Basketball

I was playing basketball in a championship game for a local amateur league. Our team was behind but slowly catching up to the opposing team. With a few seconds left, I passed the ball to a teammate. She made the shot! A nice 2-point shot that brought us ahead of the team by 1 point, 92-91, at the buzzer! We won!!

The coach of the opposing team was not pleased, however. He was upset that the winning points were scored by someone who had just come off the bench. He said that the rules clearly state that players need to be on the court for at least 30 seconds before they can score, and that she had only been on for 2 seconds. I said that I had never heard of such a rule, but that I would look it up in the official rulebook. No-one had one on-hand, of course, so I Googled it, but any search for “official basketball rulebook” or “NBA rulebook” led me to non-existent sites or pages. If I image-searched, the only results were for cute pastel drawings of some strange looking fish and some deep-sea sponges (maybe the scientific names started with “n. b. a.” for them? I couldn’t figure out the reason). Very frustrating to not find what I was looking for!

California dreaming

I dreamt that I was visiting my friend Ryan, who lives in the California desert near Joshua Tree. I had a couple days left in my vacation, and we were talking about the different things we could do over the next few days, when we saw in the distance 3 mushroom clouds from massive explosions. These weren’t nuclear explosions though, they were definitely smaller, but they must have been caused by massive conventional bombs. We ran outside with his wife to look, but then we started getting pelted by debris from the explosions. There were pebbles coming down (which hurt when they hit you), but larger pieces of rock as well, some as big as footballs. We then saw a 4th explosion in the distance, a bit closer than the others. And then another! We didn’t want to run indoors because were we worried that we wouldn’t be able to see the larger rocks coming our way, so we stayed outside, avoiding the falling debris. Then, it looked like Ryan got hit by a rock, and he froze. He became frozen in place, mid-jump in the air, surrounded by a bright white light, just floating in the air and unmoving. We yelled his name but he couldn’t move. His wife and I looked around and saw other neighbours also starting to become frozen in the same way, while other people were running around, panicking. I was running as fast as I could with his wife, hoping that we wouldn’t become frozen as well. What was it? Some government experiment gone wrong? An alien invasion? I didn’t know, but I was so scared and breathing so hard from running, that I woke up.

Desert home and cinema

I have a friend who recently bought a home in the California desert. I dreamt that he told me and several other friends that we can visit any time. The odd thing is, while he was telling us this, we were actually already in his new house, visiting it already. In any case, he gave us a tour. A Scottish friend of ours was also there, and he was grooming his cat. His cat had odd little plastic wires all around him and integrated into his skin, almost like a bionic cat; my friend was cutting these off one by one.

I continued to explore the house. My friend brought us to the hot tub that he had outside. Our friend in the Yukon couldn’t be there, so we called her up to tell her about the hot tub. We didn’t have a phone that had a camera in it, we only had an old-style wireless phone, so we made her listen to the noise of the hot tub.

Continuing the tour, we went down some steps into the cinema area. We thought the house was attached to an old abandoned cinema, but it actually was still in business, and clients were coming out of a movie, others were buying popcorn. I lost my cap and wanted to protect myself from the desert sun if we went back outside, so I bought a cap in the cinema gift shop. However, the clerk made a mistake and charged me $760.40 for it! I didn’t notice the amount when I tapped my credit card, only after the transaction was approved. I then insisted that they refund me but the clerk didn’t know how. My friend came by and explained how to the clerk; thankfully my friend is honest!

Burlington, Vermont

I have a friend who lives in Burlington, Vermont. I dreamt that I went to Burlington to visit her. While there, I saw an electronics and video game store. I went in, but seeing as it’s Burlington, aka Hippie Central, the store itself was only part of a larger business: a farm! The store was built out of an old farmhouse, and there was a barn out back. You could buy your Nintendo Switch console, but also farm-fresh eggs, and jars of homemade jam. I explored the farm a bit more, and discovered an amazing sight: a horse making fresh spaghetti noodles! A woman was blowing a whistle to help the horse keep time, and the horse was operating a contraption that pushed out fresh pasta dough from a large machine, and when the pasta was long enough, the woman would give the signal and the horse would use the machine to cut the noodles. People were amazed at the sight, and stood watching in awe. I was kind of freaked out by it, so I decided to leave. I then went to the beach (Burlington is on Lake Champlain), and said to myself, “I bet I’ll find my friend Julia here”. I turn the corner of the beach house, and sure enough, there she was sitting on the porch, with a few other women who looked like her. I pointed to a woman who was sitting a bit apart but who looked like my friend’s twin, and I said “You must be Julia’s sister”; another woman sitting right next to my friend said “Just because I don’t look so much like her doesn’t mean that I’m not her sister!”. It turns out that they were all cousins. Then the porch changed into a stage, and Julia and her cousins started dancing and singing a song about family, but it was meant to be a funny song. It was very Vaudevillian in style. Another woman came out, who turned out to be my friend’s mother, and they all sang this funny song about family. People started applauding and cheering, and the singing family said “We’ll be back tonight! All of you who want to be part of the show, sign here!” and people rushed the stage to sign the papers so that they could be part of the show.

Coughing on the Royal Family

Unfortunately, I don’t remember much about this dream. Here are the bits I *do* remember:

• A friend from work was suddenly a tiny version of himself, and with the emotional and intellectual maturity of a 6 year old. But he still looked like himself!
• This friend was somehow related to the British Royal Family.
• I was tasked with taking care of him during a reception at a palace (possibly Buckingham). We wandered around the Palace, and I helped him up and down stairs.
• We went through a room where a fake queen (an actress, possibly the same one playing the Queen in Season 3 of The Crown) was eating a meal with people, all dressed up fancy like the real Queen, and being filmed. I didn’t curtsy or anything, just walked on through.
• At one point, I coughed. People around me looked at me, startled, and started covering their faces because of fears of the Coronavirus. Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was one of these people. I told him it was just a cough, relax!

Folding paper, and Star Wars

As seems to be the tradition,  I caught a cold this week, Christmas week. This cold led to some fever dreams last night. For context, I was reading a book called “Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension“, a popular-science book about math, with chapters on n-Dimensions, knot theory, and making solids by folding paper into different shapes. I also saw the latest Star Wars movie last weekend, and it was..  ok, no more. So, without further ado, last night’s fever dream:

I was disappointed by how the movie ended, so I decided to rearrange the film and change it, by folding a sheet of paper into various squares; the final shape ended up being a long “snake”-like shape, of multiple squares of paper that I could fold back and forth. On these squares of paper, I was able to paste scenes (in my mind) on each one. Then, by clever folding, I knew that I could rearrange the scenes in the movie. However, my paper-folding powers grew, and I was able to send squares (and thus the scenes from the movie) into different dimensions, thus making them disappear entirely, or travel through time to come out completely different than what they were originally. In fact, my powers grew so much that I ended up being scared, because if I didn’t fold the paper in just the right order and at just the right angles, I could actually affect world history, and not just the Star Wars movie. So from about 3 a.m. to about 5 a.m., I was floating, half-awake and half-asleep, with some guy’s voice in my head telling me how I needed to fold the paper in the right order and direction to prevent destroying the universe. I even got up to drink some water and went back to bed, and the thoughts wouldn’t stop. I saw the paper in my mind, disappearing into other dimensions with a flash, and then coming back. In the end, I do believe I changed the movie to make it better, and I certainly didn’t destroy the universe, so it was a successful fever-dream in all respects!

Napoleon

I was a time traveller. I went back to the Napoleonic Wars era, in the middle of a battle. It was night. Cannons blasting, men charging and retreating, and Napoleon guiding the events. I pretended to be one of his most trusted colonels. The battle was going badly, so Napoleon decided that it was time to involve the local peasants. They were given torches and told to run around, lighting things on fire. The dry fields of wheat and barley went up in smoke. There was one peasant woman who had crazy-eyes; she ran towards me with a torch. I ran, but came upon a fence. While climbing the fence, I got stuck at the top, and then I got shot, and woke up.

Automattic Video Game

I dreamt I was in some kind of VR video game, maybe kind of like in the movie Ready Player One? I was fighting with some of my Automattic colleagues; in particular, I fought against Daryl. My weapon: a tiny Christmas Tree which was also a sword. Other Automattic colleagues showed up and were not pleased at my transgressions, and also wanted to fight me. Since I was outnumbered, I decided to run away. However, our CFO, Stu, tackled me. I somehow managed to slip out of his grasp and climb over a fence, and escape.

I Was On A Rocket

I was in a big military base with a Richard Branson-like person (rich, long blond hair, eccentric ideas). He took me and my two boys into his rocket, which was shaped kind of like a lampshade. We launched, and he told me to put on an oxygen mask. Because of my glasses and the mask over my face, I had trouble seeing outside properly, but I did see some stars, and the International Space Station. However, the ISS was “pointing the wrong way”, so we couldn’t dock with it and had to come back down to Earth. At this point, the lampshade rocket stopped being a solid vehicle; all of us on the ship had to hold a piece of it in place around us. Fake Richard Branson held the cone of the ship over his head like a hat (by this time the rocket had become super-small, just big enough for the 4 of us). We landed but got ready for takeoff again immediately, because we had some urgent mission on the ISS to complete.

Trump and HNIC

I dreamt that I was in my old room from my childhood, in my top bunk. I was arguing with Trump about something. I called him the dumbest person on the face of the Earth. He got really mad, and Tweeted out an insult about me, except for some reason, he thought I was the head of the NHL player association (except instead of calling it the NHLPA, he called it HNIC (Hockey Night In Canada)). Still, several of my colleagues pinged me on Telegram (I remember @james pinging me in particular) to tell me “Watch out, Trump just Tweeted about you”, so I rushed to turn off my Twitter notifications before my phone blew up.