Dream Last Night

Here's what's been going on in my life that may have resulted in the following dreams; I'm taking a class, my friend Natalie is in town for a visit, we have a huge product/system switch next week, and I'm sick. Now I think some of the oddness of the following is due to the mixture of cold medicines I've been taking since Friday, but read it and let me know what you think.

The majority of my dreaming last night involved me trying to figure out a long, convoluted series of arguments. They were nicely diagramed but involved hundreds of acronyms. As soon as I'd think I understood one line, I'd move to the next only to realize that I had forgotten what all the acronyms meant and had to start all over again. It was tedious and I kept trying to move away from this dream, but kept coming back to it.

There was a tiny portion of the night's dreaming which didn't involve arguments and acronyms. It started with me running through a field of tall golden grass. I was being chased by a velosoraptor. I could hear the beast panting and whipping through the grass behind me.

I soon reached a moderately wide river with steep embankments on both sides. The water was moving too fast for me to wade through. The only other way across was a red rusty barrel hanging on a cord from a tree above the river. I jumped and hung onto the barrel as it began swinging across the river below.

The velosoraptor also jumped onto the barrel and as he grabbed onto it the barrel began to spin. It eventually knocked both of us off; I flew into a bush on the other side of the river and the velosoraptor fell into the water on the side we had just come from. I'm quite sure the dinosaur would've continued to come after me had a group of men in hazmat suits not shown up and tazered the animal. I scurried up the embankment passing several dead velosoraptors along the way.

When I reached the top of the embankment I came to a strange tunnel and walked in. Inside was a walkway lined with padded red pillows. There were several other tunnels of similar nature stemming from the main one. I peered down each as I passed them and eventually picked one to see what was down it. The auxiliary tunnel was much like the main one, but smaller. After about a hundred yards in I got a weird feeling and decided to turn back.

As soon as I turned around two large men in head to toe black patten leather suits grabbed and dragged me down the tunnel to a little room. The room was mostly white with two chairs in it, a big gray recliner in the middle of the room and a small wooden one next to one of the walls. The men put me into the gray chair looking out a big window of a strange city. It reminded me of Stephane's toilet paper roll city in "The Science of Sleep" but with more color. Soon I was joined by an old friend of mine who, to my surprise, sat on my lap and gave me a big hug. He then proceeded to tell me about where I was.

It was a socialist community where individualism was sacrificed for the greater good. Everyone was completely taken care of if they could follow the ways of the community. Everyone was given three suits to wear as they wished, the catch being that all the suits were pretty much the same. Everyone was also given a good car, that looked a lot like the futurist cars in "Minority Report," and were given a nice home, that looked like it was made out of playdough.

There were also jobs available, but only three, and when you joined the community you got to chose whichever one you thought seemed interesting. You could work in the mines, teach, or work at the general store. I asked what the community mined, but my friend just gave me a creepy blank look and continued on like he hadn't even heard me.

He then ushered me to the wooden chair next to the wall and had me sit down and listen to the music coming out of a small speaker installed in the wall. I sat down and could barely hear the music so I put my ear next to the speaker and realized the song playing was "Sugarpie, Honeybunch" but the lyrics were all wrong. I started thinking what the real lyrics were when an electronic hand shot through the speaker into my ear, implanting some sort of chip into my brain. I was naturally shocked and terrified at what had just occurred.

I stood up and put my hand to my now bleeding ear. I was then moved into a van for a tour of the community. I kept thinking about the correct words to "Sugarpie, Honeybunch" when I noticed, as the van passed one of the mines, that the people of the community weren't really mining anything at all, they were just moving dirt around. I began to feel my mind start changing into some sort of mindless drone but I clung to the correct lyrics of "Sugarpie Honeybunch" because I knew that somehow it would save me....

...And then I woke up.