A dream - fantabulous imagery

You ever wake up from a dream, and just lie there for a moment, and go WOW over and over in your mind?  Eventually saying it out loud?  And you're still saying it ten minutes later, until finally you have to write the whole thing up?

I worked in some kind of lab, like a Frankenstein lab with three other people... but it was more modern than crazy.  Just kind of haphazard, but definitely not all in order.  Maybe even kind of dangerous.  There was this tall nuclear fusor standing in the back room, which was constantly giving off heat.  I wondered about it, and asked the eccentric old scientist who was responsible for it if it was dangerous, and he just shrugged.  The walls of the entire lab were made of concrete and cinder blocks though, so as long as I wasn't near it, I figured I wouldn't get slowly fried.  There was also a large swimming pool in one room, and the old guy was trying to change the water so that it had healing properties.  With the radiation from the fusor. 

I came to work one day and the tall radiation machine had been moved into the main lab.  I wasn't sure how much I liked the idea of working around it all day, every day, slowly soaking up neutrons.  I asked the old scientist why he'd done that, and he said, "So I can charge my cell phone.  Check it out."  I looked at it, and he'd attached his phone to it. 

"Does it really charge like that?"

"Yup, just soaks up the neutrons."  I thought about sticking my cell phone to it to see if really worked, but I didn't want to soak up the neutrons.

Apparently we were also an operating room, because a sick man came in and we operated on him.  We had him hooked up to all kinds of pumps and tubes, and his heart monitor was beeping away.  We had high hopes that we could save him, but then his blood started to clot.  I watched the tubes turn purple with clotted blood, and one of us cried, "It's an embolism!"  We did frantic things to him, but then a big purple bubble welled up on his abdomen and then surged through one of of the tubes, and the heart monitor stuttered and flatlined.  Well, I guess he died.

Then the old coot who had been irradiating the pool jumped into it and started screaming, "It works!  It works!"  I thought he meant to revive the dead patient.  I was worried that the water was irradiated and deadly, but he seemed so joyous that I jumped in too.  We all jumped in.  The water started to flow very fast, and we were washed outside into the street, which was flooded.  I swam over to the curb and dog paddled there, holding onto it.  I turned and saw the most spectacular sight of my life.

A large thunderhead covered a third of the western sky, and the sun was setting behind it.  It looked like a gigantic fireball.  Above, where the sky was clear, Venus and Jupiter were in conjunction, forming an almost single star, blazing in its intensity.  Below, I could barely discern another planet and its moon as a gray smear.  If I shifted my vision to the left, I could make them out.  As the sun set and the clouds moved, the lighting behind and inside the clouds would shift, patterns of orange and white light would coruscate through the clouds, parts of blue sky would become briefly visible, and rays of sunlight would emerge and fade, emerge and fade.  It was glorious joy, watching it.  My colleagues swam over, and we all turned to behold the sight.  I wanted to say that it looked like a monstrous explosion.

Instead I said, "It looks like a gigantic fireball.  Like the western sky is on fire, and the explosion is frozen in time."

The crazy old man handed me a fifth of some kind of liquor.  He handed bottles to my other colleagues.  He lifted his in a toast.  We all drank from our bottles, as a salute to the glorious evening.

Then the thunderhead seemed to well with light, and it turned white, and it was as if a wind blew across it, because vapor writhed and boiled for a few seconds, and then blew away and vanished, leaving it looking even more clear and pristine.  Then the blue and orange colors of the sky behind it began to shift.  I looked up at the conjunction, and the two planets were circling each other and dancing.  I looked at the faces of my friends, and they were shifting, moving like puzzle pieces.  I began to grow suspicious.

"What was in that bottle?  Did you dose us, you asshole?"

The crazy one smiled and didn't say anything.

"He dosed us!  Are we gonna trip tonight?  He dosed us!"

"Yup, I dosed us.  Yup, we're gonna trip!"

I thought that I might be afraid, but the tension and anxiety never coalesced.  I resigned myself to an insane evening with my insane colleagues.  We all smiled.

Awe inspiring

Olivia proposed to me tonight.  It was so sweet.  I had just finished telling her about my Mexicanness, and how it was ok to be a human dwarf because of your genes since it's not your fault.  I also said I had an inferiority complex and only liked girls that were shorter than me. She gushed at this, whatever that means.  I said, "How tall are you?  5 feet?  That's a good height.  Doesn't threaten my machismo at all."  She said, "WILL YOU MARRY ME?"  I of course said yes, and predicted that we would have hobbits for children.  Mexican hobbits.

When third shift showed up, Olivia said "I proposed to Ash tonight!"  Everybody looked at me and bowed down like I was the man.  I stood there and basked in it, and punched in the numbers in the MOT.  Then I backed up and made some space around me, and said:

There once was a boy named Ashley
Who everyone loved unabashedly
"I am who I am and I don't give a damn"
"If you do, kiss my quarter Mexican Ass-ley."

And it was so awesome that the ducks showed up.

Don't FiretrUCK with the humans.

Fuck with the humans, you get a nuclear bomb up the ass.  Aw, did that piss off the poor widdle awiens?

Dreams

Last night I dreamed about Martians again.  It's been a recurring theme since I was a little kid, when I first read 'The War of the Worlds' by H. G. Wells.  Always it's a nightmare in which I'm trying to hide from the Martians, and frequently it takes place at my grandma's house in East Texas.  Last night I dreamed that I was at Grandma's and the Martians were outside, trying to get in.  I had locked all the doors but I couldn't get the living room window to lock properly.  It was one of those old fashioned rotating window locks, the kind that would turn and slide into a brace attached to the frame.  I stationed myself there on the couch which was situated against the wall with the window, trying to get the lock to turn while peeking through the curtains frequently to see if the Martians were coming.  The dream ended when I realized that even if I did get it to lock, the Martians would use their telekinesis to unlock it.

There is another dream that I've had only a few times but it has stuck with me for years.  I dreamed this back in 2003, and I associate it with the very beginning of my problems with addiction, as that's when my problems started with pain pills.  Anyway, it's not the dream I remember, exactly, but just a few images and the feeling that goes with it.  It takes place in a forest, at night, up in the trees.  There is torchlight here and there, orange flickering light, and it's as if there is some kind of society up here in the trees.  A town of sorts, but with no buildings or houses or anything actually constructed... but still, the trees are a place where people live.  Or something lives... maybe elves.  I don't know.  But the feeling of being up there in the trees with the torchlight, and the presence of 'others', is a mixture of comfort, sadness, joy, apathy, and of being content with all of that, and also a sense of timelessness.  That it is all enduring and never changing, and that things don't rot or die, and existence is static and almost intangible.  It's like one moment stretched out forever, and the feeling of that moment stretched out with it, and it is also like being embedded in a myth of thick fog... not real fog that you would see in the morning which dissipates with the sun, but a fog of mind and emotion.  A mythical numbness which keeps all that is 'inside', and all that isn't 'outside'.  Inside consists of myself, the 'others', the forest, the torchlight, the emotion, and the static unchanging quality.  Outside is everything else, especially the passage of time, and as a result, daylight.  It is always night in the forest.  Thinking about it fills me with such a longing that it's almost unendurable if I dwell on it.  The way I've described it isn't complete, as there is some description of sense which is missing, that can only be felt inside, and therefore can't be described to the other senses.

The comfort I feel in that dream is similar to that of a waking dream I used to have a lot, which I call 'The Wafer Fab and the Window Room'.  When I worked in a wafer fab, I used to sit next to the machine and wait while it processed wafers.  I'd close my eyes and get lost in the constant sound of the air filtration units, and I used to imagine I was sitting in a comfortable lounge chair with a glass of iced tea on a side table.  I would be facing a wall of glass that ran from floor to ceiling and tilted away from me at about a 45 degree angle.  The glass stretched to the left and to the right for about 20 feet in both directions, forming one long, unbroken window.  This 'window room' was hovering above a desert of concrete which was broken up into geometrically precise yet random sections.  Each section varied only a little in height from the adjacent sections, giving a slight but definite impression of depth to the flat immensity which stretched away in all directions, towards the horizon and infinity.  The sky outside was an intense and perfect blue, and the sun was bright, shining relentlessly on the perfect desolation of infinite technical concrete.  I always imagined how hot it would be outside with all of that concrete soaking up the brutal heat of the sun as it beat down mercilessly, but inside my window room, with the sound of the air conditioner, and my iced tea, I was cool and relaxed and happy.