The Joker and the Submarine

I dreamed that I was a crew member on a nuclear submarine. We captured the Joker and forced him to do work for us. You know, free labor, like the Suicide Squad or whatever that's about. Anyway, we sat him down at a work station and gave him clear instructions NOT to push the button that fires the nuclear missiles. But he did it anyway! Some people just don't listen, you know?

Actually, come to think of it, it would have been a pretty good gag if pushing the button just made a punching bag come out of the wall and hit him in the face.

*   *   *

This dream was obviously inspired by the scene in Batman: The Movie where the Joker is on the Penguin's sub and is the one who pushes the "fire torpedo" buttons. I showed this movie to my three-year old because he loves Batman but most other Batman media is a little too scary for him. He seems to have liked it a lot. Occasionally he asks me if he can watch it again.

Spending Time

I dreamed that I was spending Christmas with the family of one of my Indian coworkers. I do actually have some Indian coworkers, but this particular person was a fictional coworker conjured from the ether expressly for the dream.

The members of my coworker's family seemed to be fairly well divided with respect to what they were allowed to eat. Some had only rice and water. Others were vegetarians. Still others were eating beef. I don't remember now what I myself was eating.

I was asked to take part in some kind of family ritual. Actually, I wasn't exactly asked. The patriarch of the family, who spoke no English (in fact, I don't remember hearing him speak at all in any language), gestured to me to take part. He gave me some sort of sea horse shaped casing made from some plastic-like organic substance in which was contained some kind of shimmering silver-blue dust. I did as the others did. I used a knife to cut the end of the tail and shook out the dust into a pool of water. I don't remember whether I ever learned the significance of this act.

Later, I was speaking with an older gentleman who looked like the sort of man who might portray a Colonel or General in a movie. Maybe a little like Bob Gunton. I think he was trying to set me up with his daughter or granddaughter or niece or something. I think I was some kind of national hero, which is why he liked me.

At the end of the evening, I was speaking with my coworker, and I realized that I had started speaking with his accent. I didn't want to offend him, so I forced myself to speak like myself again.

"You know," I said, "I was thinking. If I saved up all the money I spent on soda and candy, by the end of the year I'd have a lot of money saved up."

"Or..." he said. "The vacuum will suck up your money, you'll drink a bit too much vermouth, and the Dark One will show you a good time."

~   ~   ~

I don't know who he meant by the Dark One. I suppose he might have meant himself, referring to his skin color, but I doubt it. I'm not sure what religion he practiced. I was never aware of whether Hinduism or Sikhism had any villainous entities in their theologies (I suppose now that they probably do, though I still have not checked). He might have been Muslim, but I don't think so, and for that matter, I'm not sure whether Muslims ever describe Iblis as "the Dark One." I suppose this particular Dark One may not have anything to do with any organized religions. Well, whoever he is, I don't think I want anything to do with him.

Indiana Jones and the Fruit Sherry

A dream I had last night basically took the form of a short Indiana Jones film. In the midst of a dry spell in the market for adventurous archaeology, Indy took a part time job as a Data Entry Operator. The company that hired him immediately set him to work typing the text of several books into a computer.

Having completed the work several hours later, Indy attempted to report to his supervisor only to find that he, along with the entire company, had vanished. He immediately realized that they had actually been con artists and that he would be receiving no payment.

Indy's reaction to this predicament, of course, was to seek out Sallah for help. Upon finding him, the two visited a local cafe for drinks. Indy asked Sallah if he could cover his bill, as he was a little short on cash, having just been egregiously swindled. Being the friendly type that he is, Sallah happily agreed. However, when Indy ordered a "fruit sherry," Sallah became immensely angry at his friend so blatantly taking advantage of his generosity. When the drink arrived, it was merely a plastic cup filled with pineapple juice and chunks of pineapple. Presumably, the juice was mixed with sherry, but I cannot verify this, as I did not taste the drink.

Indy informed Sallah that he had come into the possession of a rare treasure map, and he wanted to know if Sallah would be interested in joining him on an adventure. Sallah said he would, and so the two set out.

When they arrived at the site indicated by the map, they discovered that it was already being excavated by a group of Cuban treasure hunters.

Here I awoke, but that's okay, because this film was titled Indiana Jones and the Fruit Sherry, not Indiana Jones and the Cuban Dig Site.

Bad Movie Better Butter

A couple nights ago I dreamed that there was a brand of butter called Bad Movie Better Butter, the claim made in their advertising being that the spreading of Bad Movie Better Butter upon bad movies would make the bad movies better. The product's slogan was "We make the bad movies better!"

Ghost Tag

I was trapped inside some kind of haunted mansion or castle or something. Trapped there with me were a small number of others with whom I had not been acquainted prior to my present predicament.

One of these others was some kind of military soldier. I can't remember his name now, so we'll just call him Smith. In any case, he seemed a very well seasoned soldier, potentially a valuable ally to me, and so I tried to remain on his good side.

There was also a young lady named Miss Laverne, who turned out to be an experienced lawyer. For some reason that I can no longer remember, she was helping me with some important paperwork that I needed to finish. I was very happy for the help, and she wasn't unpleasant company by any means.

As she was a lawyer, I can't help but compare her appearance to that of Ellen Parsons from the TV series Damages. But she wore glasses, maybe kind of like Gemma Taylor from The Rage in Placid Lake.

Miss Laverne looked kind of like this...

...but with these glasses. Ignore the guy on the right. He wasn't in this scene.

There were a number of others, but their details are all shrouded by the ether now.

The layout of the mansion itself was vaguely like that of my grandmother's house, but its actual features were more like the interior of Hogwarts. That is, there were portraits on the wall that moved and talked, just like regular people. The people depicted in these portraits were, in fact, spirits of some import.

For instance, one of them was a blonde-haired young lady in a dress. The label on this portrait read, "Satan."

The others and I systematically approached these portraits one by one and spoke with the spirits contained within them. Each time we did so, an apparition of some kind appeared and chased us around for a little while before vanishing without having done any real harm.

Well, after one such little chase, we noticed that one of our companions had disappeared. Soon thereafter, we received an anonymous letter informing us that he had been kidnapped and that the kidnapper was demanding four million dollars.

After we approached the Satan portrait, a ghost of a tall, old, balding man in a white shirt and jeans chased us around. After a while, I realized that one of those old-timey telephones that you see in cartoons was sitting on the dining room table, and it was ringing.

It's for you.

I ignored the ghost as it chased the others. I answered the phone. It was Miss Laverne.

"Hello?" I said.

"This is Miss Laverne," she said.

I looked around and noticed that both Laverne and Smith were gone.

"Where are you?" I asked.

"I have kidnapped Smith," she said.

"Why?"

"I will return him in exchange for four hundred thousand dollars."

"What?"

She hung up.

The ghost had disappeared by this time, and so I informed the others that the kidnapper had turned out to be Miss Laverne.

But then I started thinking about this little development.

Why would she kidnap somebody and ask for four million, only to turn around and kidnap another somebody and ask for four hundred thousand?

Also, why would she tell us who she was, especially considering that the first note was anonymous? It seemed the sort of stupid move that might be made by some thick-headed high school gym coach, not a sexy lawyerbrarian. Something strange was afoot, and I was going to get to the bottom of it.

~  ~  ~

Actually, I never got to the bottom of it. Sadly, I woke up from the dream. I like to think that Miss Laverne was actually being framed by the ghosts of the mansion. Actually, now that I think about it, it might have been one of those Scooby-Doo villains masquerading as a ghost who had tried to frame her. But I guess I'll never know unless I dream up a sequel.

As for whether or not Rose Byrne actually played the role of Miss Laverne in this dream, I don't believe she did. I believe it was just someone who looked kind of like her. A Rose Byrne lookalike, sort of in the same sense that Carly Foulkes might be considered an Anne Hathaway lookalike.

I mention this only because on occasion some of the characters in my dreams actually are portrayed by particular movie stars. For instance, once when I was in high school, I had a dream about the lost empire of Atlantis, and as it happened, the top ranking Atlantean general was played by Sam Neill. He had golden armor and wings and could fly.

Brainf***

Last night I dreamed that I was programming in a little programming language called brainf***. It was really frustrating, as though I just couldn't quite get the program to do what I wanted it to do, or as though the problem I was trying to solve just didn't lend itself well to a language consisting of only eight tokens. I think, now that I'm trying to remember it, that I was attempting to use brainf*** to develop a proof for some stupid theorem or something, but the theorem was really trivial and intuitive, and therefore proving it requires the use of brainf*** to make it more challenging, so that you don't get bored and subsequently die from said boredom. Or something like that. It's very hazy now.

In any case, the reason that I was dreaming about brainf*** is because on Tuesday (in real life) I spent an hour writing a brainf*** interpreter in C++. It works really well, though that's not saying much as it's such a simple language to implement.

Is there some subtle subconscious message coming out of this? I wrote an interpreter for brainf***, and then I dreamed about brainf***. How can I find more meaningful interpretations of my dreams? Et cetera.

In unrelated news (or is it?), I watched a film called White on Rice this week. It is the funniest movie I have ever seen. I recommend it for the whole world.

Aquatic Shopping

Little to report in dreams last night, sadly. I was in some kind of underwater department store wherein everything was connected by large catwalks. On account of the buoyancy afforded by the water, one could jump long distances from one catwalk to another. However, I was warned about doing this, because there was a large fish in the area that could potentially swallow anyone whole who tried it.

I tried to go upstairs and wound up on the second floor, which was much smaller in size than the first, consisting of only a single room. The way up to the third floor was closed at the moment, and for some reason, they wouldn't let people go back down to the first floor.

So everyone was just waiting.

Eventually, the area with the escalators changed into a wooden pier at a shoreline, and I dreamed about two guys having a sword fight. It was like one of those fights you might find in a movie where the protagonist is obviously up against someone vastly his superior, but then toward the end he musters his determination and manages to defeat the villain despite the odds. These two guys kept going back and forth trying to maim each other, sticking knives through each other's ear lobes, cutting off each other's fingers, and so on. I think one of them may have been played by Orlando Bloom.

Aliens and Robots and Pianos

So last night my dreams were pretty unremarkable, mostly just involving gunfights with aliens and robots. I mean, don't get me wrong. I enjoy that kind of dream action as much as the next guy, but it makes for pretty uninteresting reading in a blog, wouldn't you say?

It's pretty straightforward the way these dreams go.

Run, shoot, shoot, run, dodge, shoot, run, dive around corner, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, run, shoot, shoot, and so on...

I was battling aliens. And I mean the aliens from the movie Aliens. One of my teammates was a Predator. You know, like from Predator. So one could say that it was like an Aliens vs. Predator dream. But I never saw that movie. I never wanted to see it. Why am dreaming about this stuff?

There was, however, one pretty nice moment where I was standing on top of a door frame and shooting straight down into the head of the alien mother queen. She didn't like it very much.

An angry alien

"Walter was right about you," she said. I don't know who Walter is, but I think that he must have been another alien that I'd fought in another dream on an earlier night. They're conspiring against me.

Anyway, I awoke early this morning with only this to go on, so I went back to sleep hoping for something a bit more bloggable. What I got was more shooting, except this time with the Big Daddy robots from Bioshock.

A big daddy. Is this better or worse than aliens?

Run, shoot, shoot, run...

Back to sleep again, and this time I got something about helping the secretaries at a temp agency move their stuff from their old office into a new one. In particular, they had a baby grand piano that needed transporting. I could tell they were waiting for me to volunteer to move the piano myself, but I didn't want to do it unless they were going to pay me for the work. My services aren't free, darn it.

Come on, subconscious. I need some good dreams here. You know... good ones.

Hotel Unacceptable

A young woman and I were traveling by boat down a river somewhere in a jungle, perhaps in Malaysia or India or another similar place. The woman was hardy and adventurous and looked something like Marion Ravenwood from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

We came upon a little village or town situated beside this river, and after we decided to stop there to rest for the night, some of the villagers warned us about the proprietor of the only hotel in the area. I don't recall his name now, but from their descriptions of him he seemed to be a sort of Moriarty type character, a devious and dangerous man to be avoided if possible. Nevertheless, we wound up not only at his hotel, but in his very company, as he himself sought us out, evidently finding us to be very interesting travelers indeed.

Mr. Moriarty told us that he wished to be honest with us. The rooms in his hotel, he said, were quite dangerous places. Each room, according to the man we still did not trust, was fitted with a lethal trap, and only with quite precise caution could anyone survive the night. In particular, he warned us of a special class of device known as a milktrap.

We told him that we'd been assigned room number X (I no longer remember the exact number), and he immediately suggested that room number Y would be a better choice (again, I cannot recall the number). The milktrap in room X, he said, was especially deadly. Room Y, he said, though also being equipped with a milktrap of its own, was much less demanding of its inhabitants. We would have a much greater chance, he said, of survival.

So we were to stay in the room of Mr. Moriarty's choosing.

In the interest of displaying true hospitality, Moriarty decided to show us the room personally. Now, upon viewing the room, I was unsure of whether this establishment was a hotel at all or if it was rather a prison, indeed, a veritable dungeon. The room's walls were of dank greenish stone, fitted only with a torch on either side of the room to light with dim orange glow the unsure pillars extending up from the dark pool of water far below to form a haphazard floor, whereupon we stood with ever growing anxiety.

Moriarty waved us over to a niche at one end of this depressing display of meager accommodation. Here, he informed us, was the milktrap.

The device was in two parts. There was a large gas engine or generator of some kind fixed to the floor and standing at about waist height. Attached to this engine was a series of glass or hard plastic reservoirs connected by tubes stair-stepping upwards and away into the darkness of the chimney above. Moriarty wanted to light the flame of the engine. My companion said that she was afraid that this would ignite gas in the room and cause an explosion, but the shady proprietor insisted that there was no chance of this happening.

The man activated the engine, and a little flame appeared, shooting out just an inch or two from the top of the device. Slowly, I noticed, milk began to travel up through the tubes, filling up the reservoirs with steady equality, despite the variation in their vertical positions.

The pillars began to shift with extremely subtle motions. They seemed to move about the room, and yet simultaneously their positions did not seem to change at all.

At this point, Mr. Moriarty confessed that he really did not understand the milktraps at all, neither their internal mechanisms, nor their overall function.

Suddenly, I witnessed before me an array of silver spoons, and I heard a voice in my head, saying, "Fill thy bonnie circle with my ground."

I could make no sense of this statement at first, but upon pondering it, I began to understand, or I thought I did.

I recognized the voice as my own, and I began to suspect that Moriarty intended to use the milktrap to transform my companion and myself into silver spoons. The bonnie circle would be formed by Moriarty's thumb and forefinger, and the ground referred to in the statement would be the shafts of the spoons.

The milktrap, I believed, had rendered me slightly more willing for this to be my fate.