Adventures on a Tank

I climbed up about 10 feet to the edge of an open topped tank about 30 feet in diameter.  I needed to walk all the way around the edge, which was concrete about a foot wide and as I stood there thinking about how I was going to do it, the thought crossed my mind that this is the type of thing where I should get some help to make sure I was safe.  There was a metal arm on a center pivot that reached out to the edge and I figured I could hold onto it and turn it with me as I walked along, which seemed fairly safe, so I started walking the edge.

About half way around there was a platform and some mechanical gear mounted just outside the tank.  I thought I saw some brown fur down amongst the equipment a little below my level so I bent down to grab it and when I got close it scurried away.  It was a weasel or some similar small animal.  I climbed down to where it had been, looking for it, but it was gone.  As I climbed around the little platforms that the various equipment items were sitting on I noticed another piece of fur, only this time it was black instead of brown.

I stepped closer to see what it was and it moved out from under a motor or something and revealed a white stripe down its back.  I realized what that meant and also that I had cornered it, so I tried to back away as fast as I could.  As I did the skunk turned its back end toward me.  It was too congested to move fast enough to avoid getting sprayed, so I quickly grabbed the skunk’s tail and in the same motion flipped it up into the air and it landed inside the tank.  I don’t know if it’s possible in reality, but the flip was faster than the spray and I didn’t get hit. 

The tank was full of bleach.  In the time it took the skunk to swim back to a place where it could climb out I watched the black part of its fur fade to gray and then an all white skunk walked out onto the edge. 

Driving & Scraping

I was driving in heavy traffic, trying to merge onto a very busy urban multi-lane freeway.  There were several cars on the on-ramp in front of me all being held up by a badly underpowered semi.  The semi was near the end of the ramp and hadn’t gotten to more than 25 or 30 mph.  There were limited gaps and not enough shoulder to just continue accelerating in it looking for a gap.  It was beginning to look like everyone was going to have come to a stop, but someone switched left out of the adjacent lane and suddenly there was a small gap, so I swerved over and stomped the gas to the floor and jumped out into traffic.

I maneuvered around for a while and it began to snow.  Soon it was snowing heavily and there began to be wheel tracks on the pavement with piles of snow in between.  Eventually the traffic thinned, maybe because the snow was getting bad.  Snow was now a foot to 18” deep between the wheel paths and I was surprised how well the vehicle I was driving (don't know what it was) was doing about not slowing down or hanging up in the snow. 

It was starting to feel like I’d been driving a long time.  I think I was circling Indianapolis, but am not sure.  I was finishing a triangular trip that involved Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa.  I stopped and went into a convention center type building.  The conference room I was in seated about 1000 people.  It had glass walls all the way up to a ceiling about 50 feet high.  The glass was apparently not well insulated because it was glazed with ice, being cold outside and having the condensate from all those people in it.  The speaker was lamenting that we couldn’t see out the glass because of the frost on it, saying we needed to install fans or make some of the people leave.  I noticed there were scrapers on each table so I stood up and made a speech.

I said that the speaker had given a response typical for our society:  People are the problem, not the solution.  Technology is the solution.  I said that it seemed likely to me that the ice scrapers on the tables were put there to enable us all to scrape the windows so we could see.  Several people looked at me like I was crazy, but others got up, grabbed their scrapers and started clearing the glass.

Adam & Eve?, Food Monster, Indoor Race, Road Building

April 19, 2011

There was a naked man standing in a vineyard on a hillside facing away from me as he worked on the vines.  He was young and healthy and perfectly proportioned and it seemed completely normal that he would be where he was doing what he was undressed as he was.  A little ways around the hill was a similar young woman.  She was also naked, young, healthy, and perfectly proportioned and also facing away from me as she worked on the vines.  Neither of the two knew the other was there, but they were working towards each other and I knew they would see each other soon.  They both seemed so perfect that it seemed right to me that they would find each other and that they wouldn’t be embarrassed or act inappropriately, almost like an Adam & Eve scene.

Later there was a monster with a head about a foot around.  When it opened its mouth, which was most of the time, the head tilted back so the mouth was sticking straight up and it was the same size as the head.  It had sharp, triangular shaped teeth and it snapped and wriggled but didn’t seem to be able to move from where it was sticking out of the ground.  I tossed some leftover food to it and it chomped it down like Cookie Monster.  I realized that whatever it was, it would make a good garbage disposal as long as I didn’t get too close.  I tried throwing different types of scraps to it and it gobbled them all up.  I tried some sticks and brush and while it took a little longer to chew, it finished them off too.

April 20, 2011

I was running a long distance race, but unlike most of them this one was indoors, in a big auditorium, that was full of people.  The runners made laps around the room, which included running up stairs along the wall and down an aisle where people were sitting with their legs sticking out.  As I came into the room to start running there were some people already running so I just merged in with them.  I realized I was running with the elite runners and would have to hold a pretty fast pace to stay there.  We turned from the flat section at the front of the auditorium and started working our way up the side aisle and then the stairs.  I had no trouble staying in front on the stairs, but when I turned down the aisle at the front of the balcony there were lots of people sitting with their legs sticking out making it very tough going picking between the legs.  I realized at this point what the elites were doing.  They didn’t want to be first because the person in front had to blaze the path through the obstacles.  Most of the people sitting weren’t paying attention until the first person ran through, and then they would move their legs and the runners behind didn’t have to fight through the obstacles.

I made my way through the balcony, down the far side stairs back to the front.  At the front there was the same issue of running where legs were sticking out, but these people were sitting at tables, not just in chairs, so I jumped up onto the first table and ran across the front jumping from table to table, causing papers and drinks to scatter everywhere.  I ran another full lap the same way and on the third lap there was a runner who thought it would be better to hang over the railing from the balcony and jump down rather than running the stairs.  He let go but the drop was further than he’d figured and he landed badly and was hobbling in pain as I watched.

Later I was driving on a two lane highway in southern Indiana on some kind of vehicle that was very open, like a motorcycle, only I think it had four wheels.  The road was kind of narrow and it curved through hills and hollows, which was great fun.  I came over one hill and there was a huge earthmover coming toward me, using the whole road.  It moved over as far as it could, with one wheel on the shoulder next to the ditch, but the other wheel was still more than halfway into my lane.  I moved over onto the shoulder and managed to get by with no trouble.  As I continued on I realized that the earthmover was there because the road was now under construction.  The paving ended and soon I was driving on bare ground where high points were being cut down and low ones filled in.  I drove right on the edge of a vertical cut about three feet deep and thought I would join in the earthmoving fun, so I ran the left edge of my vehicle against the earth wall and sliced off a few inches of dirt as I went along, helping to smooth out the cut.

Soon there were a series of big machines on caterpillar tracks that crossed the entire roadway and were working their way toward me as they chewed up large chunks of dirt and re-deposited it where it was needed.  I looked for a way around, but since they were cutting down a hill the side banks were nearly vertical and there was nowhere to go.  There was a section at the back of each of these machines where the tracks just spanned open space.  I knew it would be risky, but they were moving fairly slowly, so I ducked down and drove through the open space with the upper part of the track swinging just a few inches above my head.

Newmark Lab

I went to an open house at the Civil Engineering Building (Newmark Lab) and was touring the facilities on the main floor along with a crowd of people.  I noticed a one man elevator along a hallway off to the side and went to check it out.  I pushed the down button, not because I wanted to go down, but because I was curious about what it looked like inside and I had to push a button to get the door open.  It was about the size of a dumbwaiter, maybe two feet square, and about eight feet tall. 

Of course it closed almost as soon as I got in and it started to drop.  At this point I realized there was no light in it and as the light from above faded away it got very dark.  It wasn’t dropping fast, but it seemed like it must have gone down at least fifty feet before it came to a stop.  I got out and was in a very mechanical area with bare concrete all around, lots of pipes and pumps and motors and electrical gear.

I was looking around for a bathroom when I heard two women coming down some metal stairs.  I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I started looking for a likely place to hide.  Not that I was particularly worried about getting caught, but I didn’t want to scare them – you know, the creepy guy hanging out in the dark.  I had hardly moved from when I first heard them, though, when one of them looked directly at me and started asking me questions, like, “How much amperage is available here?” and “What is the lifting capacity of these hoists?”  I realized they thought I worked here, so I started guessing and making things up.  They seemed fine with my answers and when on about their search.  I hadn’t seen the stairs until their noise drew me to it, but now I figured I would use them to leave.

War

I saw a flat, grassy valley with distinct steep banks about 20 feet high on either side, kind of like a river valley except without the water.  The grass was wild and unmowed and golden brown like wheat.  There were two separate groups of 50 to 100 people on opposite sides of the valley, like opposing teams, only these weren’t athletes, they were warriors.  As I watched three swords came flying out from the top of the bank on the far side.  Two of them stuck in the ground and one didn’t and bounced and lay flat.  I looked around and notice there were several other swords of various shapes and sizes already out there.

The swords seemed to sizzle w/ electricity as they flew and I realized that the warriors weren’t grabbing them.  Somehow I knew that they were wary of touching them.  It seems that they knew that some of the swords held a fatal charge and the first person to touch them would die.  The warriors were unarmed and were in the process of trying to cause a person from the other side to make first contact and then be the person to pick up the discharged sword.  This all caused a lot of running around with some trying to catch and some being chased trying to lead their chasers into contact.

I didn’t see how she got it but noticed a young woman warrior from the far side had hold of a sword and was spinning it around at high speed with great form like a kungfu artist.  She could have been fierce in a tight spot, but this was a huge open field and she wasn’t fast enough to get near anyone to do them harm.  I watched the battle go on for a while but never had any clue who they were or what the fight was about.

More reruns

I've had another dreaming dry spell, so here are three more from before I started the blog:

January 8, 2011

I was riding on a large platform vehicle of some kind.  We came down the road in front of Vineyard and the parking lot was full of vehicles w/ boats and boat trailers.  I remembered that there was some kind of outing that involved going to the water scheduled and figured these must have all been involved.  We pulled into the parking lot.  I looked down from the platform about 30 feet in the air and managed to stop it just short of a crowd of little kids that weren’t paying any attention.  Tamara Brandt was on the sidewalk below and was yelling something up to me.  Larry was on the platform w/ me.  I was standing out on the edge of the platform looking over the situation when I realized I needed to get down immediately, although I don’t remember why.  There was a corrugated metal stovepipe hanging from a mast sticking out over the side of the platform.  I grabbed onto it and my weight was enough to make it stretch, like a spring, only one that wouldn’t spring back.  I dropped quickly, but as I approached the ground it stiffened and my descent slowed and I came to a stop w/ my feet about a foot off the ground.

January 13, 2011

I was swimming in shallow water in an enormous aquarium.  There were all kinds of little fish and amphibians and other little swimming critters I’d never seen before.  The water was perfectly clear so the view of everything was great.  The bottom was sandy w/ plants and various marine things on it.  Most of the time it was only a couple feet deep but I was staying horizontal to keep my face in it to see.  At one point I put my feet down to stand up and noticed something attached to the bottom of my right foot.  It hurt a little bit, like I’d stepped on something.  I hobbled a couple steps and sat down and asked Scott to take a look at it for me.  He grabbed hold of a white, translucent shape that had tendrils or roots on it that were sticking into my foot and started to pull it off.  As he pulled it became obvious that whatever it was had more than poked me.  It had actually grown into me.  I told him to keep pulling and as he did I could feel something being pulled out of me that had grown all the way up into my arms.  He pulled out a mass of roots that was about 8 feet long.  It didn’t really hurt coming out, but it did feel weird to have something pulled through my insides like that.  I assumed I’d gotten it in the water so it couldn’t have been there long and must have grown incredibly fast, which made me wonder if we had gotten it all and what would have happened if we hadn’t.

January 15, 2011

I was leading a group of people on a hike in some woods.  We came to a steep eroded dirt bank sloping down from where we were to a swampy area below.  As I started to work my way down I warned the people with me to be careful about the cypress knees sticking up out of the ground.  If someone fell on one of them it could be pretty painful.  There were also palm trees that had similar knees, which I had never seen before, but I assumed they served the same purpose on a palm tree that they did on a cypress.  As we got to the edge of the swamp we followed the edge a little ways until we came to a boardwalk that headed out into the swamp.  At first the walk was solid and well built, but as we went on its condition worsened.  Eventually it got to where there were sections that weren’t usable at all and people were trying to jump from one section to the next or step on a log sticking up out of the water and hop to the next section.  Finally everyone had fallen at one point or another and there wasn’t enough trail left to mess with, so we just walked in the waist deep water.

We went just a little farther and the water got a little deeper and the vegetation ended and we were just in open water.  About ¼ mile across the water was a beach with buildings behind it, so we walked and swam toward it.  When I got there the beach was made of gravel, ¼” to 2’ diameter, instead of sand.  I walked up onto a veranda of a building and a black woman asked me if I wanted anything to drink.  It was very hot and we’d just been through an exhausting slog, so I said I did.