Cold Storage, and Moving Furniture

My sleep was pretty evenly segmented today with one 4-hour segment from 3:00 AM to 7:00 AM, and another 4-hour segment from 11:30 AM to 3:30 PM. And as is usually the case, it was the second segment that brought me dreams.

I woke from the sleep with clear memory of two different, short dreams.

Cold Storage:

The setting of the first dream was in the suite of rooms in which I now live in real life in this hotel on the Riverwalk.

As is usually the case in real life, in my dream I was using several different computers at home, some for this purpose, others for that. Unlike real life, however, in this dream I had several little netbooks. And for some strange reason, I was storing the netbook computers in my refrigerator when they weren’t being used.

The only action sequence of this dream had me walking to the refrigerator and sliding out the particular netbook I wanted to use from the stack of three or four that were resting on top of each other on one of the refrigerator shelves.

Moving Furniture:

The second short dream took place in some non-descript apartment in which I was living. Due to the fact that I had a roommate either moving in or moving out, it was necessary for me to move some of my furniture and “stuff” from one room to another.

I found myself rather sidetracked while moving some dresser and desk drawers by sorting through some of the knick-knacks I’d stored and had been saving. It struck me that I really didn’t need to be holding onto all the “stuff” that I’d been storing. And I was in the process of deciding what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to throw out when I woke.

A signal from beyond?

Last night’s sleep was long and deep, the kind of sleep for which I’m very thankful. It was slightly segmented by one of two lucid dreams.

The second dream of the night dealt with issues of a personal nature, so I’ll not go into it at any length here. It wasn’t disturbing or nightmarish at all, nor did it include anything immoral or illegal; but it dealt with institutions to which some folks have a strong personal attachment and against which others hold strong prejudice. It was very interesting and had some beautiful elements, and was one I wouldn’t be surprised to revisit in the future.

The first dream of the night was the more lucid of the two, though both were more lucid than my average, “run of the mill” dream.

In this dream…

…I was a (the?) lead scientist of a team of scientists investigating an alien artifact.

The origin of the material we were studying was unknown, and its exact nature wasn’t made clear in the dream. But we had come to conclude that it represented an active attempt by some alien entity to contact us, and I had decided on the most appropriate response.

Seated at a computer work station in our large, shared laboratory space, I typed my message to the alien and checked the monitor in front of me to verify that it was what I intended while the rest of the team watched the big, wall-sized flat panel display that mirrored my monitor. I hit the Enter key, sat back, and let out a sigh of relief.

Someone in the room asked, “What happens now?”

“Now,” I replied, “we wait for anything, a signal of some kind.”

Then I woke to the sound of what I interpreted as three sharp knocks at my front door. These weren’t “real” knocks; there was no one at my door. But it woke me to the extent that I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. Realizing that they were “dream” knocks, I applied head to pillow and reentered the dream.

What I saw when I returned to the dream was the big, wall-sized monitor display in the research lab. It showed two text fields: the top field contained the message I’d sent to the alien, and the bottom field was filling up with a stream of new symbols from the alien. Communication was under way.

A strange, segmented dream

The dream I remember from last night’s main sleep period was segmented and non-lucid. In both segments I was a college student, probably a grad student, sharing an off-campus apartment in Bloomington, IN, with two other guys, they both students, too. Though the dreaming was in full-color and included some spoken dialog and tactile elements, I can only remember the outlines now.

In the first segment I was a computer geek while both my roommates were much more into nearly constant partying than anything else. I found their behavior quite annoying. I was also annoyed at how many folks in my circle of acquaintances kept pestering me with computer related questions and problems.

In the second segment one of my roommates was replaced by another who was not only louder and more obnoxious, but psychotic as well. He and I really didn’t get along! A constant sub-theme of this dream segment was whether he or I was going to force the other out of our shared apartment.

The main theme of this second segment involved an academic project in which I had become involved. It was led by a faculty advisor who looked like G. Gordon Liddy and who clearly had some mysterious government connections. Our project was building a ground-launched, guided missile with a payload the nature of which I wondered about. My task was developing the missile’s guidance system, and that was sufficiently challenging enough that I never got around to asking many questions about other aspects of the program. I do remember wondering, though, why the advisor insisted we take the missile to Cincinnati, Ohio, to test-fire it.