DREAM 8/29/00 3:47 pm
I was at Burning Man - ----- greeted me
out of his truck at some station - curious, there were trees and forests there
where I had expected only desert. He is tall and stronger than he used to
be; he is my big brother. We travel with others up a winding road toward
the open space of the desert, which i can sense by the intensifying brightness
of day as we approach. I am blindfolded and helpless.
This dream is full of struggle, confusion and chaos amid the serenity and beauty and chaos of the setting. I know I am in California (even though it should be Nevada). And it will take me a minimum of so-and-so hours to get back to New York in time for work that day - or is it the next day?- I never seem to know when I'm expected where, which is a wellspring of continual panic and anxiety. I can't stay here long, I will miss the burn, that much is certain, and I feel that I'm being cheated out of something important in my life. Still not sure how I'll get home and when I have to be there exactly, I grab my cell phone and start making calls.... a machine voice is actually quite helpful with suggestions and calls my attention to a number of automated services I'm not familiar with - one, for example, points out that my Discover card offers some help booking last minute flights and even offers a discount through most airlines...
In the dream I am also trying to reconcile some joint "bug" in real life and in C++, this is a reoccurring theme in my dream life lately. There is no boundary between the computer language abstractions and the phenomena of day-to-day, meatspace existence. I was trying to work out the "friends" bug (Chapter 11, Strng2: friend bool operator X (const String & st1, const String & st2); --- "illegal friend declaration" etc.) [as an aside, I seem to be retaining all the new information well, but for how long? Will I find myself all finished with the book, then go through another C++ book as a matter of review, to find I've completely forgotten most of what I learned?]
Memories of brief Catskills and Fire
Island outing "vacation" with ----- in the dream. Vague
awareness of her being away in Maine, and -----'s upcoming wedding in
Rochester, which I've still not completely planned out. One specific
scene: I come across an artifact: a round 1' diameter wooden bas relief
of a demonic/draconian figure whose spaces and ridges are filled with a stiff,
waxy, dark brown substance suspiciously resembling hashish. I scrape this
substance out of the wood, which makes the whole disk lose its rigidity; it
turns to a soft, flimsy thing which I cannot repair - I have ruined someone
else's precious and unique thing. I ashamedly try to hide it and get away
before being caught.