Monthly Archives: February 2012

Kazakhstan trains


run trilogy

I went on some eastward runs somewhere in New England, maybe three times on the same route or at least the latter two times: first with my uncle, then with WU friends (I think), and finally by myself. The first time was on a sunny afternoon, ending at a big barn on the south side of a rural asphalt road with a large field beyond and a big lawn between the road and the barn; we were maybe meeting my parents there. Somewhere around then I was also in a car and had to stop really quickly at an intersection, going east, crossing a north-south highway, with the barn visible just across it, on a sunny midday. The barn was some kind of restaurant or food shop but still looked mostly like a barn on the first floor, with a stand in the middle against the north wall of a partitioned central area similar to a restaurant receptionist’s podium, but this had a couple of people who served drinks. The first time, wanting something refreshing, I asked for mostly sparkling water (maybe with Garfield in the name somehow, as in the cat) and a small amount of orange juice mixed into it, which through some confusion was interpreted as sparkling water topped off with sparkling water. The second time we went down a really crazy steep woods section where we had to hold onto the posts of radio towers or something to descend at all safely; we seemed to arrive at the barn again; other friends were about (a bunch of them, but I forget who was there after which run). The third time, running on my own, was down the same precipicey route, but the building at the end seemed to have changed to a more high-tech one, with a wide flat metal canopy all round, partly fixed but partly containing large flaps the depth of the canopy and in the same plane, but semi-hinged at the building, maybe having to do with photovoltaics; I sort of fell down into them, as the steep slope ended at the building, and strained the flap I landed on downward, which helped get me safely down to the flat paved area of ground on the east side of the building (here it was a semi-sunny morning, and the location seemed like a cablecar station in Switzerland), though I was worried about damaging the flap. I met up inside the building with I guess WU friends (including the same ones I’d gone on the second run with) and got on a bus with them, maybe returning to school thence; other things happened there that I couldn’t recall properly.


  • I won a fellowship for my proposal to go to the country just north of Panama and study trash disposal (I think); there were some concerns about rising political violence in Central America; the country was the size of Costa Rica but the shape of Nicaragua.
  • Later, I was walking west through Antrim, by a lake (Gregg Lake?); I went up a gravelly parking lot into fancy town hall with a classical-style central lobby.

bizarro Charles

  • I was with my roommate in/around a building complex in a rural area with a northwest-southeast small highway at its northeast edge, with forest beyond, but the complex was in an open zone of coarse gray river sediment. The weather was rainy/icy and gray. In driving along the adjacent road, we came upon pileup accidents and had to drive around/over all sorts of obstacles (including driving tilted up against the side of a stationary car in one of the pileups, which seemed undamaged as we approached and was somehow not impacted by driving over its right side); my roommate needed to get back home soon but was maybe able to do some work there at the complex.
  • At some point during that, I visualized a map of southern New England showing the Charles River, which spanned Massachusetts east-west, flowing south along the Mass.-NY border (with the border being correlated to the river’s position, like the Mass.-NH border with the Merrimack IRL) then turning east and then northeast and flowing back to MA’s northern border, then turning southeast and heading toward Boston, and maybe meandering still more near there.
  • I also visualized a 3D map (maybe the same) that really clearly showed the watersheds of southwestern NH separated east-west by rises (the Contoocook, the Merrimack, etc.)
  • At home in NH, I had occasion to go up into the upper attic; I went up through the hatch in the master bedroom ceiling with some difficulty (without a ladder, just clambering up). I rediscovered that my parents had renovated the attic with additional windows and a lot more space (vertical and horizontal) than IRL (this is a recurring dream), with lots of nice areas with nice materials (a combo of wood and white wallboard, oriental rugs, etc) including a living room furniture setup with one couch against the side of the stairs (their south side, with the stairs going up to the east to a sort of loft area to the south) raised up about 4′ for some reason while the other seats were on the floor like normal; it looked out to the view to the northeast.

laundry mishap

  • I was in a big laundry in a sort of storagey room (via a project I was working on IRL), with steaming/drying closets along the south wall and washing machines to the right along the same wall, with only artificial light for illumination. I had all sorts of clothes and shoes washing (I thought) in the closets but after opening them up afterwards realized there was no actual washing involved, so nothing had gotten clean, even the few things I sprinkled laundry soap on (it was still on them).
  • I was holding a long floppy piece of metal flashing or similar at one end, maybe in the laundry room still but inside anyway (again with artificial light only); I tapped my finger against it at about 180bpm as it had a pleasant, harmonic sound that reminded me of the guitar in NEU! [I remembered this snippet thanks to a thing on Michael Rother on the Resident Advisor feed IRL this morning]. Some friends/peers were around; I wanted to ask them if they heard the NEU! connection.
  • I was in a long, widish but low-ceilinged north-south room with lots of people about; my desk had what someone was discussing to be a flat-railed German chair that would stand upright upside down, so I took it and tried standing it on its top rail, which worked, and then sat it upside down on its seat on a shelf at the south end of the room, for storage, but then I looked back around and lots of guys were approaching carrying black-wood wardrobes and such to put into storage, so I took the chair back to get it out of the way.
  • There was a weird pastel-laser-light show in the sky; it seemed to be some sort of summer celebration — I was out in a field with a lot of maybe NH people (this recollection was vague). There were a couple of electronic guides to the night sky about and I was confused as to their differences. Initially I held each one up against the sky to overlay it, but then looked at them at a normal reading position while sitting on the ground (facing west), and noticed that the second one superimposed the Earth’s geographical boundaries on the celestial sphere based on current alignment, and I zoomed into NH and saw that they got the names of all the counties hilariously wrong (one was labeled COOT but I don’t think it was even Coos, it was maybe Carroll, wish I could remember the others too).

up north trip


repair pigeon

  • A guy in his house phoned a pigeon to repair something at home, plumbing probably. The pigeon cooed into the phone; the guy couldn’t understand what the pigeon was trying to say and just asked it to come over at a particular time; (then I semi-woke up briefly) later the pigeon arrived at the front door, standing on the front step; the guy let him in, and the pigeon made the repair.
  • My roommate and I were investigating an apartment in a run-down rural building, like a barn/shop; it contained two apartments. One apartment (maybe #178) had a note that the rest of it was in another building, but it seemed to be just upstairs; there was a ball pit upstairs, maybe there was some outright reference to Chuck E. Cheese; I kept expecting something horrific to appear or happen but nothing did.


  • On a sunny mid-afternoon, I biked down to Temple St from just a block or so east or south, turned right onto it, and turned right again at the end onto 38 while lots of pedestrians were crossing, so I almost hit some of them (I wasn’t going fast but couldn’t brake in time). The far side of 38 was wooded, maybe with an open (highway/industrial) area visible past the trees.
  • I found my way into a set of small wooden-walled tunnels/shafts that were being explored from another direction by a tour looking for waxy multicolored stalactites; they were all wearing hardhats and I thought I’d be scolded for not having one on, but wasn’t; we all ended up at a little gift stand with an east window near where we were standing; again it was a sunny mid-afternoon (I’m not sure of order of these scenes or of a possible connection between the bike scene and this one).
  • I attended a Jewish ceremony partaken in by a number of my Wms friends, who were completely covered in segmented pinstriped deep purple fabric (like a RL shirt of mine), the fabric even covering their heads and faces except their eyes, but covering even the whites of their eyes as well, with fabric segments corresponding to the parts of the face; I asked one of my friends what it was and he was amused that I didn’t already know before deciding to attend, but seemed to explain it anyway, though I can’t remember what he said about it.