A little bit of dementia this time: I couldn't break out of a cycle. I saw an endless list of amino acid positions of Apc (the protein I study) with their corresponding function. I would scroll through the list and would discard uninteresting mutants that would come up every so often that our lab had apparently generated. But it wasn't fully a dream, I was lying there in bed looking at my room, and the list hallucinatorily overlaid everything else. I actually got up and went to the bathroom at one point and told myself over and over again that I needed to ignore the list, that it wasn't real, and that I wasting my time. But when I went back to bed, there it was again. But there's an upside: when I woke up in the morning I realized just how interesting such a list would be. I'll make one today.

Later I dreamt that we lived in a modern house, with a kitchen that had an open counter overlooking the living room. The countertop was black marble, offsetting the white rooms and complementing the black couches. People were gathered around on the couches for some event or other, but I didn't want to stay. I don't remember any more than that.

posted by Larry at 11:03 AM

The Knapp House was arranged like my college dorm, with rooms off each side of a long hallway and a lounge off the middle. The lounge here, though, was a library, with a long wooden table in the middle and shelves along the outside except for two oblong windows. Fernando was reading at the table when I and a tour guide came in. She explained that it was "Turnover Day." All the books had paper labels looped over the spine; all included the date of 2004. Suddenly, the room came to life as the fellows filled the room and the bookshelves started the automatic turnover. The labels printed out like old dot matrix printers, pushing out the old labels and replacing them with 2005 markings. Then the tour guide started explaining something about the windows, and broke one apart to show us. But I don't remember what was so interesting. Then my cousin, who lives nearby in real life, called me up and said the whole house should come out to dinner with him and his friends. I agreed to ask them but was doubtful anyone could make it on such short notice. I woke up shortly after.

posted by Larry at 8:58 AM

I lived in an enormous luxury hotel that was over 20 floors high. I lived about 2/3 of the way up and the room looked like a condo. There was a living room partitioned from a kitchen by a bar and my bedroom was right off the living room. The carpet and walls were white, and I had quite a lot of stuff, both furniture and decorations. Later on, there seemed to be a T-shape to the living room, where an extension grew off the left side (from the door) where the bedroom originally was.

I was a week away from graduation and my high school friends (some who really exist in real life and some made-up people) had come to celebrate. We ordered up room service. While we waited, we took a case of MGDs up to the roof to drink them. I took two bottles and just turned them upside-down over my mouth and guzzled them. I never tasted any beer so good in my life as that.

After we ran out of beer we went back down to my room. Then my parents showed up (my friends temporarily disappeared) and they insisted that I started packing everything up right away. My mom wanted to clean all the surfaces over the next hour. Since I was so lazy, I tried to stall them, but to no avail. They started taking all my posters down and moving furniture out. As my dad was hauling some stuff down to the car, my mom and I ate the room service dinner we had ordered. Since I was out of MGD I had ordered an ale which came in a glass mug. I finished my meal and searched everywhere for the beer. We guessed that room service came and took away my beer before I could even have one sip. I tried to call them up, but I couldn't figure out which of the three phones on the wall to use to call up food service. There was a blue, a yellow, and a white phone (for outside calls). Just when I was about to try one, one of the maids came up. She was a cute 20-something German girl who had evidently liked me during my stay and offered to help me out. We got in the elevator without my parents and went down to the basement. On the way down, I could see out of the glass elevator and all the lavish decorations and lighting of the lobby and floors.

When we got downstairs, there was an old grumpy man who was the girl's father. He told us to wait in the old service kitchen while he tried to sort things out. When he was gone, the girl (who turned Asian for the moment) said that she had been promoted and now was able to access secret parts of the hotel. Since she liked me so much, she was willing to take me and friends to a club where she knew some people.

When we all (my friends magically reappeared) entered the club, the girl (now German again) introduced us to a bunch of her friends. I put my arm around one and asked her how she was doing, and she said "I need time!" Confused, I pretended like I was really drunk and tired, and I began walking with my head down and bumping into people. This second girl said, "I don't like people who snooze like that! They just turn out to be slackers." So we quickly exited the club and went back upstairs.

In my room, in the T-offshoot, I had a big tank with a giant crab inside as a pet. It was a "spider crab" and had one big arm extending from it that ended in three pincers instead of two. This gave it a lot of dexterity and it started attacking my friend Tim. I calmed it down and told my friends to be careful as she was possibly the only one of her kind left. Apparently, I had found it during a deep-sea expedition. I noticed she was laying little eggs and I realized it was an exciting moment to watch. All of a sudden, a huge number of medium-sized black crabs popped directly out of the mother and everyone in the room, including the German girl, her father, and my own parents, was celebrating the moment.

The crab then suddenly took on a bizarre anthropomorphic appearance as a stumpy guy in a shirt called Buddy. He had a lumpy human head and the crab's body hidden under the shirt. Everyone slapped it on the back and it smiled and responded in broken English. I wanted to ask it who it had mated with in the wild, or if it was asexual. But as I looked around the room, I saw that the German girl was beckoning me over. Suddenly, the room cleared and it was just me and her talking about my leaving. She was asking me to stay longer because there were so many fun things we could do now that she had been promoted. I felt kind of drunk at that moment and could only explain that it was too bad that I had to leave so soon. She shook her head and left with her father while I was left with a bunch of empty bottles to clean up. Then my dream ended.

A new dream after that had me on a SWAT team checking out an abandoned home where college kids had lived in. We suspected they were a front for some kind of militia or terrorist organization. As our group of six moved down the hall, we saw that it forked and also had a room off to one side. I motioned for us to break into teams of two, and my partner and I went through the door and down some stairs.

It looked like a big storage room for at least one person, and looked as though it had been abandoned for some time. It was dark, dusty, and had cobwebs everywhere. Fortunately, our rifles had mounted flashlights so we could make out tons of boxes and even a washer and dryer. We noticed some boxes of baseball cards off to one side, and both of us started rummaging through them for valuables. I grabbed a bunch of rare cards, then found a full premium basketball card set which had each card in its own paper sleeve. I thought how terrible it was that it was all a dream and that when I woke up I would be disappointed that I didn't have these cards. But I harbored a little hope that it was all real, or that maybe I could take some of it with me to reality. Then I woke up and, not having bought any sports cards for years and years, I wasn't actually disappointed.

posted by Larry at 9:27 AM