Reading and Dreams

I'm reading Lilith Saintcrow's "The Iron Wyrm Affair," which I'm enjoying ever-so-much more than either "Boneshaker" or that other steampunk-Sherlock novel with zombies which veered schizophrenicly between a science fiction adventure story and a romance.   Saintcrow's story (in the Foster sense) starts out action packed.  She's doing a good job revealing character motivation and back-story by an artful use of change of point-of-view... Although I'm beginning to lose some sympathy for her grim-tough heroine.

Dreams:  Last Wednesday or Thursday, I dreamed that Mark and I were sleeping in our old place.  Only it wasn't exactly our old place.  Our  bedroom abutted the garage.  It was like our bedroom had been moved to the south end of our current garage, and the whole house had moved to Sarah and Gretchen's neighborhood.  The house was old wood, sort of like an old barn.  

In the dream, I woke early in the morning because I heard some sort of sound.  Our silver car had been stolen, and the remains of some beat-up orange car were strewn across the driveway.  The thieves had broken into the garage, too.  

"It's a good thing they didn't use the tools to break into our bedroom," I said.  Although there was something not quite right about the house.  I think Mark and I had some further conversation as we looked around the garage. 

Suddenly, it hit me, and I said, "Mark, this is a dream; our bedroom isn't normally against the garage this way."

"But John," Mark said, "somebody stole our car."  I think we may have had a couple more exchanges where I pointed out that this must be a dream and Mark reasserted the reality of the situation.  .... and the dream went on to other things.

Last night I had a documentary dream focused on me.  The setting was supposed to be Carleton College, but physically, it reminded me a whole lot of Western View Middle School hallways.  I was a whole lot smarter and competent than I probably was back in 1990, and I recall thinking as I watched myself giving user services support that the film must be edited or something.  

A user was having problems logging in, and I was behind a plate glass kiosk, asking diagnostic questions, in a relaxing, reassuring way, with occasional hearty comments like, "Oh, that happens to me all the time" thrown in.  

The dream kind of went downhill from there.  There was something about my paycheck not going through.  At one point The Child appeared and started playing with the office phone, to the annoyance of the operator.  I had made a mechanical exchange that played recordings -- sort of like a hundred mechanical spiders whose legs tapped each other or help messages.  And then the dream turned into a credo dream where I voiced some issues from 1991.