Dream Log: November 24, 2001

I was working in the same company with my dad and mum. Then there were just three other employees. Mum and two colleagues came into my room and I thought we can call it a day but they have something else in their mind. They had plotted an evil scheme to get some extra cash from the company. In the corporal hierarchy dad was the next from the boss and because I was relatively fresh face in the company and I had the highest education I was the one who was trusted and listened to. Therefore they shortly explained what kind of story I was supposed to tell dad so that he could redirect more money to me "to acquire extra resources" for a brand new "innovative project" that sounded really promising.

Dad was just about to leave and I stepped into a corridor repeating him everything I was told. I didn't feel so good about this but the scheme sounded watertight so I let it go. Dad became inspired about it and went straight away to tell it to the boss and listening over the conversation the money was practically in my use already.

I went back into my room where mum and these two colleagues were hiding. I told them it worked out and they were really cheerful about it. But after a while mum noticed I looked miserable. She asked what was the matter and I directly asked her if she loved dad anymore. I had my doubts because this scheme would put him in awkward position. She hugged me and told me everything was okay. She shed tears but told she loves me and dad and everything will be okay. I knew she really meaned it and I hugged her, tightly.

Slowly, I wake up from dreaming and notice I hug myself. Very funny... :-)

Dreams and smells.. a weird combination.

I dreamt last night that I had been married to my ex-boyfriend and that we had divorced the same day. Apparently the marriage was very hush-hush, considering that my parents didn't know about it. We seemed older too, but we really weren't.

We were divorced, yet he kept kissing me and we acted like we didn't know anything about romantic standards except for that they existed and that we didn't like it, but we liked each other. So we kissed and we danced.

And he smelled like something. He smelled like a mixture of sweet corn, old books, cologne, and something else that I can't identify. It was one of those smells that you either think smells putrid or one that you like or can at least deal with.

I liked it.

Open-Hearted Campus Stroll

• I've come to my car in the Porter College parking lot to retrieve some item. I get out again, lock and close the door. My only covering is a pair of Teva sandals--I am in the nude and happy to be that way. However, as I walk away I take in the falling dusk light and chilling air and reconsider. After going back for a pair of shorts I hesitate again before ending up with shoes, shorts and a t-shirt.

  When I walk into the quad of Benjamin F. Porter College at UC Santa Cruz, every leaf, stone, bird, bee, face, word, cigarette butt, and miscellaneous photon is noted consciously by my eye and a blessing of love thereupon bestowed. My face projects a permanent smile and my heart chakra beams out through space to each living thing like a lighthouse beacon. I encounter friends and acquaintances from the present, near and distant past--to these assembled faces of my life I give smiles and hugs. I meet my dear friends August and Tish and embrace them lovingly. Now I pull out my tiny digital voice recorder (on which I am recording this dream upon awaking) and begin to broadcast a tinny soundtrack of groovy bass lines and a funky brass horn arrangement. After passing to the East of Porter, under "A building", I run into my friends Ali, Amy and Nicole. I hug them all. While hugging Nicole she says something about kissing my girlfriend, Genery, and I look at Nicole and give her a big kiss on the lips. We all continue on the forested path of the UCSC campus, North towards Kresge College. Along the way I notice that the hillside on the right side of the path, which normally slopes down to a ravine, has now at intervals been cut away into a vertical drop of ten feet or so, ending at a lowered garden. Ali falls sometimes off the ledge as we make our way North. The sound of loud hip hop music announces the presence of a party in an apartment we arrive at. I enter the front door and see two people from my elementary school: Jessica Gavia and Meghann Welsh. Jessica says that the dancing just stopped the moment before when everybody migrated out back. I hear the raucous noise of college kids partying. I hug both women and sit on the couch next to Meghann. Jessica asks if I'll dance with her if the dancing starts up again and I tell her I will. The bass beats in the room next door as I lean on Meghann's shoulder and converse pleasantly with her.

I had a Linux nightmare. Seriously.

I dreamed that somehow my hard disk had gotten corrupted, and I was at the command line trying to figure out what was wrong. Except /bin/ls was corrupted too, causing it to act like rm at random times. So as I tried to fix the system, I was gradually destroying it.

But somehow, I had a completely fresh install of Debian on another partition. So I rebooted into that, hoping that I could work from there without the corruption. But I found that its files were corrupted in exactly the same way. And when I typed "ls;/" (the semicolon was some sort of typo), it ended up doing "rm -rf /".

I figured this out from the way my hard disk was chugging, and quickly hit ctrl-C, but many files had been removed from both partitions. While I was getting an increasing sense of desperation and deciding to install a third Debian system to salvage what I could, I woke up.

And during the day, the news came out that Linux 2.4.15 had a serious bug. It would corrupt your filesystems whenever you unmounted them - so attempting to do something about the problem would at first make it worse.

I had eerie flashbacks to my dream. I started thinking about how many times I had unmounted my partitions since I installed the new kernel, and how many files might already be lost. I searched desperately for information on how to resolve the problem. And then I realized that I was actually running 2.4.14, that I had downloaded and compiled it the day before 2.4.15 came out, and breathed a huge sigh of relief.