Dreams

I've been remembering my dreams very vividly of late. And they all have ties to actual thoughts and experiences, so I remember them during the day. It makes me pause and think, "was that real?" It's sometimes hard to tell.

Yesterday I awoke still humming a song from a dream. It took me a few hours to figure out whether the song was real or just a figment of my dream. Preliminary Google searches suggested "figment," but then I remembered the words to a verse and it was real after all.

Two days ago I awoke from a dream that I was taking a long cross-continental train ride, and throughout the thing, gross wet stuff (dog pee, rotting milk, etc.) kept getting splashed on me, in one way or another. (Perhaps this was a mental echo of being sprayed with lobster juice during the day.) Also, the dog in question had untrimmed nails and kept standing (painfully!) on my feet. I think this was because (in real life) my sandals had worn raw spots on the tops of my feet during the day, and the pain came through into my sleeping brain. I tried to get off the train to escape, but it was in the middle of Siberia or the arctic -- very cold and snowy -- and as the train blew its whistle to leave, I realized, "I won't survive here!" I had to sprint to catch up and then leap onto the train. Only to be promptly hit with a drinks cart, soaking me in cups of flat soda and strangers' backwash.

Last night, I had a dream. I was going back to Japan, with a friend, to stay with my host family again. My topology professor showed up and tried to teach me game theory, insisting, "If you don't know this, you're unemployable!" -- but we couldn't find any empty blackboards. That's saying something, because three of the four walls in my bedroom were covered in blackboards, but E. had left notes and lists and diagrams all over them that I couldn't erase.

Robin Williams was in Japan, too, with a cockney accent, trying to pull off some movie-heist scheme involving my friend. (Note: some parts of my dream were close-up shots of his face while speaking & emoting, and I remember thinking, "This was shot with an HD camera! Look at that detail! Nice camerawork." in my dream.) He had a huge, cavernous lair with a concrete floor decorated by the imprints of tyrannosaurus footprints (laid in wet concrete). There was a rough layer of pebbles scattered on the floor, and at some point he gave them a verbal command and they self-assembled into a tyrannosaurus! -- starting at the footprints, and building upward. The pebbles were actually tiny robots! Eeeeek!

So we ran and ran and ran, while I wondered what algorithm the little robots were running to coordinate so well. And I woke up.


This post's theme word: ecumenical, "having a mix of diverse elements" or "universal; general" or "pertaining to the whole Christian church; concerned with promoting unity among churches or religions. "

Pictures on Ubuntu, update

I've been playing around with Picasa. It's missing some features I really liked about iPhoto.

1. I can't import my albums from iPhoto. This fact is still incredibly irksome, and will continue to be so for as long as it persists.
   
2. I can't make folders of albums. This means that if I have more than 20 albums, they clutter up my sidebar and I have to scroll through the entire list to find the one I want.
3. There's no way to scroll through ALL the pictures in full-screen mode; photos are sorted by year, then month, then day. And full-screen mode will only allow for scrolling through a single day's pictures -- then to jump to the next day, I have to exit full-screen mode, pick the next day, and re-enter full-screen mode. Yuck.
4. Although Picasa is set to recognize .avi files, it doesn't.
   

The struggle continues. On the positive side, Picasa is not terribly slow. And lets me see my photos. That's nice. Standards lowering... lowering...


This post's theme word: moue, "pout or grimace."