i keep getting people killed
I had two weird dreams last night, capped off by a dream in which I was wondering what those two dreams meant.
In one, I was at a carnival with a lost of other Perl people. We had won some free ride on something, and we all got in. I’m not sure who was there, but it was a mix of Pobox people and Perl people. I know Helen, Dieter, Damian, Allison, Jesse, and Chip were there. (This is what I get for reading all those P6 meeting notes before bed.) When the car rounded a corner, I saw that there was a loop coming up. I said, “I don’t do loops!” and hollered for the attendant to let me off, but she wasn’t going to. I jumped out of the ride while it was low to the ground, and she panicked: now it was unbalanced. As the car went through the loop, the whole structure swayed to one side, then the other, and then broke apart, toppling over to the ground.
The fate of the riders was not made clear.
In another dream, I was arrested as responsible for the death of a police officer. For my own protection, I wasn’t kept in a holding cell, but I was locked in our car in the parking lot. (The police station parking lot looked a lot like the gymnasium parking at Liberty High School; I’m glad, because the actual police parking lot is dark and underground.) I was there for a long time while cops walked by, kicking the car, keying the car, or giving me dirty looks. Eventually I went inside the building (into the school auditorium) and was booked and indicted. I called my father to ask him to get me a lawyer, and he asked me to tell him that I hadn’t done it. “I didn’t murder anyone,” I said. He didn’t seem satisfied, so I added, “and I didn’t cause anyone’s inadvertant death.” This seemed to satisfy him. I think my lawyer was my barber’s cousin. As the legal procedings went on, the BPD wouldn’t give any details on what I was accused of, and we started to get the idea that the cop had died of a heart attack, and they were going to accuse me of having startled him somehow.
My third dream I remember the least; I was at work, except the office seemed to be a very tall, narrow structure. Maybe it was a windmill. Dieter got some new, critical service running and then had to go. It was being run by a daemon that was re-run when needed by cron, and the way to keep cron from running certain of these services was to make a special DNS RBL entry or something. Fortunately I woke up before I looked at any of the code involved, because given the administrative stuff I was dreaming about, the code would have surely had me waking up in a cold sweat.