Frustrations

Eternal night veiled the campus at the University I was visiting. Whether this is a natural feature of the surrounding area or a man-made one to accommodate the vampire population of the student body, I don't know, but the night-time that engulfed me was forever.

I was attempting to register an account at the campus computer lab in order to use the Internet, but the process of registering required that I complete a quiz about the points scored in the most recent baseball game that had been played on the campus. I had to identify which players from both teams scored in which innings (strangely, called pads in this area) and the final score at the end of the game. I had to do this in the form of an essay.

Needless to say, this is a very difficult thing to accomplish without having watched the game, taking notes as it progressed. I had not done so. And so I sought out the local scoreboard, which kept such records until another game was to be played. I started trying to take notes on when different players scored, but it was very difficult to read it as the information was scattered around, apparently at random, and every time I looked from the scoreboard to my paper and back to the scoreboard, everything had changed completely. The only things that were consistent were the letters "NMC" at the top.

Frustrated, I went to a nearby car wash and got my car washed. No one was there. I simply helped myself to the equipment and did it myself.

I went to class, but right before I entered, I realized that I was naked. Luckily, the blinds in the classroom were closed, so the other students inside could not see me. I hurriedly put on my clothes and ran away.

I went back to the car wash with my wife and kids. We entered the washing area, but we had no car. We had ordered personal washes. The machines sprayed us with water and soap and got our clothes all soapy and wet. I think I was screaming during this whole ordeal.

I tried to go use the drying machine, but the controls were too confusing. There were two big buttons, one of them labeled, "load." The other button's label was too faded to read. There were also six smaller buttons in two rows with just single letters on them. The bottom row were N, M, and C. The labels on the buttons of the top row were also too faded to read. There was also an unlabeled small red button.

I watched another customer dry off with another machine. He pushed some of these buttons and the machine dried him off.

So I tried the top button with the label worn off, and the airflow that came out of the machine had specks of spit in it. I realized then that the label had read, "Camel."

I tried "Load," but the same thing happened.

I asked the attendant for help, who looked at my receipt and informed me that no drying service is included with personal washes. She informed me that you have to get a car wash to dry. It was at this point that I realized that I was already dry anyway.

I told the attendant that I had used the machines earlier. She told me that they had been closed at that time.

"But I used it!" I said.

"The machines still work," she said, "but we were technically closed."

Whatever, I thought.

I returned to the baseball scoring table again, but this time it was really crowded, which made it ever more difficult to get the information I needed.

I was getting really frustrated.

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.

Subterranean Ether

I was visiting my parents' house the other day, and present there was a young man whom I had never met. He was upstairs in my brother's room, and as a lowly member of the military he was working on a puzzle as a part of his duties. As he worked, I spoke with him a little bit and tried to understand why he was in my parents' house. Eventually he became quite frustrated with his puzzle and gave up.

"The military is coming to get us," he said. "I'm getting out of here."

He left without another word.

With nothing else to do, I took a look at his puzzle myself. It was a large rectangular case with a glass panel on the front side that allowed one to see a series of rows of tiles with various letters on them. The tiles were attached to long rods that extended from one side of the case to the other, and by manipulating the handles on either side of the case one could remove the tiles from these rods and move them to new positions on other rods. In this way, the young man had been trying to spell the word mayonnaise at the bottom of the case, although at the moment it read, "mo unaise."

I figured that I could finish what he had started, and so I moved the "o" right out of there and replaced it with an "a." I found a "y" and tried to move it into place, but upon doing so the tile split into four: XY, YX, XX, and YY. Frustrated, I moved those out again and tried another "y." Same thing.

Around that time, I glanced out my parents' window and noticed that there was a large silver van arriving. I knew that this was the military that the young man had assured me were on their way, and I also knew that I had to get out of there. So I grabbed my things, mostly a stack of books and papers, and made for the back door.

I tried going around the west side of the house, but after opening the gate I saw that the soldiers were already getting out of the van and would spot me if I went that way. So I went back the other way and through a large arched gateway into the alley beside the house.

Proceeding southward down the alley away from the building, I glanced over my shoulder to ensure that the soldiers were not there. I continued past a small golf course and then a desert enclosed by large sandstone walls.

Eventually, I found a cushion evidently made into a makeshift bed by a hobo. So I lay down there and set down my things beside me. Looking back, I saw a hobo coming and immediately stood to apologize.

"No, it's okay," he said, waving his hand dismissively. "During the daytime I don't need it."

So I stayed put.

In a short while, I noticed the silver van coming down the alley, so I hid beside a corner and waited for them to pass.

Of course, they did pass, and I observed that luckily none of the soldiers inside were being quite observant enough to look around the corner, and so they didn't see me. Unluckily, they stopped a short ways down and got out to search the area. I clearly could not escape without being seen.

So I did the logical thing and lay down again, pretending to be a sleeping hobo.

I felt that my performance was really top notch, that even if they were to find me there, they would be fooled and I would be free. I snored loudly, lending further credibility to my charade.

The soldiers did indeed approach, and upon examining me they discovered my perfectly groomed fingernails.

"This is no hobo," they said.

Having seen through my act, the soldiers sent me away, back to my parents' house. Strangely, they allowed me to return on my own without an escort or guard. So I decided to travel back there by cutting through the desert I had passed earlier.

Making my way across the sand and amongst an array of large sandstone blocks, I came upon a woman with blonde hair off to my left. She was leaning against two of the large blocks, which had fallen and were lying lengthwise rather than upright.

As I approached, she smiled without really smiling, lending slight pronunciation to the subtle wrinkles on her face. She was neither a young woman nor an old one, but I felt that she was important.

"What is the meaning of all of this?" I asked her.

I don't remember now what it was that she said to me. Not the exact words. I believe that she said something about how the meaning was up to me. Then again, that might be what I only hope she had said, just a subsequent fabrication or reconstruction of my mind, created only in retrospect from out of the ether.

~   ~   ~ 

What is the meaning of all of this? Indeed. Who can be sure?

My name is Luke, and the narrative that just ended was a dream that I had last night. There are details that are gone, and some of the details that appear above have almost certainly changed from initial dream to subsequent recollection. But what can I do about that? Perhaps it doesn't really matter.

Subterranean Ether is a blog in which I record my dreams. I have been in the habit of posting snippets, mere snapshots of my dreams, as status updates on my Facebook Wall, but at some point the idea dawned on me to record them more completely in a blog.

So here it is.