Day 18 |
January 4, 1998 | Return |
1,776 Miles Today: 10 Miles |
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Roamer's
Rest RV Park Tualatin OR |
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| Three dreams | Strange, vivid dreams last night. First, I was chit-chatting with two co-workers (one male, one female; Program Managers?). We were in a big office, that was actually open to the sky; no ceiling, and dried brown grass instead of carpet. The cubicles were low-walled enclosures attached to a long perimeter wall around a central space. | The setting perhaps inspired by plans of ruins in the Greek map book | |
| Suddenly we saw the space shuttle roaring into the sky quite close by – it was huge and looming. I was very excited, as I’d never seen a live launch. Just as it started to roll over, still close, it went into a spiral cartwheel and crashed into the urban sprawl just across the valley from us. I told the other two to "Get down!" and pulled one of them onto the ground beside me. We saw a fireball and debris flying, and I said "We should be OK, though, this far away." But I was wrong, and bits of shrapnel and a twisted sheet of metal came flying towards us. I had an impulse to run away, but since we were out in the open without cover, I just told them to stay down. | I remember thinking in my sleep that the special effects of the cartwheel and explosion were rather clumsy; it was as if I was both participating in the dream and commenting on it. However, this could’ve been later when I was rehearsing the dream in a half-awake state (I wanted to be sure I’d remember it). | ||
| When the conflagration was over, we discovered the wounded patients; we seemed to be in a hospital, and some of the patients had been hit. One of them was a young man in a recliner, and he told/showed us that he had one shrapnel entry wound on the front of his shoulder and with an exit on his shoulder blade, and another on his chest, though he only knew of an entry wound for that one. There were brownish bloodstains on his white gown, but quite slight ones, and dry. I felt queasy and helpless; I didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t obvious bleeding, for which I was grateful, because I worried that if I tried to staunch the bleeding I might compound internal injuries. I didn’t know how I would deal with it if the chest wound was serious; I felt very inadequate. Then we walked to another room and found a frail old man, who reminded me of my father. He’d also been wounded, but it wasn’t clear how. He was very quiet and pale. | |||
| In the second dream, some woman and I had to help a bunch of people/animals (it was confused as to which) get away from some unspecified threat. The two of us piled onto a truck, and called the animals to jump on. They were small and furry, but sentient; like monkeys or bear cubs. One was a cat, and it was too scared to jump; I coaxed it on eventually, but did a bad job catching it, and it sprawled ungainly in my arms. I said, "So no fighting between the cats and the dogs, OK?" and the woman said "Yes," and the animals seemed to agree. Then we were moving. We seemed to be on the back of a pickup or the aft deck of a boat, and the crew were somewhere else. There was an intercom and we could hear them talking. Apparently they would tell us when we got ‘there’ and should jump off, but they seemed to be talking about something completely different and not paying attention to the crisis. I didn’t want to annoy them by asking questions, so we just listened on the intercom. When one of the little animals/kids wanted to press the Speak button I said, "No, we shouldn’t disturb them". I felt like a coward. Then (discontinuity) we were all scrambling down an embankment, and I was holding onto strands of barbed wire to slow me down, hoping I wouldn’t grab onto the barbs. Then we were in a hallway off from some bedrooms, collecting things frantically, on our way out, and I said, "Just a minute, let me go put on decent boots, these sneakers aren’t any good." | |||
| Finally, I was in a forest with a younger person. There had been a firefight; the rest of our unit had been lost. We were trying to get away without being seen. [This seems to be inspired by reading about Xerxes sweeping down Thessaly towards the Peloponnese in 480 BCE, driving defeated Greeks ahead of him.] We started running down a tarred road. Then we saw a gravel (logging?) track curving off and uphill to the right, and ran up that. The bush got denser, and we moved more slowly. We were traversing a hillside, and came on the bottom edge of a strip of land that had been cleared; looked like a firebreak. We saw a dying soldier half-way up the hill. We stayed in cover and watched. He seemed to be on his own, abandoned. He was still moving slightly; then he rolled/slid down the muddy hillside towards us, and lay still. He was wearing jungle camo and carrying an R-4 not an AK-47, so I guessed (though in the dream this bit had a strong detached-observer feel) that he was one of ours. We knew he’d died, and I motioned to my partner, the younger person, to go over and get his boots. S/he didn’t have decent shoes, while I had got my boots earlier. As we were stripping the corpse of his kit, the dream ended. | |||
| Spent the morning working on the web journal. Falling behind… the overall template is now roughly in shape. | |||
| As a treat, I went out to see the new Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies. The title sequence is as good as the rest of the movie: a skilled re-invention of a well-established formula, which is what the whole thing felt like. Some great object grids – semi-transparent, a bit like Tony Cragg pieces – and wild textured 3D effects. This was the first Bond movie where I could recall the plot after leaving the cinema: "Media mogul foments world war in order to get exclusive market access." Perhaps next year the villain will be a software tycoon. | I noticed movement artifact as Bond strode across the screen in the ‘bullet hole’ in the opening sequence, and thought "Ah, 24 frames/second, not fast enough to resolve motion" – and realized I’d been spending too much time on the minutiae of DTV. | ||