Boxes of Freedom Cereal Dream

What I was working on before the dream…

Nearing the end of developing a WordPress child-theme, I’m tempted by wildly divergent design choices that will extend the length of the project substantially. At this point I know I’m trying to reign in my creativity.

Squid Woman who loves to eat Freedom Cereal

Boxes of Freedom Cereal Dream

I dreamed about a strange superhero squid woman who could only go out at night to fly around. She did this sometimes. It wasn’t safe for her to be out, but she went occasionally anyway.

[Perspective shift] I was an artist, a painter, and I had figured out how to store people and keep them safe inside paintings.

I had a photograph that could do the same thing and I was trying to transfer the contents of the photo (some humans) to my painting to keep my friend and her two children even safer.

In the picture she and her two kids were bending low to the ground to get inside the shot and they were in front of stone monuments, typical tourists.

I was painting away but got interrupted when someone came and told the squid person that in the case of an emergency the squid-person could come to a new hiding place. She emphasized that this was only in case of an emergency that this new safe house should be used. It was a last resort.

Freedom Cereal

The squid person went back to hiding but was tormented by the idea of freedom. She gorged herself on boxes and boxes of Freedom Cereal until all she could think about was flying out into the night. She rationalized her thinking with the knowledge of her new safety option. She left her hidy-hole, but could feel the dangerous people who searched for her closing in.

Meanwhile, the painter had a breakthrough! She had figured a way to transfer the beings in the photograph into her paintings by painting a certain way. She could do this by painting the people into the background of the painting… and then partially painting over them to subtly obscure them.

Elated, I woke up.

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Portals

A shelf with objects that are actually portals.

I dreamed last night that I had a friend who had spent time living as an assassin, attempting to off someone very powerful. Although she was no longer lived the life she had, she lived in constant fear of reprisal, fearing for her safety day and night

She lived in a house full of objects that were “portals”, basically objects that resembled trinkets and toys, but could actually be taken over by other people — if they knew how to control them.

Although there was a particularly creepy clown doll that I suspected would be dangerous to her eventually, I was surprised to see some rather benign-seeming toys coming to life, and come towards her. The pick-up sticks! This could be the end, I thought, waking up.

This is a dream following a week of working on a site with a php widget in WordPress that called different posts under different headings, old in one section, new in another…

WP and a canvas of adds

What have I been studying lately? WordPress themes, meaning that I am going over the php structure that undergirds the markup of any given WP site. At first the php code seems all too clear, with php pointers dividing up themes into sub-themes, easily divided up and named. However, once I started to make variations of my initial WP loop (the point at which content is inserted) I have consistently confused myself with loops inside of loops and pointers into pages with pointers into pages with pointers… I do find most educational tools lack a visual explanations for the complex file structures in my journey through web technologies. At some point I would like to create some educational images and videos relating to programing and web-development that I think would have been helpful to me along the way.

My dream last night was about a useful and creative project — one that I might yet do — and one that is of note because of how different it is from the WP development. I dreamt of taking one of the many high-resolution photos that I have, printing it out divided onto smaller pieces of paper to be glued onto a large canvas. The paper was glossy and already printed on magazine paper, creating an interesting jumble of indecipherable faded text mixed with a beautiful Grand Canyon scene.

In my dream the canvas result was quite exciting. This pic (below) is my quick photoshopped version, but in the dream, the surface was more overlapping and choppy, with a shiny veneer, and pages oriented in all different directions:

 

Figure 8

I recently attended workshop on Git and Contributing to Open-Source Projects on GitHub. This was hosted by a group called OpenHatch at UCD. Two friends escorted me to the door and dropped me off at a registration desk where smiling students gave me a “hello, my name is ____” tag. I felt that I was entering into a place where, because lower-level programming was the focus, my designs and front-end frivolity might not be welcome. I was nervous, even though I’d used Git before.

The event was interesting. I did the various exercises, making conversation with some of the “mentors” of the event, who assured me that many open source projects do need front-end work, and that communicating via discussion lists and IRC channels might be a great way to get involved.

Fast forward to waking up after watching an episode of the thrilling clone-themed television show Orphan Black, and I’d had a dream that seemed profound and yet probably wasn’t quite.

The Dream:

As I walked the streets of Brooklyn, I ran into a childhood friend of mine who I had not seen in years. She was agitated, worried for her mother. I came to understand that she was waiting outside of a building, one that, when I noticed it, looked large and ominous. She was hoping to sneak inside for a rescue operation.

I knew then that I had some familiarity with this building and that I could effectively sneak her mother out without getting caught. I offered and she agreed. I entered and quietly clicked my way down long hallways, glimpsing gray office dividers and various audio/visual equipment stacked on modern shelving units. Her mother was kept in a medical area and as I grabbed her arm and hurried her back to the daughter, I knew that a man with a trenchcoat was watching me from a doorway. He said “we knew you were here the whole time, you know. You can come and go as you please. Your lab is in here.” He spread his arm, indicating a room with metalic work tables, bright lights, and my name stenciled on frosted glass. I was so surprised that I said nothing, and gently propelled my friend’s mother out the front of the building into the arms of her daughter. They embraced in relief and as I recalled the hallways I had walked through, I understood finally that the hallways were in a figure 8 pattern. I knew that I would be going back there.

Strange Hallways

The Drive

In this instance I probably worked on web2py the day before; the memorable collapsible car you will see later feels like a good metaphor for the back-end of a website, so I will go with it.

In my dream, a dear friend drives with me through a mountain pass, a place with a stunning view and winding roads. I made this stop-motion video that shows our walk through a forest of cameras, sets, and actors:

diy underground rail tunnels

After a day full of learning to use a slide-show Javascript library, (thank you deck.js), I had a dream that I was an undercover agent for the Chinese government in Beijing.  I was strolling in an open air market eyeballing someone who might expose me, knowing that I would need to do something terrible.

Impulsively, I rushed to the woman perpetrator, her gentleman friend, and the small child that was with them (not theirs), briefly confessed my situation to them, and let it be known that all of us must make a run for it.

We dashed into the underground rail system, which had open, roofless, rail-cars that would roll past slowly enough for a person to jump in uninjured. In retrospect the rail reminds me of Donkey Kong’s.

We jumped in, and I stared open-mouthed at the large doorways that snaked off on either side of us as we chugged past.  When we jumped out, it was because we smelled delicious cooking smells, and saw a large doorway that had a pleasant green-toned light filtering in.  Like many other people [in my dream city], this enterprising restaurant owner had dug his own subway entrance that led directly into his greenery-filled restaurant.

It was lovely.  I examined the walls, wondering if they were built up to code or were moments away from collapse.

flame and red cloth

A young girl took a can of spray paint and sprayed it into a candle flame placed near a length of red cloth in an attempt to see a mix of colors. The orange flame engulfed the cloth and recoiled back to the can, startling the girl. She dropped the can and the entire table began flaming. I, the other person in the room ran to get water and blankets to put the flame out, feeling panic rising, but knowing that this situation would be quickly dealt with.  I woke up.

This dream happened after a day full of playing with Jquery and Javascript animations.  I was hoping to find just the right example so that I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel for the intro page of my website.  Recalling the dream, I felt a familiar discomfort when trying to recreate this sample: http://www.dhteumeuleu.com/home-again/.  Yesterday the flowing and responsive glow would not appear in my version.  My dream was an opposite scenario in which the glow was an out of control fire!

kiss the cat

I made a short giff animation for my website the other day using photoshop to make a series of images to create a moving shadow. After I loaded it up to the site, I felt elated about what a short and satisfying project that had been; I was bursting with ideas but had to go to bed to a restless night of sleep. Later, I managed a good deep nap were I revived myself more. . .

I was with a group of friends and we were wearing black clothes and hats, as though ready to break and enter (to get something important). We wanted some equipment for a project. We crept around some houses but couldn’t get to what we wanted, even by talking with and trying to persuade someone who lived in a certain familiar house. Myself and the gang hopefully crept around other buildings and ended up in a Catholic Church.

We looked around and realized that the church was having a “cult convention”. We saw one group of cultist martial arts-styled people standing in a circle. Next to them was a group wearing potato sacks and looking very dirty. On and on, these strange people everywhere — so much so that we couldn’t get to an exit . . . finally we found our way out, down a winding road with groups of people in grassy thickets here and there. Just before waking I came upon a group of people, each with a cat, a cat that they were attempting to kiss!

shy and quirky middle aged couple scale glacial cliff wall

Yesterday I spent the day moving a work table and chairs into my modest new art studio space in downtown Davis; this was a satisfying but tiring activity.  Moving in has cheered me immensely because it has been a challenge for me to keep up a steady art practice since completing my graduate studies several months ago.   With the help of a kindly delivery man I wheeled my unfinished rectangular table to the front of the building.  Next, I caused a commotion amongst the nearby office workers by spray-painting my table top white, thereby causing fumes to form a toxic cloud.  Thankfully, after some discussion with my fellow tenants they conceded that I should finish my paint job.  This object is now a glorious and sturdy white slab of a table to work on.  I am sitting at the table right now as I write…

Last night I dreamed that I was two people in a couple, a late forties or early fifties man and woman who were on a journey.

At first I had the perspective of the round brunette woman: we had a daughter together, a daughter who was very sick.  In order to save her life, we had to go on a search to find a cure.  The dream begins with me looking at my husband, a small bookish man with very large glasses.   We are scaling a glacial cliff together and the wind is whistling through our ears.  Glistening blue and white ice crystals are all around us looking mystical and as we round a corner, we can see an airplane parked down in a nearby valley, waiting for us.  Getting to the plane is urgent and we hop in just as it is taking off.

Once inside the plane I (the woman) spoke with a woman who seemed to be a healer of some kind.  She talked and seemed to be glowing but her words are not in my memory anymore.  I (the man) was stuck in the front portion of the aircraft.  I tried to get back to where my wife was because I sensed that something important was happening, but I instead found my way blocked and soon became preoccupied with finding a safe seat and looking at the flight deck.  I woke up.

Strange Water

C++ is essentially applied-math . . . and I would take a class in this as an elective during the boot-camp period of my first semester of my new schizophrenic, collaboration-focused art and technology graduate program in 2008.  My theory and culture-focused / art-education-trained-brain thus far hadn’t felt the hard limits of math, logic, or anything of the like, since astronomy and micro-economics several years before.

Sometime around the 6th week of class, I stayed up until 3 in the morning working on the chapter on functions.  In previous weeks I’d accidentally created a loop that printed an unending list figures and would only stop if I closed the program.  This was like turning on a faucet without being able to turn it off; unleashing an endless little flood of sorts.

On this night I had a break-through.  A major portion of my program was working.

I suddenly felt that math, in a general way, was cracking open for me; it seemed to be illuminating something about  existence . . . that physics, and much of science can be broken into these abstract digits such that we can see a constant exchange of material going on.  (Except of course for breakthroughs related to quantum physics, etc. . . .)  Anyway, this was an exciting moment.

I had an unforgetable dream that night: my housemate and I made our way through a forest and approached a dilapidated castle wall (kind of like the faux castle wall in the animated movie Spirited Away).  We went through the doors and found a wide lake, smooth with a blue sky overhead.  In front of us a log foot bridge extended forward across the lake and we naturally stepped onto it, talking and making our way to the other side.

Gradually, we began to notice that the water was acting strangely.  It appeared to be responding to our movements, even our voices.

When I would move my arm this way, the water would flutter this way.  And as we began to move around with increasingly complex movements, changing the pitches of our voices, and then making dramatic jumping dance moves, the water became increasingly volatile, splashing us, and threatening to overturn our little footbridge.  This was not a game; there was a sense of presence here, and that feeling was ominous.

We hurried the rest of the way across, keeping our movements to a minimum, and went up a hill to the walls of a castle town with turrets and shops. Tourists gaped at the sights, and, seeing our approach, asked in excited voices, “where is the lake?”  We exchanged looks, unsure whether to explain the possible danger to them.  We said: “it’s over there,” and pointed.