15 December 2002

I was going to school at some Very Expensive private academy. It was like a half-hour drive up into the mountains from any civilized place. It also more or less looked like my old high school in Merced.

There was a fundraiser, with a raffle. The grand prize was a boat. They said it was a 129' luxury yacht but really it only looked to be 35-40 feet long. It was floating in the school's enormous swimming pool so everyone could see it, and actually go sit on it and eat hot dogs on it and lie around on it during the fundraiser event.

I had a kid, apparently-- a little toddler baby boy-- but the only time it came up in the dream was when I tried to get onto the boat myself and was having a hard time managing it, since I needed both hands free but I had my baby boy held in one arm.

The school also had an extremely powerful computer to run most of its facility and administrative functions. Powerful enough, in fact, to go truly self-aware and then (of course) evil. It began to evolve high-tech means for hunting us-- faculty, students, and related family. It produced external and mobile robot bodies, armored vehicles, etc. with a variety of weapons.

Then I was at the campus watching a film crew make a movie about the event, about the computer going bad and hunting everyone, and it was becoming unclear whether I'd been there for the original situation or was just involved in the making of the documentary.

The movie was called "Snipe", which I thought was a stupid name for the film seeing as how the actual computer hadn't been the least bit sniper-like during its rampage. It had been more like giant-griding-tank-gun-platform-like.

Then, back at the raffle, I went down to the marina (the school had an attached marina for students and faculty to park their personal boats at) and some sales guys showed me other kinds of boats I could get. There was a kitchen boat which looked sort of like a floating pickup truck with camper shell, that folded out into a small diner/catering truck sort of thing that could seat three people and serve a complete menu of breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

There was also a "livestock processing" boat that was basically a floating abattoir. I sort of questioned the wisdom of taking livestock out onto water to kill them, but hey, I wasn't the one trying to make a living selling the stupid things. Mostly, I was just fascinated by the "sausage well", which was a mechanism for making long strings of sausage using gravity.

I won the grand prize boat, by the way. I chased all the people off of it and decided I'd park it in the marina and just live on it from now on.

When I woke up, man, was I ever pissed off that I didn't own a 40-foot cabin cruiser after all.