I have a dream today!

I dreamt last night that I was trying to order a credit report for Laarni. I had to argue with the operator to get it for free.

The set up is kind of like the movie Groundhog's Day, except that I and my housemates keep waking up instead of Bill Murray. It takes place over a few days.

I'm living with five housemates in a big one-story house in the desert in New Mexico. We've all got scars and some bad memories of an invasion by the aliens from Alien. In the invasion, everybody on Earth got eaten and all was lost. But the next day, we all woke up scarred mentally and physical. So we moved to the desert to try to forget about the tragedy that nobody else remembers.

Little duckpin bowling ball sized alien eggs fall from the sky. They're black and leathery. The eggs are mixed with hail. We all know what's about to happen and decide that if we can convince the president early in the day, we have a good chance of him getting some "scientist" to figure out what to do.

We split up into teams to do different parts of the job of convincing people, knowing that we won't succeed today and that it's a practice run. I team up with Jane from Coupling.

We're supposed to get a baby alien as evidence and run to the White House, which is, apparently, close by. We run to a hospital. I have to run down a corridor, burst through a pair of double doors to surprise a baby alien and grab it so it can't bite me or sting me with the several spikes on it's tail. I run down the corridor and it bursts through the door and starts eating my chest. I wake up the next day and we rerun everything up to that point. This time, I manage to grab it and hold it (kind of like Steve Irwin holding a snake).

We run to the roof which is covered with grass so the president can play golf on it. Jane knows her way around because she's an intern there. We drop through a trap door in the ceiling and run into president Clinton immediately. We explain everything to him and he's very understanding. He calls over his top scientist who looks like Les Nessman from WKRP. We explain everything to the scientist and he says, "Yeah, I might be able to figure something out if I had a whole day." So we explain that I and my housemates will wake up tomorrow able to do everything again more quickly. As for now, we have to find a place to die less horribly.

We decide it would be good to go to a Meat Locker and freeze to death because the latch would be too complicated for an alien to open and the door would be made of metal. We look around the White House for one, but can't find it, so go to a supermarket. The aliens have already started invading and people are looting the supermarket. I see a lot of old ladies with shopping carts full of orange juice. We make our way to the back of the market and find the storage freezer. We lock ourselves in and freeze to death. Then I woke up.

Malcolm X is one of my best friends from high school. I've promised him I'd give a speech for him down at the 47th St. trolley station in San Diego at 3:00pm. I get to the station at 2:30pm by taking the bus and he's nowhere to be found. I realize that I don't really know where I'm supposed to give the speech, but I'm sure it's not actually at the station. So I take the bus back home (incidentally, travelling South on 47th street in San Diego metamorphoses into travlling North on North Charles St. in Baltimore). I run into my apartment to double check my e-mail and phone messages to ensure that Malcolm didn't specify any further where I was to speak. He didn't. So I grab Laarni and say "Come with me." And we both run down to Charles St. and keep trying to hail a cab. There aren't any. So we take the bus. Half way to downtown, I see a bunch of yellow cabs outside and beg the bus driver to stop for a second so I can jump out. I exit through the folding bus-door that's on the driver's side of the bus and run across the street up to the string of cabs. I now realize that the cabs are black and not yellow. They're in fact limousines waiting for rich kids to get out of the elemantary school that the limousines are parked in front of. In frustration Laarni and I jump back onto the bus. By the time we get to the 47th St. station, it's 3:30pm. I sit there scanning the horizon for where I could possibly have given the speech. Than I see Malcolm angrily striding towards me with a fancy suit and a big furry Russian hat on. "Where were you!? The brothers and I waited for half an hour! Now everyone's gone. I promised them a speech! Where were you?" I explain to Malcolm that I came early and didn't know where to go. I explain that I'd expected him to be at the station and show me where to go. He takes me to the Elks Lodge type place where I was supposed to give the speech. He's weeping a little bit and says he can't be my friend anymore. We get into a long argument about whose fault it is, etc. After a long time, all of the people who were supposed to hear my speech appear behind me and are arranged like one of those Christmas Tree shaped choirs -- in tiers. They sing some kind of hymn that softens Malcolm and he apologizes. I apologize. We hug and we're all a happy family again. When I wake up, I'm actually sweating from the stress. I very rarely sweat in my sleep.

Somehow some of my friends are playing baseball in a classroom at Gompers. Kat Goetch is the coach of the Padres. The Padres aren't even trying and I remarked to myself and to Alex Boisvert that they're doing really terribly because even I can tell they're not trying and I know very little about baseball. I then asked him, "Why aren't the Padres even trying?" To which he responds, "They never try when (the other team's name) is visiting." I was getting really annoyed with Kat and telling her, "Why don't you coach them properly! At least talk to your players!" She was just fiddling with one of the windows while looking outside and ignoring the game. She responded, "I don't know. All I know is that when they're done, we're all going to go out for pizza." I was extremely annoyed by this for some reason, so I tried to ignore the game, too and just stare out the window. Then some time passes or something and Laarni and I are at home. We've got this big Victorian bathtub in the bathroom. It's really deep and it's up on feet and everything. I wanted to get rid of a bunch of excess chocolate pudding, so I poured it into the tub and put a lot of hot water in so it gets real diluted and starts running down the drain. Later on when I check back on it, the pudding has re-congealed into a big blob of pudding again, only there're these fist-sized holes in it with all these maggots running through it. Rather than squirming around in a nasty maggot kind of way, they're kind of exploring the caves in the pudding like hamsters in plastic-tube maze. I remark, "Aw, man, I shouldn't have left all this pudding here! Now it's rotting in the bath tub! What the heck am I going to do. I can't get it all out." I feel really stupid.

I dreamt that Laarni and I were at Henry's natural food store buying apples and other fruits. Then we had to go to the library to do some research because Laarni and I were some kind of nature research team. Then things get foggy and we end up scuba diving and examining a fish that's thin like a pencil and a crab about the size of a matchbox. What we've "discovered" is that they're both hibernating, but if you tap them a lot, they dart off and claw at you respectively. Our "discovery" is this sort of hibernation where, if undisturbed, the animals sleep for a season or something, but when you bother them, they move around a lot. Then later on, we're eating the apples we bought back at our house and this gigantic worm crawls out of Laarni's apple. It's like a water-weasel. It's sort of wrinkly and has a tubular mouth. In fact it looks exactly like what Jewish men don't have that Gentiles do. I told her, "Oh, that's good. It means there were never any pesticides on that apple. I read that in the Bathroom Reader." We were watching television during all this and the music video for Free as a Bird by the Beatles came on. Except, they were singing in Hindi. For some reason, this didn't bother me and I told Laarni, "Oh, this is when they sing it in Sanskrit. I've seen this."

I dreamt that Paul and I were going to take a road trip to Wyoming. It was 600 miles and going to cost about $35 a day to travel. For some reason, Lila had to come. Laarni was coming too, in a separate car. We had to stop at a gas station to take a shower, but you had to just use a hose at the gas station. This bothered us because it meant it would take a long time to take a shower. I saw this Japanese guy with a minivan hosing off his whole family. Each member of his family was wearing a goofy-hat from Disneyland. I'm afraid I'm a bigot when I'm asleep.

Last night I dreamt I either lived in Japan or was watching a documentary about Japan. There was some kind of subculture of people in Japan called the Uri. In their tradition, the males in the family were supposed to work as hard as possible for the benefit of the family and the females were supposed to try to subvert the family as much as possible and take advantage of it. That's all I could remember when I woke up.

Last night I apparently dreamt the following:
I'm in Stratford upon Avon, walking with Laarni down a busy street when Laarni points out that the ring has made it's way back to my finger. It's just like I'm in The Lord of the Rings as Frodo. I don't remember putting the ring on. Laarni says she's really worried that the ring is going to take over my mind so if it happens a couple more times, I should pass it on to somebody else. It's silver and has a crack in it. Shortly after saying this, we get to our destination which is some kind of public park full of all the other UCLA math graduate students and a few other people. Some kind of hippie was running a meditation seminar or something and we were all participating. We had to hold hands in a big ring, but we held hands first in a crowd and then untangled ourselves into a big circle. Then we all sat down to meditate or something. I thought it was funny to sit down in Lotus position with my shoes on, so I did. Gabe was next to me laughing about it, too. The hippie running the seminar was trying to tell a story to make everybody meditate better. We were supposed to be imagining the images she told us. She told the men to imagine they could play the diggerido (but it was a classical Indian instrument in my dream) and that we hated Mexican people. The girls had to imagine they also played some kind of instrument and that they were Mexican. For the sake of the dream, both instruments required a vacuum to operate which you generated by pumping a bellows, but the girls and guys had to imagine that they were paired off male-female so they could share one set of bellows to each pair. This all seemed really funny to me. Then I woke up.