Category Archives: Dreams

Done with Higher Ed

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I haven’t had a University dream in a long while. We were moved to new offices and I went exploring. Trying to find the vending machines I end up on a service elevator that heads to a basement. I don’t have the oddly shaped key that lets you return so I leave and discover that I’m in the middle of service corridors and I start to try to get outside. I end up in another one way hall in the library with an odd platform that seems to have only one function, to crush people. Like a compactor. I get out of there and end up in a sub-basement and eventually find my way out through a construction area with metal and glass doors allowing only exit, not entry. A student looking terrified actually gains entry and runs the other way. I make my way out to a courtyard and run into a younger student fleeing an older man who is chasing him with a machete. Then I wake up.

I can say that the part of my life where actually being inside University buildings is well and truly over. Here’s a dream exploring that awful place. I woke up and laughed, “Yeah, not going there ever again. You don’t have to wrap it in symbolism.”

Higher Ed, hah. Done with that.

Dreamtime: Little Shop

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Setting up a boutique shop for friends maybe? Talking about product placement and strategy, how to do pricing, and enticing customers to buy.

This one was sticky. I kept on going back to the same setting every time, from wake up cycle to sleep cycle.

I have zero experience in doing that. So, okay. Apparently good ideas are in there anyways.

Deet dah daaah.

New York City Boy

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Tonight’s dreams were sponsored by a blend of La La Land, a free ranging musical where strange behavior and boundless physical endurance meet a totally romanticized New York City where there is traffic where traffic is romantic and piers providing perfect picturesque vistas of the cityscape that obviously do not exist. Complete with the background orchestra that provides the structure for the dancing, running, and singing. And nobody is a fat tubby bitch who runs out of gas in the first ten minutes and can’t get past midtown without an oxygen tank and a blintz. Oy Gevalt.

Dreamscapes of Chicago

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While I’ve been enjoying Chicago, and we’ve been pretty much carless the entire time with the Santa Fe parked in the hotels parking structure and taking Uber rides everywhere it has done nothing to reduce the nightmares that I suffer every night sleeping in this place.

Car Theft.

These nightmares are riffs on a theme, different thieves, different cars, different lives, different settings. Cars without wheels, somehow rolling away, cars without any internal parts whatsoever operating as if they had them. Thieves that are anonymous or thieves that are caught but chatty occupy the dreamscape.

I’ve had three cycles of sleep here, and in each cycle, the same exact thing. My vehicle is stolen. When I try to stop the thieves, they explain to me that it has to be this way, that it always has to be this way.

And while I’ve had a delightful time at C2E2, I am going to welcome my exit from this place. I can’t stay in Chicago much longer, if nothing more that I can’t endure many more of these nightmares every single night, like clockwork.

Trials

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A major Fortune 500 company has a world-renowned hiring trial for their new IT staff. There are all the usuals, the resumes, the interviews, but there is also a fully funded practical trial as part of the job application process. The job itself is cherry, practically autonomous, with real challenges and true financial backing so the winner can dig in and achieve serious results.

The trial is rather straightforward, given a property address, you must approach, perform an intake procedure to discover what is required and then plan and execute whatever is needed to solve the IT need.

The property has one person, a newly hired young woman who is sitting at a central desk on the ground floor. She has a folder, within it, a script that she reads to each candidate:

“Welcome to your trial, this building has everything required to run a branch of our company. Every computer, networking component, and server component is placed and wired properly. Your task is to configure all the equipment throughout the branch properly. You will find all the resources you need to complete this task within the building. You have one week to complete this task. Good Luck.”

The young woman then folds her hands together and waits.

Several candidates engage with the trial, hoping to get the cherry job and have learned about the young lady at the reception desk. They pass all the requirements, and they eagerly arrive to try their hand at the trial. They impatiently sit through her canned speech and quickly head off to the basement to start in the server room.

Candidates come and go, some pass and some fail. The trial is to get the branch fully operational and on the last day of the week the branch becomes staffed, and the candidate must ensure that all the preparations are in place and that everyone can work without a technological failure. The trial is winnable but very arduous.

The young lady sitting at the central desk on the ground floor has a secret. She has a shoebox locked in a drawer attached to her desk and around her neck is a key on a golden necklace. She has specific instructions, which if a candidate approaches her and engages pleasantly and shows sincere interest in her role in the branch without being the destination of a last-ditch effort, she is to pause the conversation, unlock the desk and produce the shoebox to the candidate. Within the shoebox is the answer to the trial, it is every specific requirement written in clear, actionable text with a memory stick containing every proper configuration and a full procedure list that will bring the branch to full operation without a single hiccup. Everything from networking configurations to the copier codes for the janitorial staff is covered and once executed virtually guarantees a win.

How many people would simply ignore the receptionist and get cracking on the trial and how many would take their time to get to know everyone and their roles in that particular branch? Either kind of candidate can win, either through a sheer act of will or simply being kind, careful, and honestly interested in the welfare of each of their coworkers. Nobody knows about the secret key, but sometimes the answer you need comes from a place you would never expect.

PAD 3/26/2013 – Deja Vu

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Have you ever truly felt déjà vu, the sensation that you’ve already had the experience you’re currently having?

It comes in fits and spurts. There are moments that feel like they have happened before. It’s like the experience of the unfolding events align around a pivot. The nagging feeling starts and then you start feeling very strange. At first it’s not clear what the feeling is attached to because you are approaching the pivot and nothing looks like it does, until you’re half-way along and then what you experience rings with your memories, the memories of the future that became crystallized in that one moment. When it strikes me I have to stop what I’m doing and respect and witness the event coming to pass around me. The feeling of Deja Vu is so powerful sometimes that I become almost paralyzed with the novelty of the situation. I don’t know exactly where the memories of the future come from, perhaps I dream them and in that there may be some untapped clairvoyance active within me that I can only access when I’m dreaming. My dreaming world is very rich and I remember many of my dreams and I write them down before they evaporate under the assault of too much consciousness.

Almost always, when I have this feeling of Deja Vu I will stop and I will remark to everyone around me that it’s happening to me. I don’t consider it to be a very private thing and since it paralyzes me with it’s marvelousness I feel it’s important to explain it to others as quickly as possible so they don’t worry that I’m having some sort of stroke or attack.

PAD 2/19/2013 – Nightmares

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Describe the last nightmare you remember having. What do you think it meant?

I journal my life, and my dreams in my Day One app. This morning I recorded this, while it’s not a nightmare per se, it is rather upsetting:

I dreamt of an else world that didn’t have milk. Or rather they had cows but due to a mean trick of nature the cows didn’t produce any milkfat. There was a visitor with me from that place and we were talking about food and they had never had milk or cream or anything made with that ingredient. I have watched too much Fringe. 🙂

It would be the way, that an upsetting dream would involve butter, cheese, ice cream. The general take-away from this is that if ever I became lactose intolerant I would rather live with the agony than give up any milk product at all. Such a totally Cancerian thing too, I don’t think you could walk any distance with a Cancerian before food came up as a topic of conversation.

No milkfat, so…. Boo? Yes. Boo! Nightmare? Eh. Not so much. But this is as dark as my dreams get. 🙂

PAD 1/9/2013 – Fear

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“You’re locked in a room with your greatest fear. Describe what’s in the room.”

Golly, this is an easy one. It’s actually a feature in some of my more deeper and more meaningful dreams. I’ve blogged before about a regular setting that usually happens in my dreaming life – the big house. Sometimes it changes shape and place, but I know it’s the same structure. Almost always in these dreams I end up at the end boarding an elevator. What starts out as a normal elevator ride becomes way more nightmarish when the walls fall away and it’s just me standing on a rising metal platform with a broken knife-switch control. Either the elevator rises or I pull the knife-switch and it falls.

No real big surprise that my biggest phobia is that of heights. So, the room itself is sort of the fear, at least until when it rises and then the walls fall away.

Memory Lane

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It’s always a surprise what my dreams will bring to me in the night. Tonight’s fare? A trip down memory lane. I was back in college, back at SUNY Buffalo. Walking into my dorm, Clement Hall, on the venerable South Campus. There was the usual warping of memory, some details were utterly wrong but the sense of the place was intact. Lots of memory was dredged up for this dream. Waking up carried little threads back to those memories and I woke up smiling. My time in college was probably the most wonderful, frightening, and liberating thing I’ve ever experienced.

This must be how alumni get those dents in their memories. Dreams bring them a highlight reel to enjoy and then only those memories of the good times get reinforced. You forget about all the goofy awkward junk as it fades and in time you get this antiquing patina on the best of the best of what you remember. I bet in time most alums get around to idealizing what memories remain, deny the awkward stuff and that is why when you recall college you get all warm and fluffy about it. None of the negative, all of the positive.

And this has a sidelight to a greater commentary on memory in general. Taking a trip to Lethe before you get to Styx. There is a blessing, perhaps it’s just that we elect to have it this way, that we are given things like this and go with them. Naturally allowing your memory to fade, recalling the good things, denying (nay eroding) the bad memories and then idealizing the entire structure. A life remembered of only the happiest things. Memories are the context for your present. Perhaps this is one of those keys, brought by dreams, that bears including in a wider discussion on how best to pursue happiness. Not only to live in the present and not be cynical and negative, but also to actively prune the bonsai tree of your memory and trim away the unpleasant memories until all that’s left is a highlight reel of your favorite and most cherished recollections.