howeird | Weird Dream Channel (Reply)

I'm building a homework project, it's like a science fair display. I'm painstakingly gluing my rock collection to display boards. I'm in some kind of a student lounge, maybe a dorm shared space, because suddenly some really loud, bad music comes blaring out from the other side of the room. Someone has cranked up the stereo. A woman in that part of the room, who is wearing a pair of headphones and working at a table, writing in a spiral notebook, interrupts her work, holds up another pair of headphones yells something at some guy (which I can't hear because of the music and the distance) and he takes the headphones and the music stops. The woman goes back to her writing, and I notice it is Renuka, one of the women engineers I work with in real life. I wonder what she's doing here.

The scene changes instantly. I'm now alone in the same room, but now I have two of the three panels of my display standing up science-fair-mode, at the back of a long narrow table. I am sitting in front of the table, hunched over, gluing the last couple of pieces to the final board. Behind me the door opens, and it is my teacher, a tall thin man with a pale complexion, wearing an off-white casual shirt, black pleated pants, a black Artful Dodger jacket or maybe it's just an oversized black shirt, and a well-worn top hat. I'm in a panic because he shouldn't be here, and I'm not done (and I probably should be). He says something in greeting which I don't hear, and strides over to the collection, and plucks a piece out of one of the finished display boards, and examines it. I jump a little when he does that because I thought they were solidly glued in place, and besides it's pretty rude to just pluck something out of someone's display like that.

He says something about the piece, and puts it on the table, and plucks another. He does this three or four times. , I don't hear the exact words but I know it's complimentary, and his air is of a colleague appraising a friend's collection, rather than student-teacher.

And that's when my cats wake me up - they're having a fight by the bedroom door. This was tonight after work, I had come home, finished an eBay purchase, took two aspirin and laid down for a nap. I closed the bedroom door most of the way (I keep a hanger on the door knob so the cats don't accidentally shut themselves in - something they did the first day we were in this apartment). Domino had parked herself next to me when I got into bed, and Pumpkin had been downstairs out on the patio. The two of them do a lot of this game where one tries to keep the other from coming in or out of a room, and it works best if the door is mostly closed. The door mitigates the fact that Pumpkin is twice Domino's size.

Anyhow, there are some real-life links to the dream. One is I am taking a Perl class Tuesday nights,. and the instructor posted our next assignment on the class web site, and made it due next Thursday, though he had told us it would be due the week after that, because we have a quiz in class this coming week. The way he writes his assignments is he spends several pages on hints, unrelated information, extra reading assignments also not related to the homework, and then finally ends with three programs for us to write. It's annoying.

I've been cataloging and photographing my sapphire collection, and today the display trays arrived, and at lunchtime I put all my sapphires, which are in 1-inch circular display holders set 3x5 into foam inserts, into the trays. I have been waiting for a month for those trays to arrive (the company in Flah-dah I bought them from was closed Xmas-NYE week when I ordered them, but that doesn't excuse their taking 2 weeks after NYE to ship them.