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This dream was set in a universe where everything is like it is now (and so we have all the advanced technology that we have right now), except that the USSR and all the other communist states still exist. I was almost done with college (computer science), and I had to go do an internship.

As I looked through all the available internship positions on the internet, I saw one that was quite interesting, to say the least. It was an internship as system administrator in communist Romania, for leader Nicolae Ceausescu. It sounded quite crazy and adventurous, and I got to work together with a supreme leader of a country, imagine that! So I was totally into it and I took the internship.

I don't think I saw much of Bucharest or of Romania in general. The dream skipped straight to the offices of Ceausescu. He was giving me a tour around the building, telling me where everything is, telling me what my job is, etc. He told me that I would be paid in a cryptocurrency called DigitalSilver (doesn't exist in real life, by the way).

I ended up sitting in an office that looked a lot like my grandma's (dad's mom) kitchen. I was there together with 2 others, a male cook and a female secretary. We were all doing our thing: I was doing some indistinct tasks on a terminal, the cook was cooking food, and the secretary was filling in some documents. Ceausescu was roaming around the building the whole time, occasionally coming in to check on us.
At some point my mom calls me to ask how everything's going. I said everything is fine.

Spoiler for *** WARNING: GRAPHIC PART ***:

All seemed pretty chill, until at some point, Ceausescu notices an error in what the secretary was doing. He gets angry, grabs a large knife, and stabs it right into her face. It was pretty gory. He cut a whole part out of her face, like the entire middle part cut out like an apple, so that there was only a huge pyramid-shaped wound left. Her eye was hanging out of the socket. As he got the knife out and let go of her shoulder, her corpse fell down on the desk and blood was gushing out of her face. The whole scene was very upsetting.

My heart was beating very rapidly and I looked at the cook. He pretended as though he didn't see it, so I did the same. At this point I was very scared, but I tried to stay calm. I should just continue working, and avoid making any errors, and by the end of the week I can go home. Then it's just a matter of simply no longer coming back (to hell with that school degree). I continued working as best as I could, double checking every command I entered into the terminal. But I felt very very scared, and the thought of possibly getting a knife to the face like what I just saw scared me shitless and I could no longer concentrate. The more I thought of it, the faster my heart was beating, and my hands started shaking.

I wanted to call up my mom with my android phone. I waited until Ceausescu exited the room, and then I ran upstairs. This place looked a lot like my other grandma's (mom's mom) upstairs hall, together with all the bedrooms. I went behind a bed and took my cellphone. However, I had this eerie feeling that Ceausescu might've followed me, so I didn't call yet. Rather I waited for a while to hear if there wasn't any noise coming from another room. And there was no noise, but I was still very paranoid, so I slowly crawled around to check on the other bedroom.

As I peeked into the bedroom, to my surprise, I saw my SNES on a nightstand. That was very suspicious, it might be a trap. So I peeked a little further, sticking my head into the room a little. And, just as I feared, I saw Ceausescu's shadow on the floor, he was waiting for me behind the corner! I was incredibly scared and I froze. Then I made a snap decision to just flee from the place and go back downstairs to the office.

I asked the cook how I could claim the DigitalSilver tokens for the work I had done so far. Somehow, I had the time (and bad priorities) to first claim my DigitalSilver, trade them for litecoins, and sending them over to my wallet. Then I darted for the exit and the dream was over.

So the plan is that me, my 2 brothers, my neice and nephew, and my parents would all pack up and go out to eat, go to a museum, return home and open presents, and finally go to church in the evening. It was early morning when the day started. We had to take several cars for reasons not explained to me. First trip involved brother Kris driving my dad, me going with mother and the niece and nephew, and older brother going alone.
After a few hours we arrived at the restaurant. I sat down at a separate table from everyone else since the original table my family sat at could only hold 5 of us. Slowly my family came and sat with me, leaving only mother and brother Jeff sitting at the original table. Dad looked very seriously at Kris for a few seconds and started to say something of great importance..."No more biscuits for you." Kris had eaten some biscuits before we started our trip and apparently they gave him horrible gas. He stunk up the car the whole ride down here. I sighed and accepted that I would be smelling him too the next several hours until we reach our destination, but dad said the biscuits would take some time before they start affecting Kris. Long enough that I probably wouldn't be stuck in the car with him any longer.

Kris assumed I would not be going with him now, so he started arguing to mother about it and throwing a fit. I tried telling him I planned on riding with him next, but he wouldn't let me get a word in. Kris then called me names and I actually for some reason started crying. This gave me an opening to speak, and I told him it was always my plan to go with him next. While riding with him towards our destination I was catching up on some Overwatch news. The Overwatch League had started and there was an event going on for all the players to get rewarded and stay entertained while the competitions were going on. Xqc, a professional player, had gotten suspended for raging and throwing. He had to sit out the entire event. He decided to record some youtube videos on the PTR in the meantime. There were some new skins and emotes, but also a strange feature added to the hero Mercy. She was given a new ability that spawned up to 5 avatars that didn't do anything but spin around her and emote. They were transparent monks colored red, blue, green, yellow, and black. This seemed to be a beta feature that was supposed to be removed. It may be a future ability for a new hero.

We now arrived at the museum and all got out of the cars. Niece Adira started running off on her own towards the place. Someone sure seems excited to visit. We all wait in line to go enter, meanwhile I catch the name of the place (I don't remember now what it was called) and judging by the singing I hear, it appears to be an opera house of some sort. Just great...Also, it has a cost of like $40 per person and it is a 2 day event. Mother pays for us all to enter and we take our seats. There is a singing performance with a choir. The crowd is mostly older folk and the style is not my favorite. On the way in they gave everyone brochures with all the artists and performances that would be playing in order. An employee noticed my disinterest and offered me a game system to play while this all was going on. I took a look at it and it seemed to be a 3DS and a few games, but it was all on paper, folded up. It seemed to be a future console that used new technology. It would all still work the same, but it could be folded up for easy storage. I gave it back to the employee because it would be rude to ignore the performance and play alone.

There was a stage where one of the singers would stand and people could go up and take pictures with him. There was much applauding and crowd interaction. After the initial song things started getting a bit more lively and interesting. There was a duet. After that performance was a solo singer who had a great voice, and was singing a christian song. The twist though is that she never practiced for this song and it was not a mainstream song. She had to improv the whole thing. Everyone cheered for her as they were all quite impressed. I was actually really bored and disinterested the whole time. The next act had everyone get out of their seats and start jumping and clapping and moving their bodies to get some energy in the place but I was the only one in the crowed still sitting. I expected to be called out and asked to participate, but they did not call on me. The final act I saw before waking up had the stage right above our seats. The man above was doing magic tricks. Amazing tricks where his hand would appear to be floating without an arm, tricks that involved animals doing strange things, and many other typical magic tricks. I was impressed at first, and found out the magician was in fact David Copperfield, but when I looked more closely I could see the whole thing was a sham. He was hiding behind cardboard and paintings to give the illusion he was standing in front and showing off, but the crowd could only see fake imagery of the magician. Nothing there was real or live. It was all props. That was why the things he was doing made no sense. It would have been just as bad if he was digitally editing an entire performance and showing it on a screen.

Morning of December 24, 2017. Sunday.



The foundation of this dream was totally unexpected, as it was based on a computer program I wrote nearly fifteen years ago and of which I had not thought about for years, before we moved from Brisbane.

I am in an unknown residence but which seems to be where we are implied to be living. My youngest son and I are looking at a large poster-sized image of surreal imagery. In some sections, there are human-like figures of which were created randomly by a special algorithm with a basis for a more natural choice of which next color and in which direction the line would continue. I remember that the first version of my computer program merely had an equal probability for each next line to continue from its previous point. It was like watching an invisible pencil scribble all over the screen, sometimes with insignificant leaf-like or vine-like (or spaghetti-like) patterns (and of course sometimes going beyond the range of the screen and coming back again, though my second version did not have this potential occurrence). Using probability based on a real drawing or other image was more interesting, though still resulted in surreal images that usually did not really look like much of anything. Bitmap (BMP file) templates had to be used (for gleaning probability of particular values as a percentage of the original total), each template image of course producing different results.

I begin to consider that it is very strange, yet intriguing, that images that look so much like people standing around were created randomly. I consider altering how the program is running. My “computer” is very large, bigger than my entire desk in real life. The monitor is the size of a large window. The image appears on the screen and I print it out when I see something interesting.

At one point, I seem to have done something wrong, as when the program starts again, the imagery remains in vertical orientation, looking something like a vine growing upwards, though with “leaves” coming out from each side now and then. I try to adjust it.

Eventually, something quite unusual occurs, as my program seems to be missing certain subroutines. Sections of written print keep appearing along with parts of a Mandelbrot image. It seems like the parts are coming from the same original image, but in unusual irregular swirls and patches over prior imagery. Now I know something is wrong, but I have the false memory that my original template was a Mandelbrot image above a paragraph or two of writing, possibly from a virtual textbook or database. I am somewhat annoyed that it is not working as it should. (I do not consider that I would not have used an image of printed text for any sort of template to produce new random patterns from.) The area of random imagery selected (to be reapplied) is too large to make anything very unique. (This is an unusual false memory which is not perceived as such - yet my thinking skills are otherwise more present than usual as is my current conscious self.)

Just as I think of fixing my program, there is ambiguity of being inside and outside at the same time. A nuclear explosion occurs nearby, though mostly only followed by small fireballs overhead. I get Zsuzsanna and our children and decide to go into a close-by underwater bunker, where I think we might be safe. (This is an attempt at dream state reinduction - returning to the essence of water, which represents the dynamics of sleep, as my sleep was slightly restless towards morning due to the extra warm weather.)

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