Dreams

Sometimes I have the strangest, most vivid dreams... It's a pretty cool feature of being an undiagnosed case of ADD all these years. Plus everyone needs to communicate useless, uniniteresting personal information on their web page, as if anyone out there cares. I believe this is a requirement of web pages.

• Storm Troopers Invading Haverford, #1 In this dream, storm troopers invaded our lovely sleepy green campus. They quickly ounded just about everyone up and were holding them hostage on the Featherbed fields, which for the purposes of the dream were extremely large and located in a small valley. Then the storm troopers sent out a few small patrols to get the rest of the stragglers.

  Note that at no point did it occur to me or anyone else to just leave the friggin' campus.

  I had to lead the resistance movement, of course. As every leader of a resistance movement knows, first you need weapons... So, I did the only sensible thing: I went outside of the North Dorms (Jones, Lunt, Comfort) and hid in a pine tree on Barclay beach, holding the end of a sheet. My best friend Matt Sazinsky went out there holding the other end of the sheet, pretending he was hanging laundry. Of course one storm trooper approached, Matt acted surprised, but held his end of the sheet tightly while I jumped out of the tree, wrapped the other end around the storm troopers neck and together we strangled him to death, and then quickly grabbed his sidearm. We took his body away and hid it in our secret hideout, which was likely inside the tunnels underneath Comfort, though I don't exactly remember where it was.

  Later, at evening, we quietly approached the fields, crept over the hilltop and stared into the valley trying to devise a plan for rescuing the remaining 1500 members of the Haverford community with one weapon and one storm trooper outfit.

  Additional note: I'm not quite sure what we did with the storm troopers dead body. Basically the dream flashed from strangling him with a sheet, to looking through his gear (which included binoculars, a grappling hook, and of course his storm trooper armor). So I never had to deal with the dead body.

• Storm Troopers Invading Haverford, #2 In this version, the track team was in charge of demolishing an important storm trooper stronghold. After setting our explosives, We were leaving via the service elevators. I was in charge of guarding the corridor leading to the elevators, and I was supposed to take the last elevator down, with Tom Donnelly (our coach in real life, and our general in the dream).

  The next to last elevator was ready to leave, except for Alex Au, who for some reason had sat down halfway down the hallway and now refused to move. I sent the elevator down and tried to argue with him. Meanwhile the last group arrived, and were waiting for the elevator to return so we could get away undetected. I told them to wait a minute while I got Alex, who still refused to move. Tom, who was waiting with me, finally said "I'm taking this last one down!" and headed to the elevator.

  Before they could leave, I told Alex I wasn't leaving without him and tried to use guilt: I removed the ammo pack from my weapon (which so far as I can recall very closely resembled a cross between a traditional storm trooper weapon from the movies and a black Entertech squirtgun circa 1989) and threw it on the ground, claiming that I would die with him and my death would be on his conscience and keep him from honor. My ruse worked (of course) and he started heading down the hallway. Luckily the last elevator had just gotten back from the bottom floor, so we could leave with the rest of the group.

  I quickly reloaded my weapon just as a squad of storm troopers rounded the corner. Chaos ensued, with me blasting away at people. I was actually a good shot in my dream, and from years of TV and movie conditioning, felt no remorse at killing people because, in Arnold Schwartzanager's immortal words from "True Lies", "they were all bad".

  Finally we got into the elevator, but just as the doors were closing, one of the storm troopers threw a "stinger" grenade into the elevator. I don't know what a "stinger" grenade is, but I knew that's what it was enough in my dream to yell "It's a stinger grenade!", and I knew instictively that it sucked... So we reopened the door, engaged in a fierce firefight, and eventually got into another elevator. For some unknown reason, the troopers weren't right outside the elevator ready to kill us. This was never cleary explained in the dream, though I can rationalize after the fact that they were scrambling to take a different elevator.

  Then I woke up from all of the excitement. I think I recognized at some level that I was pretty much cheating by that point, by dreaming up (so to speak) implausible solutions to amazingly difficult situations.

• Exploration of Mars Coming soon!
• Space Marines "The point to pain is not to hurt, the point to pain is to live to judge". What does this mean? I had a dream that I was a little kid on a space station and my Dad was a former space marine and currently a famous scientist for the Federation (or Confederation, or Alliance, or whatever generic name for the orderly good guys in sci-fi movies). We were on a space station on a small planet or moon, and it was going to be attacked by the bad guys. I'm not sure who the bad guys were... But they were attacking, and therefore must have been bad.

  Anyway, we were walking up an enormous stairway leading to the escape shuttles (the stairway strangely was modeled on the big stairway used in a production of Hamlet I saw at the Shakespeare festival in Cedar City, Utah back in the early 1990s) and my dad the former marine/current scientist ran into a young space marine who he had known from before he left the marines. They were talking a little bit, and then as they parted, it looked like the marine was going to whack my dad in the back of the head, so I tried to grab him, but his lightning fast reflexes caught me just as my dad turned around. The marine smiled, ruffled my hair, and said "The point to pain is not to hurt, the point to pain is to live to judge" and then took off. I asked my dad what had happened. He said that in the space marines you are always trying to do daring things like sneak up on each other, and that he knew the marine was going to try to hit him and he was going to block it, just to show how tough and agile they were. It's sort how they say hello and goodbye.

  The line he said was the space marine motto, which means that the marines don't fight and inflict paid because they like to; they do it to subdue unruly opponents and then establish an ordered society governed by laws, and that part of the space marine credo is that they would all like to be judges in a courtroom rather than soldiers because inflicting pain as a judge is an important barometer of civilization.

• Being attacked by a Viking The earliest nightmare that I can remember. Coming soon!
• Dream Control Several times, I've figured out that I was dreaming. I understand this happens frequently with children but not as frequently with adults. The last time this happened was during Customs (basicall Freshman Orientation) my freshman year at Haverford. I can't for the life of me remember what the dream was about, though.

  When I was a kid and would figure out that I was dreaming, it was almost always during a nightmare, and I wanted to wake up. So I would tightly squeeze my eyes shut, then open them, in the dream, until finally I'd open my eyes in my bed.

  I've been told that you can also look at your hands, though I learned this in high school and haven't been able to try this technique out yet.

  I've also been told that you can't read in your dreams... I dispute this, though, because I'm fairly certain that I've read in my dreams before, usually in Spanish though.

  I was trying to think up palindrones in a dream one time, but instead I came up with "violent violet", two words that differ by a single letter but have very different meanings. Is this significant? No.

  After seeing T3: Rise of the Machines (a decent movie but too much talking, not enough explosions, too much stupid humor for such a dark movie, and what is up with trying to explain destiny, the future, other crap like that?), I had dreams that I was being chased, followed by someone, probably an evil terminator robot, but I never saw her. I was living at my Nana's old house in Milton, MA, staying primarily indoors, avoiding windows. I ended up in an interstate bus trying to escape, knowing I was being followed. It was eerie, walking onto the bus, hoping that my seeker wasn't already there, then feeling positively trapped on the bus, but also knowing I couldn't buy a car because purchases like that can be tracked. Ultimately, I decided to learn a foreign language and move someplace else, maybe Europe. The main point of this dream was living in secrecy, hiding all the time, avoiding windows. Very freaky.

• Dreams that involved other that aren't Star Wars like love These aren't that interesting unless you're me. Which you're not. Are you?