tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:174879Hummingwolf at Homehummingwolfhummingwolf2014-04-09T23:30:44Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:174879:60282Resistance...2014-04-09T23:30:44Z2014-04-09T23:30:44ZProkofiev's Lt. Kijé Suitesleepypublic1So in the dream I was living in something like a good hotel or a particularly nice dormitory--large building filled with other residents (many of whom live in my general neighborhood in waking life), but not at all spartan accommodations. As I was taking a shower, I felt what seemed to be a mild earthquake. I quickly dressed and went to a large window facing the street, where I saw Chinese soldiers advancing. The Chinese had, rather unexpectedly, taken over the USA. As far as we in the hotel/neighborhood saw, there was no violence.<br /><br />The dream went on, with a group of polite, pleasant young people patiently trying to indoctrinate us, or at the very least get us used to their way of doing things. We residents weren't exactly cooperative, but we did try to be nice to the young people since they were gentle with us and were, after all, only doing their jobs. Then suddenly they all stopped in their tracks as new orders came to them through the earpieces they were wearing. One of them told us: "According to the latest computer simulations, the American army defeats the Chinese army. The new simulation is more accurate than the previous simulation, so we must accept our loss. We will leave you now." And so they did.<br /><br />I have no idea what my subconscious mind was trying to communicate last night. The best I can come up with is this: <b>Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Simulated.</b><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=hummingwolf&ditemid=60282" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:174879:49132Hummingwolf Today2011-11-02T03:34:38Z2011-11-02T03:34:38Zokaypublic10<b>Link of the day for NaNoWriMo participants:</b> <a href="http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013264.html">A Litany for November</a>, via <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://supergee.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://supergee.dreamwidth.org/'><b>supergee</b></a></span>.<br /><br /><b>Link for my own purposes:</b> <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/recipes/2008/04/16/onion-pie-lavender-bacon-and-blue-cheese/">Onion pie with lavender, bacon, and blue cheese recipe</a>.<br /><br /><b>Now seeing:</b> The computer monitor in front of me, with the Dreamwidth update page in IE as the active window and the usual Notepad and Solitaire windows half-seen in the background. Behind the monitor, the non-computer window's blinds are closed and reminding me that I need to do more dusting around here. Also, there's a smudge on the left lens of my glasses.<br /><br /><b>Now hearing:</b> Typical evening background noises--computer fan running, housemate chatting on his phone downstairs, distant and easily ignored traffic noises. I'd put on music, but then I'd be too distracted to type anything.<br /><br /><b>Now feeling:</b> The usual pain and fatigue, plus the annoyance of a stuffy nose. Less headache pain than I've had in recent weeks, though, so that's progress. I'm feeling a bit lightheaded and twitchy, but mostly okay.<br /><br /><b>Now tasting:</b> Mint from the toothpaste & floss I just used.<br /><br /><b>Now smelling:</b> Combination of mint and ginger with an undertone of garlic from various people's suppers. (Whatever people cook, I can probably smell in here.)<br /><br /><b>Now wearing:</b> Lightweight light grey sweatshirt-type thing with pearly grey embroidered geometric (possibly meant to be a highly stylized floral) design, light blue jeans stained with flecks of ancient mud, white socks, dark grey men's slippers (because the women's slippers all seemed too likely to fall apart), a pair of glasses that I keep saying I need to replace soon, an ill-fitting old bra, purple cotton panties, and a a Band-Aid around my left index finger.<br /><br /><b>Miles walked today:</b> About two.<br /><br /><b>Food purchased today:</b> Peanut butter (the natural kind with just peanuts & salt), bananas, carrots, some kind of healthful cereal with lots of protein & flax seeds, an ostentatiously organic chicken & bean burrito, and a Snickers bar.<br /><br /><b>Non-food purchased today:</b> A pair of white & black athletic shoes (Nike, from the men's section of the store because the women's section didn't have my size), a pair of light blue heavy socks (women's this time), and six washcloths prettily embroidered with Halloween designs like pumpkins and skulls. I wasn't planning to go to the discount store today, but I'm glad I followed the impulse to search for shoes since today's shopping trip was surprisingly painless. I do hope the shoes fit as well as they seemed to when I was in the store.<br /><br /><b>Last remembered dream:</b> On Halloween morning, I had a dream where a man sent me and at least one other person on missions to an alternate reality to find out what had gone wrong over there. Our job wasn't to <em>do</em> anything in particular; we were there to diagnose, not treat, the problem. One of the things I did over there was watch films, like an old Bogart & Bacall film that never existed in our world. Humphrey Bogart's character was rather vicious to Lauren Bacall's character, which my boss/handler/watcher later told me had been one of the first clues he'd had that something had gone wrong in that world.<br /><br />"Bogart wouldn't have played a character like that in our world!"<br /><br />"Oh, but he did," I corrected him. "He just never played a character who could be that nasty to <em>Lauren Bacall</em>."<br /><br />Though I did go to several other alternate realities in that dream--against my superior's orders because I distrusted him--I don't remember much about them, except that in the last one the native language of just about everyone in the USA was something that sounded like French, which was rather inconvenient for me.<br /><br /><b>Last film watched:</b> Chosen because of the Halloween dream: <i>Dark Passage</i>, which may be the least-beloved of the four Bogart-Bacall movies made in this reality, yet seems seasonally appropriate thanks to the focus on faces and what they reveal or conceal. Also, I choose to interpret the implausible events and coincidences as being driven by dream logic rather than scriptwriter's convenience.<br /><br /><b>Other DVDs seen recently:</b> <i>The Prestige</i>, <i>The Dark Crystal</i>, and a Jeff Corwin episode about Australian bats.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=hummingwolf&ditemid=49132" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:174879:33062Saturday update2011-03-13T00:24:17Z2011-03-13T00:27:31Ztiredpublic5I was amazingly tired after my little coughing fits last night, so I went to bed around 9 p.m. and went to sleep soon after. Had an odd dream in which certain scientists working for some shadowy government agency conducted dangerous, unethical, and highly illegal experiments involving mice, squirrels, and small children in order to discover whether or not the universe was, in fact, cross-eyed. Yeah, I dunno either.<br /><br />So, waking up in the real world, I began the day coughing less, which came as a relief--although I <em>did</em> cough up some blood-stained stuff, which I'm assuming was caused by some minor irritation caused by the coughing and not something dire and awful. (If I wake up dead tomorrow, you may feel free to tell me how stupid I was to assume such a thing.) Had a migraine in the morning bad enough to convince me to take my prescription meds, and it's possible that the meds helped with my coughing & ribcage pain as well. By afternoon I had enough energy to go to the grocery store to buy some fermented foods to get some probiotic action going in my recently-depopulated gut; and while I'm pretty sure the sauerkraut I bought has no live or active cultures in it, I've got some hope for the olives.<br /><br />In other news, I remain fascinated by Prokofiev's seventh symphony.<br /><br />Tonight is probably another good night to go to bed early.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=hummingwolf&ditemid=33062" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:174879:26575Last Memorable Dream of 20102011-01-01T02:39:01Z2011-01-01T02:39:01ZSting, "The Book of my Life"contemplativepublic4In the dream the night before last, I was looking out a car window up at a starry sky in the middle of nowhere, no lights around anywhere I could see. I was alone in the car, talking on the cell phone to my aunt who, after I complained that Mom wasn't there yet, was commiserating with me about my mother's irresponsibility. Suddenly I remembered: Mom died way back in the 1980s. What am I doing here?<br /><br />Then my mind flashed back to a time in my personal timeline when I'd been a 41-year-old disabled woman who was suddenly sent back to her life nearly 30 years earlier. With all my memories intact, I'd somehow ended up in my life before my mother got cancer, right around the start of puberty, and wondering how the heck I'd gotten there. As soon as I realized where and when I was, I started making lists of people I'd known in my 30s and 40s who I thought I might want to reconnect with eventually. I wrote down approximate dates of birth, what I knew of where they were in the 1990s or later. If I could somehow avoid being disabled--maybe getting treatment for epilepsy earlier would help--then life would be different enough that eventually meeting the people I wanted to re-meet might take some work, but I had years to plan for it all. After all, the Internet wouldn't have widespread popularity for more than a decade, and some of my friends weren't even born yet. There was time.<br /><br />So in the new timeline, my mother survived. I was closer to her than to Dad, which seemed strange to me given my memories of my original life, though it was understandable too, since in the timeline where he was never a single parent, he saw no particular need to retire early and spend more time with me.<br /><br />(Today, thinking about the dream again, I imagine myself asking Mom a million questions I've thought of in the years since she died. I imagine her saying to 13-year-old me, "I'll tell you when you're older," and me with my extra decades of memories thinking to myself, "But I <em>am</em> older.")<br /><br />As much as I loved my linguistics professors, I felt no need to sit through Chomskyan linguistics lectures again, so I thought about what I should focus on in high school, which questions I should ask that I'd never asked before, and what I might want to major in in college. I seem to recall leaning towards visual arts, thinking of fractals and looking forward to faster personal computers to play with. Frustratingly, it took me longer to decide on a college major than it had the last time I was in school.<br /><br />(Again thinking about things that never came up in the dream: how many things have to change in the world before popular culture is affected? Would my friends and acquaintances be wondering why I sang all the wrong words to all my favorite songs?)<br /><br />At a university--not the one I attended in this original timeline--I was walking down a path when I saw a younger version of a man I met in my original 2009. Seeing him was the first thing in my new life that confirmed for me that I hadn't entirely imagined my old life. I tried to think of some excuse to say something to him, but had pretty much decided to let him continue his conversation with the pretty blonde woman walking next to him when he turned in my direction and looked at me with recognition.<br /><br />"You!" he said. "I remember you. We met in the future! I know that sounds--"<br /><br />"Which future? Did we meet at the farmers' market?"<br /><br />"Farmers' market? No, we met--"<br /><br />--and that, of course, is when my alarm woke me up from the dream, so now I'll never know which alternate reality he came from, and how many years he'd spent in our newest timeline, and whether he knew any more than I did about why we were in this new world at all. And I still don't know why I was waiting for my mother in a car in the middle of nowhere.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=hummingwolf&ditemid=26575" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:174879:16736Happy Thursday2010-11-19T02:36:21Z2010-11-19T02:38:43Zgigglypublic4Not a perfect day, but overall quite a good one. Before I get to the day itself, though, I must mention that there was a dream in which <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://nalidoll.livejournal.com/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif' alt='[livejournal.com profile] ' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' width='17' height='17'/></a><a href='http://nalidoll.livejournal.com/'><b>nalidoll</b></a></span> somehow managed to travel faster-than-light by crawling into a kitchen cupboard somewhere and crawling out of a cupboard in another kitchen in another state. Once she made it to our kitchen, Nali decided to go exploring the area for a while and I lost track of her, so I never got the chance to ask her how she managed <em>that</em> bit of kitchen witchery.<br /><br />Anyway, back in the waking world: I walked five miles today! This was a bit of a surprise since the morning wasn't exactly a great one for me, but I'm certainly glad I had that kind of energy. Along the way, I went to a library and picked up some more videos to watch, so I've got plenty to keep me entertained after the inevitable crash.<br /><br />I also went to my favorite farmers' market's last regular market of the season. Spent lots of time there, mostly chatting with vendors and trying to decide what to buy at this last market. There was a man asking people to sign their names to get the Libertarian party put back on the ballot. I'll sign to get almost <em>any</em> party on the ballot--the more, the merrier!--and it sounded like the man with the petition has the same attitude. I don't know if the average Libertarian has good things to say about the Green party, but this guy certainly did.<br /><br />As the afternoon turned to evening, the weather was cool and breezy enough that the vendors were all wishing they'd brought more layers of clothing with them. On the other hand, there were entire families of customers standing around eating locally-made ice cream. And to be honest, if the ice cream folks had brought their pumpkin flavor today, I probably would have bought some too.<br /><br />You know you've been accepted as part of the market environment when the vendors start putting you to work. Being asked to put some items into place in one of the displays wasn't too surprising, but when another vendor asked me to hold down the fort for a few minutes while she went off to do something else, I was slightly startled. I probably could have been more useful if I'd known how much she was charging for sweet potatoes...<br /><br />So, my favorite farmers' market is over for the season. However, there is one farmer who plans to keep coming back as long as he can until his crops are frozen over, so I guess the farmers' market will be followed by a farmer's market. There might still be a reason for me to leave the house on Thursdays after all.<br /><br />Now it's night-time, time for rest. Or possibly it's time for a movie. How does <i>Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog</i> sound to you?<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=hummingwolf&ditemid=16736" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:174879:6880Heh2010-07-16T09:41:27Z2010-07-16T09:51:07Znews radioamusedpublic15So I had this dream that the world was predicted to end within a few hours. But then the supposed time of the end came--and passed--and I was relieved even though I hadn't <em>quite</em> believed the prediction in the first place, and other people were uncertain because they had believed and weren't convinced that their lives on Earth were not coming to an end.<br /><br />The earthquake that woke me up from the dream is currently thought to be a 3.6.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=hummingwolf&ditemid=6880" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments