Dreamland -- dream with nothing right.

Three of us were sitting in the living room in Lakeside and someone shot someone like Paul DeCastro in the head. We were talking about it in, fact, when he was shot in the head -- maybe it was the second attempt at killing him, the first one not having worked, I’m a little vague about that -- and he keeled right over.

You could see the little red spot in his upper left forehead. But then when I looked to see the blood trickling down, it wasn’t there and there wasn’t a hole, just a red spot, because the bullet had bounced off. This was amazing! Was it a weak gun? what direction had it come from?

On looking, we found the hole in the glass window, and this provided the answer.

The glass was about three-quarters of an inch thick, so it must have slowed down the bullet, which we eventually found on the floor, not flattened out as you might expect, but with a pointy sharp point very unlike a bullet. The glass had a crack in it below the hole and had become partially lifted out of its setting.

A hole had been parted in the shrub outside, which had been cleared away also, to give the shooter a place to stand. The shrubbery being cleared away and the two palm tree leaf stubs being trimmed back up to a height of 8 feet or so was evidence that the crime was premeditated.

The glass with the hole in it remained in the living room for the remainder of the dream, even though the rest of the dream occurred in our house in Maine. A whole bunch of stuff happened, with four or five visitors being shown the glass with the bullet hole in it, phone calls being made about a Cal State faculty meeting with coffee to be served, etc (even though it was the house in Maine) and then I remember this long conversation with Joe Wolcott of CIS.

There were all these small electronic devices of daily life strewn about the living room and I got to thinking about getting a video recorder and really programming it up to do animation, but then I thought the frame-to-frame registration of film transfer still wouldn’t be very good, so what was the point. So I guess I called Joe. He said they had been working on some feature of the Rank (which does film transfer to video) and had gotten it much better on the Rank end of things. “Who did the programming,” I wanted to know. “Roger” he said. “I thought Roger quit or was fired.,” Joe said he was fired.

I asked him how was everyone, how was Kevin, did he still work there?

Just as he was about to answer I looked out the window and saw the UPS truck turning around out in the driveway. I said hang on a second and ran out to see if there was a package. There wasn’t one on the front door, so I went outside to go up and get him before he drove off. I noticed a cardboard box off to the right and picked it up, but it was just a rectangular cardboard box.

I went up to the truck, but it wasn’t the brown UPS truck, it was a red Coca Cola truck. Funny ,we had been expecting the Coca Cola guy to come and fix some electronic device, so I told him, come on in I’ll show it to you. Of course (maybe) I showed him the bullet hole in the glass, and he seemed just about as disinterested as everyone else who saw it. No one was at all impressed by this evidence of attempted murder.

Anyway, I said to him wait just a second I’ll be right with you and I got back on the phone with Joe. He said he’d seen me run out in the yard to talk to this guy. I said what, with my underwear on? He temporized and perhaps I wasn’t wearing my underwear after all, but I formed the impression that he lived next door. We talked a little bit about network stuff -- he was booting up his computer and it was giving him a network not found error, and then I said we should get together to have lunch. “Lunch” he said, “I’m trying to take a little off.” Well, I said, lunch is very important you have to eat lunch. “I eat breakfast,” he said, “but I don’t eat much lunch.” “I’m trying to take a little off, too, and I eat lunch,” I replied. “It’s working. What’s your phone number.”

Joe tried to remember his phone number, but he couldn’t, and he couldn’t look it up because his computer was down. He said he had been in bed for three days and wasn’t feeling too good. I asked him for his address, and he couldn’t remember that either.

At some point during this conversation, I notice that the Coca Cola guy wasn’t working on fixing whatever it was, and looked out in the yard. He had taken a backhoe and dug a hole in the front yard about 15 yards long, 3 or 4 yards wide, and about 5 or 6 feet deep! It was obviously for a swimming pool and I had had a vague recollection about discussing putting in a small swimming pool with Irene, but didn’t recall deciding anything. Maybe it was at the wrong address? I went out and asked him if he had a work order. He shook his head sheepishly and said no. “I’m going to call my wife as soon as I get off the phone, I said, please wait.” Or I think I said please wait, I don’t really remember exactly.

So I went back inside and finished up the conversation with Joe, it seemed to take a long time to get off the phone.

And indeed, when I went back out I was surprised to find that the swimming pool was installed. There were some kind of “indoor” aspects to it, like the fact there was a long low couch on the other side that had been pushed up against the wall (wall? this is outdoors) and to the left and downhill of it was a four or five panel deep blue wall painting maybe of the solar system that had previously been hung somewhere in a space now occupied by the swimming pool. But these were just glances. I wondered why he had installed it on a slope. Obviously the water would all go to one end.

Even though the swimming pool was installed I still wanted to know whether it should be taken out again, so I called Irene. I was about to call her at work, but instead I dialed her mobile number 1-310-990-4646, and then I woke up.
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