This morning’s dream was super-weird.
I let the dog out through the kitchen door, then realized he was going out to play with his friend. His friend was a big-eyed lemur with an aluminum-foil patch over one big eye. I noticed the patch was wearing out so I got out the aluminum foil and started cutting a new patch. The patch turned into a pattern for an architectural facade with arches and windows.
Gak! Usually a dream is a random pile of recognizable echoes; sometimes the echoes are scripted into a solid plot with original characters. None of this was recognizable … with one big exception. The kitchen and screen door belonged to the Stillwater duplex, my first independent residence after release from prison in 1969.
The duplex floor plan:
Listening to the Zenith TransOceanic to reconnect with the world outside the walls:
For the last two months I’ve been in high anxiety over upcoming jury service, which obviously resonates with prison. The call is for two weeks, and the fed system uses ‘one day or one trial’. You’re scheduled in advance for exactly one trial in each week. If the trial is pre-empted by a plea or settlement, you’re completely free for this week, but still might have to serve again in the second week.
[UPDATE: Yesterday I checked the website and found that I’m FREE this week. Might be needed next week, but at least I’m on probation for one wonderful week.]
‘One day or one trial’ is vastly better than the county system, where you go to a waiting room the first day whether scheduled or not, and spend three full days in the waiting room, trooping back and forth to various courtrooms like a gaggle of goslings behind mother goose. If you don’t end up in the box after three days you’re tentatively done, but still keep calling in every day for the rest of the two weeks. The marching strongly resembles prison, where every work shift and meal and “recreation” starts and ends with marching back and forth from the cell block behind a guard.
In the fed system you do all the waiting at home. If scheduled for a trial that didn’t get pre-empted, you go directly to the courtroom for voir dire. If chosen for the jury, you start trial right then; if not chosen, you’re entirely free for all two weeks.
= = = = = = = = = =
Irrelevant long footnote: I wanted to say that this dream didn’t measure up to the weirdest dream of all, which I had previously written about in 2011. When I tried to link it, I found that Blogspot had removed it for some unknown reason. Blogspot started to remove my political and “virusy” items in 2021, so I moved here to WordPress. Fortunately I preserved it in my offline archive long before it was canceled. So here it is, rebuilt from the archive, as a meaningless gesture of defiance.
WEERDX! DREEMX!
Been short on sleep and REM time lately. Made up for it this morning in a big way. In this dream I was working on special assignment in North DAKEETX! And North DAKEETX! had adopted a strange dialect in which many words were spelled like the British brand name WEETABIX! The PEEBLX! were friendly, but my JOOBX! was menial and HAARDX! First I had to clean up a giant HAARBALLX! that had been coughed up by a BLAAX! KAATX!
Then I was on top of a hundred-FEETX! tower, balancing on a small ZHEETX! of plywood, using a HAMMBRX! and SKREEDRIBRX! to repair an old wooden DREZZRX!
A good thing about getting OOLDX!… you have more control over DREEMX! I had already dropped the HAMMBRX! and SKREEDRIBRX! and was about ready to FAAAAALLLLLX! from the hundred-FEETX! tower, so I grabbed the WEELX! and woke up.
Most of the elements are easy to trace: the metal tower and woodworking tools came from the fence repairman a couple days ago. The giant hairball came from a BBC blooper clip that I'd been watching just before bedtime. But the dialect? Just weird. Strangest of all, the nouns of the Weetabix Declension were not only spelled oddly, they were supposed to be written in a cartoony font. This didn't affect the pronunciation, but when you said the word 'people', you knew it was meant to be written:
Polistra's Mill 