Mark Carroll's Journal

In one dream this morning, which included irrelevant parts about things like getting my laptop computer back from somewhere, I was upstairs exercising on something like a cross-trainer, except it sometimes looked more like an old garden roller. When I was getting settled on it in a good rhythm, it would inconveniently levitate, just a little, no more than a couple of feet. This was awkward because it would float around a bit, sometimes such that other things in the room would get in the way of my trying to use it. As I used it, I puzzled over the phenomenon, not seeing how me on heavy equipment could be lifting from the floor.

In many dreams, I own a house so large that it warrants exploring. In yesterday's dream, I was exploring what appeared to be a large house, with the help of a nice surveyor/inspector. One of the upper rooms that we discovered turned out not to exist at all. The surveyor didn't realize that they had the psychic ability to temporarily add further rooms to houses, lending them fictional extensions, and indeed they typically did so during their surveys. Perhaps they had made an unfortunate choice of career.

An American airstrike hit an enemy military facility but some of the (oddly stubby) missiles went somewhat awry, arriving but not detonating and suchlike. I observed this from above, in some kind of small craft that I'd used for some time in surveilling the facility. However, I was hovering low, and the craft was not at its most powerful, so I was observed and caught. At least at the initial stage, the enemy treated me quite nicely having caught me. (It didn't feel like me so much as being the protoganist whose point of view I had.)

I had mentioned often dreaming of having a large house. This time, I was staying in what looked just like a magnificant cathedral in a beautiful location. Though, it was but a temporary stay, I wished I could remain. Looking out of a window, I saw what seemed like white haze around the leaves of abundant vegetation and thought it to be early morning mist or somesuch. In mentioning it to my father, I found the mist effect instead to be some product of condensation on the window glass or somesuch.

This moved into what may be a crossover between Doctor Who (1963) and X-Files (1993). There was a large, secure facility that some official was inspecting and he was particularly intent on a complex of buildings that were considered highly secure. He was making his way around to enter one, pursued by a concerned member of site staff who was trying to stop him. First, however, he was plucked away by some large piece of construction equipment or such, operated by the Fourth Doctor. The inspector turned out to be an imposter known to the Doctor, it was an alien who could change their appearance. Attaining their goal would not have achieved anything useful for the alien, whose dead loved one was among those stored in the buildings.

When my dreams feature myself at home, it's typically in a large house; this time was no exception. I had started up the launcher, which shoots a sequence of rockets up high into the air, one after the next; it's kind of a side addition onto the house. When it's running out of whatever, it can't launch any more and, as it failed, a rocket launched, gained little altitude, fell sideways, then set the adjacent woodpile alight, so I had to get dressed properly and head outside to put out the fire. I was still waking up and such so it was a bit annoying to have to go do that, that'll teach me not to have the woodpile next to the rocket launcher.

After actually awakening, I wandered out of the bedroom and looked out of the window, at cats on a roof below, and goats in the yard. I shall miss living here.

In wrapping up some kind of interaction at a research institution at which I had perhaps been staff, the administrators were taking the stuff I was to leave but also destroying extra things I had provided that they deemed superfluous. I thought this to be disappointingly wasteful, they could have offered them to me, or I could have spent more cheaply on buying them in the first place.

One of the administrators seemed surprised that I wasn't submitting a thesis. Apparently, for my kind of interaction, one can earn official credit if finishing off with a thesis. I was correspondingly surprised, and suspected that, were I wishing to claim credit, I may have also had to pay handsomely for whatever it is I had done, which had been a rather less official, unpaid collaboration. There also seemed to be some hope that I may someday take some extra course because they greatly desired more very conservative alumni from that course, with what felt like a knowing wink as they imagined that I am such.

As part of this wrapping up, I was then visiting some shared house to pick up some of my stuff that was there. A door closed between the room with my stuff and the exit and it turned out that I was in such a supportive household that a fair bit of shared space gets closed off for maybe a few hours for one housemate's bathroom-related needs. I was annoyed because I had not needed to be there for long, also because the fact that this whatever-it-was has been announced and agreed before I had even arrived felt patronizingly irrelevant.

Making the best of my undue confinement, I explored the room with my stuff for other interesting items. There was a surprise find of various large equipment typically used by lawyers' offices, I'm afraid I don't recall the specific functions of these devices. There were also some DVDs under something, the first I saw happening to be of a horror movie that I had been wanting to see, so that was a silver lining.

This morning is unusual in that I noticed something from the real world affecting my dream. I dreamed that I was somewhere around Boston, using Google Maps on my cellphone to navigate a fictional instance of the rail network, when my real cellphone alarm went off and, for a moment, I thought that the alarm was on the dream-cellphone.

I set a 6h alarm even for Sunday because the consistency makes the Monday alarm far more palatable when it comes. Annoyingly, this morning was one upon which I awoke prematurely then did not easily fall back to sleep although, in the end, I must have, given that I was caught dreaming.

Incidentally, thinking of cellphones: I shall soon close my account with Virgin Money. Apparently, online banking is not an option, and I trust mobile operating system security so little that I do not want to use a personal banking app. I had already closed an account with Clydesdale Bank for similar reasons. With luck, this isn't a trend. I would consider a two-factor-only or read-only app but not a general banking app.

Another couple of scenes from dreams feel worth relating. In one dream, to ease traffic congestion, some locality's transportation authority had a transit scheme wherein road traffic could be diverted to waterways. One stayed in one's car and, among the others, somehow they all bobbed along the surface of the large river that formed part of the route onto which they could be diverted when necessary. In another dream, a set of small framed pictures were each being wrapped in a cloth or blanket or somesuch and carried outside the house. It turned out to be a tarantula doing this, perhaps as some unusual expression of natural behavior.

I slept unusually poorly last night, I woke up before 3h, after a dream in which my mother came in and, knowing her to be dead, I took the opportunity to give her a big hug. I don't recognize the room from real life. She wasn't ghostly or suchlike, I was curious as to how she could be there, acting normally. I awakened, laid in bed awhile, eventually got up, looked online, watched a light show, laid in bed some more, then the alarm went off. I got through the workday okay but recorded only 7½ hours, coming home a bit early. I won't do much tonight, I hope to get an early night, then sleep rather better. Tomorrow, after work, I shall hang out with my neighbor.

As I mentioned a dream from yesterday, in discussing my sleep patterns, I shall also describe a fragment that I recall upon waking up today, partly in noting how dreams are so very diverse. In this one, I had been breakfasting with Diana, Princess of Wales, in the mess of a Royal Navy ship. I headed out onto open deck to make a cellphone call because online I had seen a house for sale that I wanted to view later that day and I hoped to bring somebody else along for that. It was rainy out on deck but I still called to see if they were up for coming along to view the place.

That dream too is surprisingly easy to interpret but, as usual with these things, it seems to depend on plenty of personal background, including an element from an old episode of the BBC's Front Row Late (2017) that I watched last week.