Monthly Archives: September 2008

book vault

One scene was where I went with a bunch of other WU people into a tall, narrow barrel-vaulted room that was daylit from the south; the vaults were augmented with shelf-like ribs — or rather rib-like shelves, because the whole vault, plus maybe the walls, was stacked with books, that somehow were holding themselves up there by friction like stones of an arch, or maybe by skyglue. At another point we went into a different library room (maybe in the same building) with larger windows on the east and south walls, and a bunch of tables with chairs in the middle of the room. We all browsed around for a while, and I noticed a perhaps small magazine that was lamenting on its cover the rapid loss of knowledge of monster names (I think its byline was “It’s much worse than we thought” and it had a wintry scene on the cover), and I became rather upset about this fact.


pool swim

I remember dreaming in a recent 3h nap of exploring through Williams buildings after dark, including Chapin Library and the music building, but of course they were different from RL. Outside the music building in particular there were no lights on at all and it was almost totally dark. I found a bunch of offices etc. that I had had no knowledge of before. The other scene I remember is of swimming in an indoor pool in some sort of competition that several friends were also in, except it seemed to be more ceremonial and less competitive. We swam across the pool in the short direction with different strokes and there was lots of cheering from spectators after we all got to the other end (in like 20 seconds), approximately simultaneously. There was late afternoon sun coming in from the southwest; the pool was aligned east-west.

south view

15-hour (a record) catchup sleep — I hope not to have to do too many more of those this semester. However, it did result in numerous vivid dream scenes, which though have as usual faded to sort of colorful blurs in my memory over the hours I’ve been awake. One setting I remember is a south-facing sloped yard with a view out; the house or cabin was just uphill to the north or west, with woods beyond in all directions, but maybe some more fields just below to the south. Where I and a bunch of WU classmates were sitting or standing around was a bare patch of rich, dark earth, and we were doing something specific, maybe listening to somebody addressing the group, but I forget the exact situation. It was mid- to late afternoon, with some gauzy clouds in the sky, but with sun shining through. If I remember any more scenes than this, I’ll amend this post.

Faust collection

Two things I remember from last night’s dreams:

  • At home in NH, there were a number of people we didn’t know walking around in the backyard, maybe about 6 after we discovered them all. We were suspicious when looking at them from inside the house, but when we went outside and talked to them, they turned out to be pretty okay. I don’t remember if the overall reason they were there was clear, but one guy (they were all middle-aged, of mixed gender) built a curving low brick border at the southeast corner of the yard, extending from the sunporch. This all happened during the afternoon, I think, in the summer, with it maybe partly overcast but with some sun.
  • In a windowless, largish room that seemed to be like one in my high school — cinder block walls painted yellowy-beigy or maybe just gray — there were CDs for sale, I guess, and I picked up a Faust CD collection in a transparent, thick (there were several discs included) CD-cover-sized box, with the top CD being red, but it cost 67 (British) pounds, which was too much for me to afford.


Sillily, I’ve been writing down dream scenes over the course of maybe a week, quite possibly longer, in a single draft, and only now am I transposing those into complete sentences. So here we go, in chronological order of being dreamed, although I no longer am sure of the exact dates:

  1. First, several scenes of dreams from one night that were probably more connected than I now remember:
    • My parents and I were driving west along 101 near Keene with the sun at a fairly low angle in the west-northwest as if it were about 7PM in midsummer, except that 101 was maybe the Stowe bike path, even though it was a highway. We came to a left turnaround in the road and thence proceeded east, paralleling a chainlink fence that ran between the two portions of the road we’d just been on. I think there was another bike path too, an actual one, right next to the fence.
    • I was sitting down in a rural gray-gravelly north-south driveway with some open lawn or fields around it but pine woods a little further away; the sun was low to the north, or just west of north, and I was facing it. It was brisk and fresh out.
    • I was with a bunch of people in a waiting room for a theater at Wms, but there were no seats in it, so we were just sitting around on the floor. It was a completely gray room, I think, lit only by the fluorescent light from the room outside to the north, its light shining in through the wide entrance; there was also an open entrance to the west into the theater, whither a beam of light from the same light was also shining in.
  2. From probably the next night:
    • Everyone in my class at WU, including the new people incoming this year (but this was prior to the IRL start of classes, so my mind was just making them up) was assembled in a rural field, mostly sitting around, with a couple of gravel roads and some woods bounding it — it looked like part of a camp. Then everyone but the new people and a few others walked over onto one of the roads, one that went through woods, toward a nearby cabin, but no one seemed to know why they were doing so, and maybe in due time everyone turned around and went back into the field.
    • I got a ride to the first class meeting of the year, which was in a small parking lot somewhere in close view of an east-facing lake or ocean shore; the road we arrived by snaked down a very steep, mostly wooded hill to the west, with some houses in and around. We had to watch out for a number of individuals of a curious species of mammal that were out on the road: they had green, black, and white fur, and were somewhat tapir-like, but moved around a lot like slugs, and they were called “trucks.” We got to the class meeting at precisely 9AM, as did many others, which was good, because lateness would not have been tolerated, or possibly one would have just gotten snarked at a lot.
  3. The only thing I remember from the next night in the list is setting fire to a fairly large mushroom, probably a portabella.
  4. Then:
    • I drove to a big house on a lake (on the western shore, again) in a small red car with Ted Kennedy to go swimming, and Mitt Romney was already there. He and Ted talked about stuff, but I didn’t join the conversation. They probably talked about Massachusetts? It was a grayish day. I think I went swimming in the lake, and also may have gone inside the house at some point.
    • I was out running south on a big wide-open plain on a late afternoon with the sun occluded by wispy rainclouds that sometimes emitted some thunder; there was a ruddy glow to the sky. I stopped and got some water at a drinking fountain. Some friends approached from the north in vehicles (?).
  5. Another night, I dreamt of being in a dimly lit subway — it had about the same amount of illumination that a basement often has — and the platforms were rather densely populated by large cutouts of countries of the world, particularly of East Asia. They were solid, about 2″ thick, covered maybe in Formica, with each cutout being of one solid color, mostly in the red to yellow range, although I think there were some green cutouts as well. I crossed the tracks a few times (no third rail) and had to be careful of trains passing through.
  6. Finally, last night, the one scene I remember is looking out a ground-floor window onto a broad, concave, east-facing shoreline (yet again) with a wide beach all up and down it along the water and with a road curving around landward of the beach, paralleling the shoreline, and with a lot of houses on the landward side of the road. People were walking by in sizable numbers from an Obama speech.