maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in the living room of a really nice apartment, sitting on the couch with a really pretty Indian woman. The couch and floor may have been white. There was an entertainment center just across the floor from the couch.

The woman was showing me something on the screen. The screen was black, but divided into sections by white lines. There may have been six sections. In each section were a few letters and numbers. The screen would occasionally pull down.

The woman was showing me this, but I was actually controlling it, using either a keyboard or a joystick. I realized this was some sort of data processing system that was connected to a company's database. People could work from home, from their TVs, by entering data for this database.

As the woman stood up and walked toward the dining room, off to our left, I told the woman, "I always thought this would be a good idea."

The dining room was gone. A window was in its place. And it was like I was in a house rather than an apartment. The woman was just outside the window. I stood up and walked to the window.

I continued, "In fact, I've always thought working from home would be the way a lot of people worked, eventually. I was thinking of writing a science fiction story about it, where everybody works from home, on their computers."

The woman stood out in an area full of trees. She may have kept moving farther and farther back -- without walking, until she had disappeared in the trees altogether. But I was still talking to her.

I continued, "Everything -- the world, gets greener again. The population rate goes down. But people are happier. So many things are controlled by robots. And a lot of people work from home."

Now I was looking out the window to a normal suburban front yard. Two of my old friends, M (a man) and P (a woman) walked up to the window, which was maybe a meter or so higher than their heads.

M told me he and P were going somewhere. When they were done they'd come back and pick me up to take me to the airport so I could go back home. I was a little panicked. I said that my flight was probably leaving pretty soon. I needed to get to the airport.

M told me not to worry. Besides, M told me, I had some task to take care of, possibly involving a car, and that I wouldn't be able to leave until I took care of that, anyway. M asked me for the car keys so he and P could leave. I gave them to him.

M and P were gone. I walked out of this house through a door opposite the window. I walked through another yard that looked like a front yard and up into the front door of another house. This was my mom's house.

My mom was just inside, sitting at a table in front of the front window. When she saw me she stood up and started walking through the living room. There was a couch set right in the center of the living room. My mom started telling me something. But I can't remember what it was.

Dream #2

I was in a bedroom. The room was dim and blue. I had been listening to some conference call and taking handwritten notes on notebook paper. I may have been at a desk. But now the call was over.

I heared a kind of squeaky-raspy voice from another room. I had been looking off to my left. But now I looked over to my right, to the door of the bedroom. A beige-orange light came from under the crack of the door.

The voice said a few things. Then the person got up, apparently from a room behind me, and left, walking away down the hallway that was just outside the door. I now realized I was sitting on the floor, using a bed as a desk.

I understood that I had left my job. This was the office for my job. For some reason I was back -- maybe just to help out on a short-term project, maybe just for one day.

The guy the squeaky voice had been the guy who'd replaced me. It was 5 PM, and the guy was leaving. This, I thought, was kind of lazy, since there was still a ton of work to do. I thought that maybe I'd impress my boss by staying for a long time tonight.

But, right while I was lost in this thought, my boss burst in the door. I must have looked like I was just doing nothing. My boss rushed up to my bed-desk and began flipping through my notebooks.

I knew I had just taken notes on some conference call. I wanted my boss to see the notes. But now he wasn't finding them. Instead he flipped to a page I'd made of sketches of the famous cartoon character Strongbad.

My boss pointed to one of the drawings and said, "I want to see less of this," as if he thought all I did all day was draw sketches of strongbad. He actually even flipped to another page that was also full of Strongbad sketches!

I was trying to figure out how I could explain this to my boss. I did a lot of work. But sometimes, while I was listening to calls or trying to think through a problem, I'd start sketching.

Dream #3

I was pulling a car I had (when I was in high school!) out of a long driveway for a house set up at the end of a long, gated yard. When I got to the end of the driveway, I had to close the gate. I pulled off to the side of the road and got out of the car. I was also thinking something about the difficulty of driving backward.

When I got out of the car, my sister was there. She told me, "Don't forget, while you're taking care of the car, to wash the back windows. That's really important, and C (one of my old friends) did it all the time."

I told my sister, "I was just planning on doing that once I got home." Apparently I was planning on taking my car back home after visiting my family -- although I was also planning on taking a plane home.

I was now in the living room of a house with my mom, grandpa, and probably some of the other members of my immediate family. My grandpa and mom were standing. My grandpa was getting ready to leave.

I was going back to my car as well. My grandpa was going to drive me. So we left the house together.

It was dark outside. My mom stood in the doorway. We were in a long block full of houses, possibly with some kind of median in the center of the wide road. My grandpa's car was parked halfway up on and off of this median.

My grandpa and I got in the car. My door was still open, and I was holding on to some kind of hard door-strap, as if I were going to pull the door shut.

My grandpa said, "I didn't invite you guys to my house because I didn't know what schemes your mom might have. She could sue me because on of the kids suffocated themselves on the floor or one of the kids suffocated themselves on the ceiling."