has “suffered” from “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. The “wishing well” icon must be clicked on to get rid of it. Terrific… However, I leave it as is for a bit…and decide to see what other people had experienced with it.

I visit a forum where someone says that the “payload” of the virus is waking you up from your dream - which does not make sense. Another says that the “payload” is making your computer disintegrate, whereby someone argues that it “disintegrated” because it was a dream and did not exist in the first place, but the other person posts a pile of ashes saying that is what is left of his laptop. The argument seems to continue for several pages and seems to go into a tirade about who is controlling the missile launches.

I then make the decision to click on an owl and see what happens. There is the odd electronic clacking of the computer-simulated “mouse click” sound and my head jerks back. I wake up with my wife touching my lower face, some sort of odd partial reversal of the actual “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” movie. (“waking me up from my dream”).

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Ever since earliest childhood, I had wondered how in the world dreams sometimes seem to amusingly and very “cleverly” build up to a not-yet-unfolded event or sound and have plots or themes that come way before a “concluding” real-life environmental event. That is probably one of the most unusual paranormal-like aspect of dreams (for example, I once dreamed of seeing myself, or a “copy” of myself, holding a broomstick near an overturned washtub and ready to hit it like some sort of odd musical task. After a fairly short time when I had fully “absorbed” the imagery and was already aware of it, I heard a sound in real life on the carport that sounded just like a wooden object hitting metal - my mother confirmed that was the only instance of the sound that woke me up). Not all dreams work like this of course, as some are “caught by surprise” in the middle of a dream, but many are not, too many to be coincidental as such, and too correct in the continuing detail to be chance. It is an odd type of precognition I suppose, of the several different types. Many people would claim the sound caused the dream, which is of course, a ridiculous cop-out. How can a dream come before the sound that supposedly caused it (although, obviously, this does happen at times in other cases)?

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