Batch

01-25-2013 -- [Earliest bits are faded, but much of the later bits I can remember pretty well. This dream came after about four hours of sleep, and actually involves waking up in the middle of it, and falling back asleep and going back into pretty much the same dream.] Earliest bits, I can barely remember hints of BC and Disney shows, probably at Videopolis. Then things shift to a setting of a kind of college campus crossed with the Cathedral-like setting with a huge stadium / lecture hall area in it that I have dreamed of, frequently. Though it also seems to be shifting into almost a warehouse setting.

Anyway, I have some of my stuff in a big semi-trailer sitting at the docks, though the set-up is kind of weird. Where the trailer meets with the tractor, the connection almost looks like a sort of top, with a screwdriver head for a power drill sticking out the bottom, and kind of floating just an inch or two above the tractor, somehow held in place by a self-generated energy field. I'm kind of unloading a couple of bags of my stuff that is on the trailer (kind of think of duffel bags and my old green hiking backpack), while I may be supposed to be keeping an eye on the truck.

Something seems to be going wrong, and at first a tiny bit of smoke seems to be rising from both ends of the trailer, but then it is getting thicker and darker, and it seems almost like a fire is starting to spring up. It seems to be growing and spreading, and I don't know what to do about it, so I start running to one of the nearby buildings to try and get some sort of help. There I find a security guard who asks me if I have run all the way across campus to properly notify the main office, and I'm thinking that with my size and shape, if I did that, the entire thing would have burnt down before I could get over there, and it would be very irresponsible of me. But that's what he thinks I should have done.

On the other hand, he gets some others, and they come back with me to the loading docks to fight the fire. It is getting worse, and we can see smoke and flames coming from the trailer, and the top seems to have stopped spinning, and is now making a sort of grinding sound as the screwdriver head on the bottom snaps out to a 45 degree angle, and the trailer collapses perhaps six inches to be right on the tractor. Those fighting the fire are now hosing water over everything.

Another truck has pulled in, absolutely ignoring us fighting this fire, and have started unloading their truck, and and dropping huge crates of supplies around and even on top of my duffel bags, and I am running around, trying to shift the crates or move them to be able to get my stuff, so the guys unloading the truck are trying to lecture me about how I am not part of the union, and am not allowed to help unloading the truck or something. Idiots.

So we're down in the loading bays, and it is wet, and hot, and sticky, and an utter mess. I glance over, and there is a sort of a square tunnel in the wall (kind of like the one tunnel in the old drainage ditch where it ran under Dale) and I think it leads somewhere where I can get out of the water. I walk through it rather quickly, and that was a mistake, because it turns out it was covered in spider webs, and I find myself covered in webs and dozens of big, dangerous spiders.

Thankfully, I am dressed in a thick, yellow firefighting suit, so the spiders can't reach me, and I am brushing the webs off, and crushing all the spiders against the suit, coating it in a green coating of slime. Once I manage to kill them all, I start to remove the suit, and then I am stupid enough to walk through the tunnel again, and get coated in spiders again. But I no longer have the suit on, and as I start to crush and scrape spiders off of me, they are all biting me.

Within moments, my hands start to swell up with these large blisters of bubbling and swelling flesh that get bigger and bigger before they pop, splattering ooze everywhere. It is very disgusting and halfway painful, and I am rushing to a sink, trying to wash everything off. Thankfully the tunnel leads into the university (or whatever this place is) hospital, and they help dealing with my hands, which are soon lightly wrapped in bandages.

But soon I am back out in the loading dock area, still trying to get my stuff, including managing to lift the trailer up a few inches, long enough to pull one of my bags out from under the collapsed end. [About this time I woke up, but since I was short on sleep, and sleeping poorly, I did not write the dream down, only tried to remember it, then drifted back to sleep, and back into more or less the same dream, though the loading dock was turning into more of a full warehouse than just a loading dock.]

Somehow they are unloading another truck or two, and among the things they are moving around, are a couple of beds, at least full-size, yet made up, and ready to sleep on. They pick them up, shift them, and then repeat. Oddly I see something flying through the air, and I immediately fire with a gun I am holding. Somehow it is a sort of a laser gun, and yet it ejects cartridges as it fires, and what I've shot turns out to be a bed flying through the air that crashes to the ground, by lands on its edge, standing up. Odd.

Somehow we're out in fields, with some low-growing, young plants along the lines of corn or something, and other fields that seem more like the wet rice fields. Some of them are the right kind, some of them are the wrong kind, and we are kind of walking between them, trying to cull the wrong kind and strengthen the right kind. Meanwhile there are two groups of us, and hints of two leaders that are friendly, yet opposed to one another (kind of like Tecumseh and the Prophet from the Alvin Maker tales).

Both groups are in the fields, and they are supposed to agree, but one of the brothers is trying to betray the other. The other calls all the people together, and calms everybody to stop the betrayal, but then he wanders off, because he needs some time to himself.

We are standing at the head of a sort of river, dotted with small islands, and the bad brother is trying to start up the betrayal again, by standing by the river and trying to part the water, like Moses. But he can't do it very well. He doesn't have the power or support, so he can only part a few yards of water.

The other brother isn't there to stand against him, so I step in, hold out another staff, and gesture for the Prophet (who now seems to be a third group) to speak, and he leads both groups to walk along the banks of the river, one on each side, and to be separate, rather than fighting each other, and they go off, kind of embarrassed.

11-14-2012 -- Early parts gone, but I am in an area that is half a small area of streets backing a lake in Florida, and half somewhere on the Fullerton College campus in California. I'm not sure why I am here, but I am at Don Dunn's shop, so it probably has something to do with car repairs. At the back of the property, where it borders on the lake, there is a spider web across the path, with a small red spider in the middle of the web. As I watch it, the spider is growing slightly larger, and is turning into what almost looks like a vaguely sponge ball-ish blob, about an inch across.

Moment by moment, there seem to be more and more of these things, some connected together, almost like centipede segments or something. Somehow they are important, but not terribly dangerous, and they help to keep the path clear, though clear of what, I really don't have a clue. There are some kids who live in a hillbilly-like house back in the mud around the lake that are running through the area.

I seem to be standing here with Bonnie M. at Don Dunn's place, wait for somebody who I am almost sure is Xander Harris (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to bring me something, though at first I am not sure what it is. [Problem is, I have never seen BtVS, so I don't know the character, which makes this very strange.] Whatever I am waiting for, it has already been paid for, in fact it was paid for perhaps a year or two ago, and Xander is very late in providing it.

I'm pretty sure it is supposed to be a state-of-the-art computer which Xander was supposed to be able to get for me really cheap. Anyway, as we're waiting for Xander to hopefully show up, Bonnie decides to give me a worn, slightly bent metal side-panel from a computer, and since it isn't in the best of shape, I'm hoping it isn't supposed to be a part of my new state-of-the-art machine. It isn't, just an extra piece of metal she has found that she thinks I may want.

No idea how or why, but I seem to own an old, beat up truck which is a cross between a box truck and a trash truck. I don't see any use for the side panel except as a bit of scrap metal, so I climb up the side of the truck to toss it in the back. As I go to do some, a worker looks out and asks me "What's up?" Worker? I didn't know I had any workers with the truck .... I don't have anything for him to do, and no money to pay him with, so I tell him he can take the rest of the week off because we have nothing scheduled.

But I find myself thinking that maybe I should start up a salvage yard like Jupiter's Uncle Titus (Three Investigators). I wonder if I might be able to make a living as a junk dealer. I suddenly find myself looking at some old statues and thinking of how I might pack them in the truck to be able to move them safely, figuring in wrapping them in blankets and things to help protect them from damage in moving. It seems to be almost a sort of test.

By this time, the area has turned to Hazelnut in Buena Park, and Bonnie M is trying to call Xander on her cell phone, but is interrupted when a sort of mobile home trailer pulls up to Sean S.'s house. Sean has an aunt or something that is a friend of Bonnie's, and she has just shown up and is unloading something off her trailer. She seems to be handing me bits of foam packing material or something, and I assume she needs help and am neatly stacking the material for her, until she asks me what I think I'm doing. I have no clue, and she doesn't tell me anything, but she doesn't seem to need my help.

About this time, Xander finally shows up and starts unpacking a lot of very large boxes. It seems he finally has my computer, but there are hints that not everything is right. He may need more money, or may not have all the parts because some things were not available. The large replacement hard drive may not be as large as it is supposed to be. And the 20" monitor which was supposed to be top-of-the-line when I ordered it is now more toward the lower end. But it is still a very good Mac system built on the Power PC line at about 367 MHz, which in my dreams is still quite good. (In real life I no longer know what would be a good Mac processor.) I am thinking this system will help me to reacquaint myself with desktop publishing software on the Mac, giving me a better chance at graphic artist job interviews since I still need to find work.

As we're unpacking stuff, Don Dunn comes across what almost seems like large stacks of advertising pogs or perhaps coasters. Small, thin paper-ish discs with pictures and system details printed on them. In some was I'm not really clear on, I'm shooting them out of a sort of air cannon, trying to fire them into a pile out of the way. But the air cannon is far more powerful than I realize, and I end up shooting them several houses down the block. I try to go gathering them all up again, but find all those that have landed on the grass have absorbed the dew, and are too wet to be worth collecting.