12 September 2004
Many dreams, born perhaps of the Indian food
we ate last night...? Damn... there were six or seven fragments of
varying length, but now I can't remember them all...
- C and I went to Burning Man. This year,
Black Rock City was in a sort of hourglass shape, in a valley
surrounded by low hills. Everyone was carrying a stick... just,
some sort of personal Stick-- everything from short wands and
batons to long polearms. I had a short staff which had a drum on
each end-- one large, one small-- of that Japanese sort where the
mallets are on short strings so that when you twist it back and
forth the string-mallets strike it. With great concentration, I
could get both drums on both ends playing, but the strings were of
different lengths so it produced a syncopated three-over-two
rhythm. Then, somehow, I lost my Stick, or (more likely, I
suspected) it was stolen.
- I was back in my old Boy Scout troop. We
were up in the mountains somewhere and some of the other guys were
playing a game where they would figure out various ways of faking
that they'd fallen over the cliff we were on, or coming up with
ways to suspend themselves over the edge, hang down over the side,
even though we were like a couple thousand feet up. (This is an
old memory of our Half Dome hikes bubbling up, almost certainly.)
I was unusually acrophobic in the dream, so much so that I
wouldn't even go close enough to the cliff edge. Then I realized
that there was some sort of weird primitive culture, like
cave-dwelling people of some kind, living down over the side of
the cliff...
- I wanted to get on a train. I had to
choose the right train. It wasn't that I needed the train to go
somewhere specific; it was more like, I was getting on a train to
take me anywhere at all, but I needed to pick the right "anywhere"
to end up in...
- There was a bit about birth control pills
as well.