Cool lights and unpleasant dreams

I've lost my soul to a Mathmos Airswitch tc light. It's a light; it's a toy; it's high theatre. In terms of shear coolness, it's right up there with harmonographs, theremins, and kinetic marble sculptures.

Ah well...

Strange and disturbing dreams this morning. I was in a jumbled setting that combined bits of my 1980's college rental, my last rental, a frat house, and a restaurant. I kept waking up part-way thinking, "Gee, that was unpleasant" only to fall back into the dream again....

At first, I was trying to walk around the setting without waking up my housemates, who all seemed to be sleeping with their significant others in unexpected places (and none of these people were the folks I went to college with; I think there were some contemporary folks). There was something about somebody's dad wanting to use a computer to check his stocks, and he had sort of hijacked my session with an unknown program; I couldn't get the machine to stop running it, even with a reboot.

There was a break, and suddenly I was in some sort of custody kidnapping movie or something. A bunch of shaolin monk types trouped into a small, bare apartment living room. They used a sort of bowed huqin or sanxian (and incense, I think) to get a feeling for the room. One spot that they traversed made the musical instrument howl -- an indication that something horrible happened on the spot.

There was something about being served breakfast or dinner or something although I was from the wrong dorm, and very soon after, I found myself being shown out of the building by a malicious maitre'de who pretended not to recognize me. It didn't help that my dream clothing shifted to just a bathrobe and my feet were muddy.

At one point I was fighting a pint-sized ninja while the people around me watched. I wished they would help, but they didn't. In the end, I had the ninja by one arm and one leg, and was trying to keep him from kicking me or slashing me with some sort of ninja knife. I'm not sure if I was in a bathrobe or if my dream attire had become more daytime. Eventually, I had to release him, and for my troubles he painted to F's on my left collarbone, saying, "failure!" each time. This was a type of counting coupe, and someone informed me that I could look forward to having my shoulder broken/stabbed in nasty painful ways in the near future.

Mr Pint-sized Ninja (he was about two or three feet tall) started leaving harassing tassels of red and black fabric around the house to show that he had been there.

The dream ended with a kind of fight in the restaurant's colonnade between three gangs of various ethnicities, with the rest of us trying to stay out of the way. Probably the most interesting piece of gang apparel were black and gold hexagonal pointy hats (sort of like three-tiered pagodas)... but at the time I was too busy trying not to get hurt to pay too much attention.