h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

OK let me try and get back to this! I dreamt a lot last night. Can't make much of my notes though. First note says: ruined coniferous forest! I can't remember that dream! What ruined the forest, where was it, how did I come to see it??? Now that I try and remember I recall a different dream not so long ago in which I did see some interesting places with nice trees and plants ... but can't for the life of me figure out this ruined coniferous forest one!

Next note was about a girl falling in love with a guy who she saw performing bench presses in a gym. Can't recally anything more of that dream either.

Next dream: all doors are dimensional gateways! Even if you walk underneath a bare arch, you are in fact 'turned inside out' in a way, by passing through the fifth dimension. Well in that dream that's where it *started*. On from bare archways there were more complex portals with all sorts of dimensional inversions and higher levels of reality and probably time travel too. But I can't remember any details.

Last dream: I found Gollum's bathtub on some mountain, it was a perfectly round excavated hole filled with water and with nice plants all around. Gollum was nowhere to be seen though, so how do I know it was his bath? And I think he actually would not have liked an open sunny spot like that.

I dreamt more than one dream last night, but this is all I remember:

There was a huge volcano crater located in the dream not far from where I live. In real life, driving east from Polokwane to Tzaneen, you go through lovely forests and mountains. The Magoebaskloof road is a pass with many scenic views. In the dream, the road along this mountain pass offered a view of this crater lying far below. It was very far below ... so far down that it was very, very hot as all very low lying depressions in tropical or subtropical regions tend to be. And then because it was a volcanic crater it was even hotter! I think it was smouldering, but in no danger of erupting. In the dream a plan was made to make the crater a bit cooler: the entire thing was covered with a black shade net as one uses for plant nurseries! And it worked! Underneath the cover the crater became covered with plants, a nice cool forest. I wanted to go explore it, and I think I actually did, but I can't remember much more.

Last night again only had one dream that I can remember. The dream was of a Pac-Man game! But it was played on a Vic-20 ... a truly ancient computer, with what today would be considered extremely rudimentary capabilities. The graphics resolution was very low, there were only a few colours available. In my dream, though, despite these limitations, a great Pac-Man game had been made for this computer. My dream game differed from the real game in these respects:

The maze, instead of being displayed onscreen all at once, was a scrolling maze, so you only saw a small bit of it at a time. This meant that the characters (Pac himself and the ghosts) could be bigger, so that the low resolution was not such a limiting factor. The characters had plenty of pixels for each of them, and there were other things and characters aside from Pac, his pills, the bonus fruit and the ghosts. In fact there were mystery rooms in the maze with pretty stuff in them, and sometimes there were 'don't go in there!' messages. Which of course you would ignore, sometimes finding a nice surprise, sometimes a nasty one.

Also, the dream Pac Man game also gave you the option of playing as a *ghost*. Which somehow gave the game a whole new dimension. All in all the dream game was a lot more complex than the real one, despite being on such an archaic computer.

I think this dream was clearly inspired by some of the demos of Commodore 64 and Vic 20 computers I'd been watching ... but those happened many months ago, so why do I dream something like that now?

The night before last’s dreams:

There was one of some sort of experiment with toads/rodents on a mountain. I felt sorry for the toads stuck up there in the cold, rocky barrenness …

There was a Korean quiz show which pitted Christians against non-Christians. I kind of thought in the dream the Christians would lose.

There was a strange plant, something of the Acanthus family, with prickly, succulent leaves at the base, from which a stalk emerged with a pickle-like formation at the tip.

Last night:
I was back in University again, and actually doing good for a change! I was painting a lot … what I was doing was improving many of my half-finished dream paintings. I’ve accumulated a whole load of these over a great many dreams of the past. These are paintings that generally started off well but then I got stumped when just about to finish them. Well, in this dream I got to finish off a few of them, satisfactorily! I wish I could easily transpose these dream paintings into real life …

I also tried to teach people Knuth’s up-arrow notation for representing iterated exponentiation. This is a quick and simple method for presenting numbers that are quite staggeringly, ridiculously huge. Read all about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth's_up-arrow_notation

If you understand that, and your head didn’t explode, congratulations! In the dream I remember I had difficulty explaining it to my sister, among others.

Just bare-bones notes of last night's dreaming. The first involved my sister getting into mysticism and spirituality while in school (this never happened with her, but I was into that sort of and lots of other weird stuff since primary school).

Then there's a not of a virtual reality girl! I wish I could remember more about her.

Had a whole bunch of dreams yesterday and remember much of them!

It was a bit of a plant extravaganza. One scene was with a cycad I had planted in my garden (I've written about Modjadji cycads in Phyto-Philes). Normally cycads are very slow-growing, but this one grew HUGE in a very short time - in dream-time it was supposedly two or three years, though it seemed to me as if it had grown overnight. It was leaning on another big tree. But in the dream I remember being concerned because I had planted a dragon tree next to it, which had simply disappeared! I had many more dream plants in my dream garden, and there was one that baffled me: it had warty-ish stems with purple tips. After a long while of puzzling about it I finally figured it must be a kind of Monadenium from Swaziland or Lesotho. (It didn't actually look like that, and the genus certainly doesn't occur in Lesotho).

I also dreamt about looking for plants in a patch of veld close to my house (dream geography being similar to real geography this time). But there were rhinos grazing in the veld ... in reality it's just a mdedium-sized park, and I haven't seen any mammals at all living there. In the dream I found very attractive deep purple-reddish-blackish bulbs, reminding me of red cabbage or beetroots.

I remember an old school friend visited me but not the details of the visit.

Then there was an exhibition of animal art, with some of my own art as well.

That's all I can remember.

Last night:

There was a wonderful dream of a Rube Goldberg Race! What this means was that competitors were linked together in a gigantic ultra-complex relay race with Rube Goldberg like activators ... can't remember everything but there were cats getting trod on and attacking folks, clouds of steam being released, and so forth. I wish I could remember the details. But in the dream it did not work as planned! The links did not function as smoothly as planned and certain athletes ended up being held back and the whole thing degenerated into chaos.

Then there was a dream where a friend was taking a trip in Germany, and I found it quite exciting to hear what she reported. Then I realised I was in Germany myself and not even sure where.

The night before last's dreams:

There was one of a rather disgusting breeding project! I was breeding things that were a sort of combination of ticks, fleas, and tadpoles ... they were a huge mass of wriggling black things ... I had an entire wheelbarrow full of them and dumped them into my swimming pool. All the time those things could get out and seriously infest people! I have no idea why I was breeding them. My uncle Kerneels, a farmer, was there as well and was not impressed.

I also dreamt I was opening a gym along with a school friend.

Last night's dreaming I can't remember very well. But there was one in which my being a vegan became very difficult. I was in a shop and just couldn't resist the sight of non-vegan foods ... candies, desserts, cakes and so on, and thought I would go mad. But in real life it is not nearly as hard!

I've been neglecting this ... it's hard to remember dreams or to make time for writing them down when I'm under stress. Anyways here are some notes I made for a number of nights' dreams.

* An old school friend of mine swinging on a rope attached to a high point, round and round, 'tetherball'-style.

* Olotic peaches. Yeah, olotic... your guess as to what it means is as good as mine.

* Working (who ... me?) for a fascist hit squat in a shopping centre. There were magazines, Huisgenoot - a popular mag over here - and children playing in the mall.

* A woman learning something, heading out to the seashore and towards the west, as the tide moves out.

* I am back at the university. Help an old man up the stairs with his luggage. Writing an exam: distracted while in the middle of it, have to do something. Return and resume writing it afterwards, but making lots of mistakes!

* Something aboout punishment and a pipe smoker in a car. Trying to outrun something. A mention of a huge robot or machine, unsure if it was friend or foe.

* Disconnected? Who, and from what?

* A giant dragon tree ... this one I remember, it was HUGE and it had incredibly long branches with the rosettes at the tips seeming small because of the distance.

* Me running through the city. I am very happy to be fit enough to run so long and so far, but I get lost along the way. I meet an old school friend.

* My mom is sick. I have to find the FAIL ... that is to say FAmily In Law, to let them know.

*There's an Adenia, a weird plant that I'm growing, and a pretty moth on it. Do the moth larvae perhaps feed on it?

* While visiting my mother/grandmother I find a tree in front of the house with wonderful huge fruit. They're large and light yellow and have a custardy flavour with a hint of bitterness. I eat too many of them.

And finally a long dream that I can remember fairly well! And as it happens this is another instalment in the chronicle of my ongoing DREAM love life.

Her name was Monita and I liked her a lot. She was very tall, with dark hair and eyes. I saw her a lot at church (dream church of course, there doesn’t seem to be a real life church over here that suits me at the moment). She seemed quite friendly, often smiling at me in an amused way.

I thought she liked me. I found out she was not married or attached to anyone, giving me even more hope, so I asked her to go on a date with me. Then she laughed and said no, she doesn’t think so. I asked why … she said because I did nothing more than paint cheap pictures and had achieved no success in life. (This devastated me even more because in a dream just a bit earlier, my sister told me she didn’t like any of my art … that they looked funny and wrong. I wondered if the colour scheme, especially the purples I used for the shading, was to blame.) Still I persisted. I told her to just give me one chance, to just try me, that I would find things for us to talk about and that it would be pleasant, she would see. Another female friend of mine from the church tried to get her to give me a chance, but her mind was settled on the matter.

Then something happened, I lost her, or the opportunity for seeing her. Once I thought I saw her … it was another very tall girl but when I looked up and squinted to make out the face in high up above, I saw that it was Ursula, not Monita. I searched around … I tried tracking her down to her home. I think I did … I think I found her house, she wasn’t there but there was something to eat, a cream pie or something and I dipped my finger in it – then she appeared and I was so embarrassed! We didn’t speak and I went back to my own home.

There I was surprised … there were strange objects in my house! There were presents and food … a Christmas party broke out! There were lots of people but no Monita. I thought the people were from Durban … someone at the party commented that they were even wilder than we were. But a preacher friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in many years was at the party as well. Then a fight broke out.

So that’s that dream. Imagine … not even when my mind is in control of the environment and all of the characters can I manage to get the girl! And my dream situation is *so* much better than real life, with so many nice people around me and girls I actually get a chance to talk to.

There was another dream. There was a tour of a mountainous region with a huge waterfall. There were communities of people living in the region. The women wore bird cages around their heads, they were locked in, like portable prisons. We swam at the waterfalls. My sister wanted to surf in the river but there was no time. The rest is fuzzy … there was someone who complained about something. There was a kid that either went over the waterfall or down a steep mountain slope in a barrel. There were kids with a book with a misspelling in the title.

Last night's dreams: Obelix (yes, that one) and I got hunted by the police for abducting children! I don't think we actually did, and if we did it was an innocent sort of mistake, but I can't remember the details.

Then, a dream where I had a live-in psychologist who had to teach me the proper way of doing things and help me get my life in some sort of order. She suggested that I should hold dances so as to have opportunities for meeting people! I was very concerned about what that would cost. But really, I wish I could have such a live-in psychologist, and that I could afford to hold dances ... that would solve a lot of my problems. If money weren't an object!

Last night's dreaming was long, vivid and coherent, and I can remember much of it. This time I went to The Netherlands. It started out just as a short-term temporary sort of thing; I could return home quickly at any time, and I hadn't even arranged for anyone to take care of my cat Poplap. But as the dream progressed I started about staying there for quite a long time. The idea was that I would fit in quite well, being of Dutch ancestry and being able to understand the language. And the society in The Netherlands would be much better than over here, there will be more people to meet and they would be much more social. I was also thinking of trying to find a girlfriend. I was in a pub and I think I tried getting myself some job over there.

Somewhat funny-ish scene, while on a train or bus going somewhere a man sat next to me, and asked 'keuchst du?' This is German not Dutch ... I understand Dutch but can't speak it, whereas I can speak and understand German, so in the dream German took the place of Dutch! What he asked me is whether I 'gasp' and if you know about Amsterdam you'll have an idea what he was referring to. I said no, no thanks, he lit up and even the second-hand smoke was muddling my head. I thought first, so this is what is smells like, and second, I don't like it, at least here's one temptation I wouldn't have trouble withstanding. Anyways I spoke to the man in German, hoping he would understand it, while forgetting he was the one who spoke it to me first and that it was actually supposed to *be* Dutch!

Well anyways, can't really remember much more about the dream than that. But it seems to me I'm getting better at remembering. The important thing is to jot down some keywords as soon as I wake up. With these I can then later when my head is fresh think back and remember some of the details.

Last night: just snippets of memories. A scene at sundown ... the red clouds had blue lines separating them, it looked incredible, so I tried to take a photograph of them ... no luck! I looked at them through something that was a comination of binoculars and those old 3D-viewers. Don't know what that was for.

I dreamt of being on top of the roof of the house along with a bunch of hippies! Why were we there? I looked down at a tree growing in my garden next to the compost heap. It seemed dead. I was on the ground next and saw its entire trunk had rotted from the bottom.

Then there was a dream in which I tried drawing, and I had difficulty, I was drawing the way I did when I was a small child!

Not much detail from last night.

In my dreams I often have mystery plants growing in my garden. Typically I got the seeds from somewhere but then forgot what they were. Sometimes in my dreams I just scatter large amounts of seeds of different species, and then when they start to grow I don't know what they are. Needless to say this is not how I do things in real life, I usually put a metal lable in a bag with the name of the seeds I'm planting in it, so I know what it is that's growing from the start. There are some mystery plants in my garden, though, since birds sometimes plant something and if it's nice and I'm sure it's indigenous I leave it.

Well, these mystery plants in my dreams are often wonderfully beautiful and strange. Last night's mystery tree was growing amazingly tall ... I had to crane my neck to look up at it, and it had a little crown high up. But I saw fruit on it for the first time! If I could get one of the fruit I could identify it. Somehow I managed to get a fruit ... can't remember if it fell or if I found a way to pick it. It proved to be a pear tree! Well it had delicious pears.

Then there was a dream about me reading too slowly! In the dream my entire bookcase (my room has a large bookcase against the wall opposite my bed) was full of old library books. This is a kind of phobia, of having library books past their due date, and it features in many of my dreams. In this one those books were in the shelves but I had never managed to get the time to read them. I was very frustrated by this ...

Real life subtext: I haven't had much time for reading books in a long while. In the old days I was a rather voracious reader and could finish a long book in a day; going to the library I would use my father, mother and sister's cards to take out books on, and I usually would read all of them. But these days I read a lot on the internet and cannot find time to read lots of real books. But I do still read ... right now I'm busy with Baudolino by Umberto Eco, reading a few pages of it every night before I go to sleep.

But it's strange that my dreams are haunted by unread dream-books!

Only very sparse details of last night's dreaming.

There was one where I used shiny beads in a bathtub to spell out some names.

There was one where I was stroking my deceased cat, Kadoefie, once again. I often dream of my past cats.

There was one of a Belgian band performing a total rip-off of the song 'The Paradise Lost' of the Finnish band Unshine.

And that's all I can remember.

I can only remember one of last night's dreams. I was back in school with many of my old friends. We were having a maths class and then an exam. Well during the exam we broke the roolz and spoke with each other and such things as a resulf of which the teacher failed the entire class!

There was a whole lot of dreaming last night. I can remember some snippets. I was in a movie theatre, watching a Star Wars movie. Accidentally I did something, restarting the movie when it was about three quarters of the way. I hoped nobody in the theatre realised it was me and then rapidly tried to get the movie back. A menu screen appeared and I tried to see which selection would get me to forward the movie back to the point it was at. But there was such a confusion of menu items! In the end I managed to start a different movie, a live action (sort of) version of The Simpsons. Homer Simpson as a living person was especially weird.

The next bunch of notes I made are cryptic. 'Many interpretations of character' ... does that relate to Homer Simson? I sort of have the idea in my head there were many different scenes with different actors doing different versions of Homer.

'End - lucky fungus in car - we all laugh!' This seems to refer to the 'everybody laughs ending' that featured on old TV shows and other things. But what was that lucky fungus in the car about?!

'Guy came with radioactive spear - I got him with mine'. I can remember a vague scenario, people getting stalked and stabbed with a spear in some kind of college hostel. Or maybe more than one guy? The radioactiveness of the spear made even slight wounds deadly. I did get him with mine ... was my spear also radioactive? I don't think so, but it definitely was very sharp and I think I stabbed him good. Of course I was very afraid and it was a very hairy situation and just luck that I got him before he got me.

'Two roommates, Kiefer Sutherland and another guy, sown together along forearm ... skin graft'. I don't know in which scenario this happened... maybe the radioactive spear caused skin cancer? But at any rate they were sewn together, I think from the wrists all along the edge of the forearm and upper arm up till the shoulder. This somehow was to get skin to grow on their arms again.

Night before last dream memories are very sketchy. Only jotted down in my dream diary, 'driving around in city where there used to be big trees'. Obviously this was upsetting to me; my dream cities are typically very full of interesting plants, they are roomy, there are huge trees growing in public parks and parking areas and also people have very interesting things growing in their gardens.

Also, 'visiting relatives'. In a small house somewhere I met up with aunts and uncles and cousins I hadn't seen in a long time. Can't remember details though.

I remember a bit more about last night's dreams. In one, I was having difficulty cultivating some of my carrion flowers. For some reason my father was drying some of them in the microwave (these succulent plants need to be kept dry ... I constantly worry about my real-life ones if we get too much rain). But he overdid it and cooked the plant. Then he and I proceeded to eat it like a corncob. (These plants look vaguely like corncobs and also some carrion flower species are edible - the stems rather than the actual flowers.)

Another dream was of me painting againb, and again having some difficulty. In the dream I realised that my pencil sketches and colour-pencil drawings looked a lot better than my paintings with oil and acrylic paint did.

Also in the dream a woman I have art classes with happened to have towels that looked exactly like my beach towels ... though what we were doing with the towels I can't remember.

Last night: again I had a wonderful dream book about dream nature and dream critturs! These particular critturs were truly weird ... I cant' remember them vividly enough, can't even recall if they were mammals or reptiles, but they had strange protuberances on their faces and noses, one I can remember had a forked prong on its nose. There were many, many of these dream thingies ilustrated in the book.

Then there was also something about dogs and wolves in the book ... or maybe by this point it was a magazine, I sort of have this impression.

There was an article about plants as well, a carrion-flower-like thingy that I had tried cultivating but had failed with. The article explained some things about it: it had different growth habits in different media. Carrion flowers usually have thick, leafless, succulent stems. This species, the article said, would have thin, leafy, many-branched stems if growing in sand, and also would then easily propagate vegetatively. It had quite pretty flowers as well, but the dream didn't progress beyond this point so I never got to try growing them again.

Can't remember the night before last's dreams. Last night:

1st dream. My mom had somehow survived for over a year after in real life she had died, but now she was sick again. Can't remember what else.

2nd dream: Lost calculus textbook. I was frustrated about it because without the textbook the lessons didn't make much sense ... and I was feeling like I was going to do well, like I was understanding the work easily. I *wanted* to do homework and exercises. My teacher turned out to be an atheist and depressed and couldn't help me. But a ghost helped me! The ghost was very positive and helped me to find (or steal from a library) three new books. I was hoping they would have work in them similar to what I was being taught in class. Two girls helped me as well, classmates who pointed things out to me.

3rd dream: dwarf chameleons. I frequently dream of chameleons. This time I was trying to attract them into a special habitat ... I was doing some really nasty thing, but I can't remember what ... it might have involved spoilt milk ... in order to attract flies to provide food for them.

4th dream: I had a little plant resembling a Brachystelma (a kind that I don't yet have specimens of) and I was delighted that it had made a bud on the end of a long stalk that I could detach that would form an entire new plant.

5th dream: It was raining and shallow pools were forming all over the front lawn. This lawn was much bigger in the dream than it is in real life. There were frogs coming out. I saw a bullfrog that jumped and swallowed up some smaller frogs, I think they were striped stream frogs. I think I saw this more than once.

That's all I can remember this time.