Dream 1:

I was in a large, fancy hotel with my family somewhere in Asia. We were sitting around our smallish room, relaxing and deciding where to have dinner. The entire hotel had a deep red motif, and our room had a large window looking out over the city. In a quick flash, the entire outside turned a deep blackish purple, streaked with slivers of lightning. My dad whipped around to see it and immediately shouted for us to run. We all knew it was a massive tornado, and I could see the clouds curdling towards us. We dashed outside towards the elevators, but the entire hotel began tilting over at an alarming rate! I felt true panic and terror at my last moments alive.

Then, I experienced a sudden flash of knowledge, maybe a memory and a whisper. I somehow knew that if I blinked my eyes twice, I could shift time back a few seconds. Doing so in a panic, I only managed to set it back about a second, so that the hotel was still tilting, but at a lesser angle. Somehow, none of the people were sent back in time, so my family could all make it onto the elevator. I kept blinking, but had to do it in a controlled, rhythmic fashion or else it wouldn't work. Very difficult. The elevator lurched with every time shift and kept getting stuck at various floors, probably as other people tried to get downstairs. With a huge flood of relief, we reached the lobby and flopped down into seats. Somehow, it had stopped and we were safe.

Dream 2:

Lynda sent me over to a collaborator to help verify certain data. I had to be flown by helicopter by my collaborator, a skinny bearded guy named Frank, over to an island (Merry and I have been watching Lost every night). We immediately got off on the wrong foot as he was irritated by all the questions I was asking him. We set up at a classroom that was part of a series of tunnels into a mountain, and started some experiments. I think we were trying to verify some anti-MITF drug results by using RNAi knockdown. I ran some RTPCRs to look at expression levels of genes that Lynda and the collaborator had previously found to be important targets. But I kept getting negative results, including finding genes that changed in the opposite direction of what was seen earlier. As Frank and I were discussing the results, I could see he was getting really angry at me for contradicting his data and for being stubborn. I suddenly decided that I didn't want to be in the classroom anymore and blurted it out.

The next thing I knew, I was back on the helicopter, tied up and headed back to the mainland. I pleaded with Frank to take me back so I could finish the collaboration, but he ignored my questions and kept being sarcastic to me. I didn't want to leave the island yet, I had only wanted to abandon that part of the project. I slowly realized as I played things back in my head that what pissed Frank off was that I had kept making decisions like that without asking him first. I tried to promise that I would be more collaborative, but within a few seconds I was back in my room.

The place looked like a medieval castle, but with modern amenities. It was something of a prison, and I could see scratchings of former captives on the walls and floors. My roommate tried to help me as I sat down at the computer, intent on emailing Frank and asking him exactly what I had done wrong. I wrote a quick draft, listing three things that I could have done to make him mad. After reading it over several times, I realized I was pointlessly including dummy reasons and that the one I had thought of earlier - making sudden, unilateral decisions - was the real one. I started to erase what I had written, when the entire place rumbled and shook. My roommate and I went over to my small circular bedroom, which had now sunk down about 20 feet. I could see a ring of emptiness around my bed, so I got on the bed and peered down over the edges. I could see glittering lights shining through a message that I seen earlier scratched into the floor. My roommate and I got down and pushed on a square metal inset where the message was, and it gave way. We could see an immense hoard of treasure below us. Right then, we could hear police sirens outside, and our joy turned to apprehension. They would think we had stolen it

posted by Larry at 10:00 AM