tomato pottage

The only particular thing I remember from last night’s dreams, though I remember more vague things around it, is that I was with a mixed group of people at some kind of place to stay, maybe, I don’t recall whether an inn or a hostel or not really anything like that, but at any rate we were at a set of picnic-like tables against a north wall; the tables were of a warm blond wood. One of the guys sitting at my table was eating a plate of brown stew of a fine chunky texture that looked like meat, but he said it was tomato pottage, so I tried some, and it was very good, I think maybe with a thick curry flavor. I had to check just now whether “pottage” was a real word and, if so, whether it meant what it meant in this scene, which it does. My brain dragged it out from a semi-unconscious area to put in there, which is kind of cool.

locker stil

The only scene I remember from last night is that a number of WU people, including me, were moving into Mission, except it was a version of Mission with outdoor walkways (continuous balconies, whatever they’re called, I can’t think of a correct term) for all the floors, like Smithsons-style elevated streets. The interior was different too, a connected linear array of hallways and common rooms as IRL, but there were narrow bright blue lockers in sets in the common rooms. At one point one of my friends and I hurried along the outdoor walkway on the west (IRL south) side, down the stairs (the walkways descended by stairs at intervals) and maybe had to turn around at one point; I forget what we were running around about.

basket machine

• I was sitting on a long bench seat within a large array of them in a large hall, as would be in an auditorium, but with the space seeming more like a gymnasium, with lots of light from all sides except for the front (south), as if there were a stage there; lots of other SFS people were there, only some of whom I knew, and the seating was mostly full overall. I kept inching down (east) along the seat more and more as more people sat down. Everyone was conversing.
• I was riding a bus or train northward, also with WU people, including alums, I think. Each seat had a table before it; all the seats faced forward. The guy ahead of me diagonally took a bottle of sriracha sauce (because food was served) and squeezed himself a sauce necklace (these terms sound incredibly dirty, but the circumstance wasn’t), seemingly to prove a point during a conversation about spicy food that I couldn’t really hear.
• A set of math formulas I was looking at at a table in a room by a south exterior wall culminated in a red square button for a “steel operation,” i.e. a process of producing steel. Nearby, maybe mutated from this, was an 18th-century black wooden box/frame containing an automated apparatus for making small baskets constructed like barrels (8″-10″ height and diameter, plant pot shape). Part of the apparatus was a bunch of nails bundled together in a sheaf; this and other parts revolved in different modes; I maybe made a basket/drum with it.
• There were wasps on the top shelf space of the dining room in NH’s inbuilt shelves; they were hard to see at first, but then I noticed more and more of them; a few were really big (~2″ long) and they ranged in size down to almost invisible. We wanted to move them outside; maybe when we started trying to move them, they flew into the air and a number of the tiny ones stung me. I was vexed and worried they’d get in my eyes, so I went outside into the backyard into a sunny area, which they wouldn’t like, to get rid of them. My mom stayed inside and herded them to the top of the east kitchen window and let them out by lowering the window and screen; all the while, my dad and someone else out front were enjoying the sound of the drum I’d made with the basket machine. There seemed to be other people or maybe Harriet in the backyard; there was deeper shadow from the trees, and different placement of trees, than IRL.
• I was at a cabin, seemingly in Temple, with Biv people, on an early frosty clear morning. One of them mentioned how four faculty members from the Biv days of yore were staying at maybe Marienfeld, just like old times, and it was quite a nostalgic thing.

Ray & Ray

Just a quick thing from a nap, and it was almost like I was half-awake during this: I realized all of a sudden that two of my favorite webcomics had characters named Ray Smuckles. One of the Rays was a cat and the another was maybe a bear or a rabbit. It occurred to me, further, that they wore the same kind of glasses. It was the confused sort of thinking, though, that happens while you’re in the middle of falling asleep in such as a class and trying with mighty effort to get your facts sorted out from each other. So it was difficult to think of exactly which comics each Ray was in. I also remember a dream setting from around when I was having these ideas, which was inside a house, on an upper floor, at twilight; the room I and some other people were in had an exterior wall to the west, with some windows, and there seemed to be a sort of frame taking up most of the room, sort of like an upended row of cubicles, in which one or two computer stations were set up, and I was working on one of the computers, sitting facing west inside the frame, maybe working on a website. I have the impression of there having been descending stairs in the room behind the frame, to the east.

calculator colors

This is from this morning and thus completes the current backlog.

My mom pulled out a gray 1950s pocket calculator from a desk drawer, although we seemed to be sitting at a table outside, maybe in a courtyard, in the afternoon, with the sun to the west but fairly high. Low numbers could be added on the calculator to change the color of (I think) a different flat plastic object, or maybe of the calculator’s own shell. With numbers lower than 10, the color was subtle shades of red and orange; I tried 64, and it turned to static.

I was at a reunion-like event; it was held in what seemed to be a university building. Within the building was a classroom on the north end with windows on all sides but the south, with the most light coming from the east at one point and at another time from the southwest, but there were also fluorescent overhead lights on. The room had tables set up in a U configuration, focused toward the south wall, and there were refrigerators against the north wall. A door in the west half of the south wall led to a windowless (but with daylight coming in from doorways) serving room with delicious desserts and hors-d’oeuvres being set up on a line of tables running east to west; I think I tried one of the desserts. There was a busy hallway to the south and east, much like the west entrance of the Helsingin Rautatieasema, with a sofa or maybe a set of them, in an island in the center of the hall, facing west. At one point I bounced through from one room to the next, with the bounces being unRListically high and slow; it was difficult to stop when I tried to, because of the momentum. Some WXC teammate alumni showed up in the north classroom, putting their stuff down in the seats they used to sit in when they had a class there.

soccer plain

Almost there, this is from two days ago.

• It was a golden-sun morning (especially as it shone on land in the distance) on a Western plain surrounded by mountains, particularly a ruddy slope to the north with trees above it. I was there with a mix of WU and Wms people. There was a base building to the east, somewhat like a barn in massing but maybe detailed more like an athletic hall. We were on what seemed to be soccer fields for us to practice on; these were to the west and northwest of the building, and at one point we ran as a group across them toward the building. To the east and west the land spread out flatter; to the northeast was a nearby slope, closer than the ruddy slope, and along the south was another mountain ridge. There was also a train line bending from east to south to the south of the building, at a lower ground level than the fields; I took a picture of one of my friends standing on the slope at the edge of the tracks as a maroon train went by.
• I was with some friends in a small inside pool that took up the entire living-room-sized room it was in; there were no windows, just warm diffuse fluorescent light, and the walls were tiled white. From one of my friends there, I learned the method for creating electric sparks from one’s index finger, either inside or outside the water, through a set of hand motions: spin the right index finger around in the water, point outward with the left hand, also in the water; after that, pointing with the right hand would cause a spark. If you produced a spark in the water, it would endure for a while along its line of travel and act as a kind of force field that was difficult to swim through.
• Late at night at a snowy place, I arrived, maybe with my parents, at the east or north end of a drive with trees on each side and then a wide open space to the south or east further on, and with some mounds of dirt, maybe, that the road had to bend around. At the end of the drive seemed to be a house, but its interior also seemed to be the same as the outdoors. There was lots of car traffic proceeding up and down the drive while I walking along it at one point. We ended up surfing the Web on iMacs in the “house” instead of going to bed.

granite bricks

This is from the 22nd.

• I was walking east on a city street after dark, up to an Indian fast-food restaurant on the south side of the street, to get dinner; some other people went in ahead of me.
• There was a reception on a rainy day that I attended; it was in a room up some wide steps right off the street to the west; the street wall was glazed, and on the other sides of the room were other rooms; the room was longer in the north-south dimension, and it had a low ceiling and a glossy light-colored floor. It was much like the lobby of a hotel. The reception was peopled by some WU architecture faculty and maybe some other architects. There was a wide doorway to the room to the north, which seemed to be a dining or function room.
• I was at an open-air concert in northern Norway, at a location where the land sloped down to the southeast; GZA (but with the physical form of Mos Def) and some (white grunge-looking) friends of his were there, and I was chatting with them. At another point, a young band, with seemingly high-school age members, played a powerful cover of “Purple Haze”; I was in the crowd quite near the stage, which was to the south. It was a brisk, cloudy day.
• Maybe after the previous scene chronologically, I was in a windowless pair of smallish whitish rooms connected by an open doorway, lit by some table lamps, with a bunch of WU students; I suggested that a fountain in the middle of one of the rooms emanating weed smoke would be suitable, and my justification was along the lines of “duh… Method Man!”, as if the Clan were on the way; maybe they were.
• On an afternoon with supremely clear, breezy air, cool but warmed by the sun, I sat at a picnic table on a park lawn with trees nearby, across from a woman with whom I discussed numerous facets of urban design. Other visions went by as I talked; it was a very lucid discussion, and I wish I could remember some specifics.

I took a nap also, and remembered the following scene from it: I was looking closely at a Google map of Antrim Rd north of 137; the road turned east around a pond to the south, and I began to suspect that it might be High St by that point. I was then running on the height of land of High St at the farm, going north into the woods. My running watch was at about 51 minutes. At the corner of Pleasant St, on the southwest side, there was a new house foundation bordered by woods on the sides away from the roads; it was made of brick-size granite blocks, and I stopped to investigate it, walking up to the north wall and feeling the bricks at the top of the wall.

assembly book line belt

From the 19th, just one scene remembered when I woke up: I was at the Keene Toadstool, different from RL in being just one main room, with wooden walls and with some daylight coming from the southwest, and a glass door exiting to the hall to the east. It was on an upper floor of a mill building, like the RL Toadstool. I was looking for biographies, possibly mathematics-related, and had found a few. At the end of a stack in the northwest part of the room was a sort of cream-colored assembly line belt with numerous books lying on it, and that’s where I was doing the searching. I returned there later as well but couldn’t find the books I was looking for at all.

shore barn

All right, still getting to the backlog. This is from the 18th.

• I was part of a design competition or charrette for a chapel in a windswept village of Denmark near the sea; the sea was to the northwest and maybe northeast of the village, and the land was rocky and grassy. At the time of the scene, it was sunny, around noon, and we were at the entrance of a large barn, the entrance being to the south and basically just a lack of wall, seemingly. The sun streaming into the barn threw the unlit parts of the interior walls and ground (which was just a continuation of the outside rocks and grass) into deep shadow. I think there was a view out to the sea to the northwest through the barn, maybe through such as a side door, and that the boards cladding the barn had small gaps, so you could see the luminosity of the sea and sky through them.
• I was reading Pitchfork’s review of LCD Soundsystem’s new album (not IRL existing yet), which it gave a 10.2.
• A friend and I, I don’t remember whether his identity was specific, were conversing; I related the thought that if Are You Being Served? were currently running, they’d probably have an episode where at one point they would be talking about Barack Obama, and then later Barry would actually show up. It would be great.

S & Z trains

This is the first of a backlog of several posts that I’m going to update now. This one is from the 17th.

• I was at a sparsely stocked grocery store lit only by daylight from the west side; the attendants asked me if I was having trouble finding anything, but I wasn’t, I was just trying to decide what to get.
• Some friends, I think, and I arrived at a busy Red Line T stop near the intersection of Rt 16 and Boston Ave, which was part of a whole Red Line network, including one line called the “Lordon Line” or something similar, which bent around to the northeast roughly on Rt 16’s path. It was a bright, warm, sunny mid-afternoon when we were there. The station grounds were on the north side Boston Ave, with a large plaza area and then the station building(s) to its north. We looked at maps and schedules on a bulletin board in the plaza near the road, and we saw that we needed to take the S train to get the most direct route back home (which was only a mile away or so, albeit), as it went southeast, and that it came at 5:50, which was right then, so we ran inside the station to get on it. There was also a Z train that we could have taken that would have stopped less close to home, as it went southwest through the eastern edge of Arlington.