Nazrax

I woke up after every single sleep cycle last night. I don't think I've ever written so much in one night before

Salmon patties
I'm in the house somewhere. I ask my second daughter if she wants a salmon patty; she says she does. Belatedly, I realize I should ask the other kids if they want one too. I ask my oldest daughter, and she wants one; my youngest daughter isn't around, and I come up with an excuse not to find her and offer her one. My son doesn't cross my mind. Now I'm in the kitchen (one I'm not familiar with - I think it must be a vacation house).I'm using the portable burner + skillet (I dreamed about this a few days ago, too). The first patty has been on for a few minutes and is about ready to flip. I realize that I could have put the second patty on at the same time (the pan is big enough) and saved a few minutes. I go to grab the second patty and put it on. I'll have to pay more attention to them, but at least they'll be done faster.

When I go to add the second patty, I see that the whole burner + skillet is in a giant clear plastic bag. I hope the bag so close to the skillet that it melts; but getting closer, I see that it's touching the edge of the skillet and has melted onto it. I try to peel it away without making too much mess, but I'm finding that's not possible. Worse, I find the bag was full of packages of ground beef. Worse yet, a couple of the packages were laying between the patties and the skillet, so I was cooking the ground beef instead of my patties. I hope that, since they're in Styrofoam packaging (the usual yellow trays) they weren't cooked too much, just thawed a little. I grab all the packages (there's a bunch) and go to put them back in the freezer. There's a whole pile of plastic debris covered in raw meat juice - what a mess. I want to clean it up before my wife sees it.


Baby monitors
I'm looking at baby monitors. I'm currently looking at one that does regular checks on the baby's vitals, makes sure it's still breathing, etc. If something's wrong it doesn't wait for <something> - it notifies you right away. You can wear an earpiece that delivers all this information to you in real time, or you can use optional accessories to set off alarms in case of trouble. There's a picture of one such external alarm: on the wall, I see an hand with a mechanical thumb positioned next to a button sticking out of a bell-style alarm. When something is wrong, the thumb pushes the button and sets off the alarm. If you don't like bell alarms, they also provide electronic ones.


Electronics reality TV
I see a couple of guys driving in a car along a winding mountain road, talking about Tech. They're talking about a competition they're in, something related to electronics. The whole thing is done in superhero motifs, with the professors being the superheroes or supervillains and the students being their apprentices / minions. They spend a while describing each professor, his name, his skills, and his personality.

Now I'm in a room with one of the superheroes and his apprentices. I'm there because one of his students got sick and I'm the replacement. It seems this is some kind of reality TV show where the losing hero gets one of his students voted off each week. The hero I'm with hasn't been doing so well. It's week five, and it looks like another of his students is on the way out. Also, this is the first week that personal performance affects the voting ratios, so the voting is going to be even worse than usual. There are a bunch of papers in the student's personal area describing the process and how his own failures had contributed. A girl nearby is tearing up - she doesn't want to be voted off.

Oddly, the professor doesn't realize I'm a replacement - he thinks I'm the original. He's talking to me about how "I" have plenty of skill but don't apply myself. He's trying to get his point across clearly without seeming to be personally attacking, but he's being very roundabout. I finally tell him that I'm not his student but a stand-in. Now he's showing me some of the work done by the other student. Right now, he's showing me a thing that's supposed to dampen vibrations. It's a wooden box with an articulated lever and a switch. When he first shows it to me, I assume it's one of those silly toys that flips its switch off any time you turn it on. He turns it on and a metal paddle swings around, touches the box it's mounted in, and vibrates very weakly. It's pretty pathetic. He shows me another mode of operation in which the paddle goes between the two D-cell batteries that power it; it looks like it's trying to split the D-cells apart. This worries me - batteries aren't something to handle roughly - and I look more closely. They're not even in battery holders, just attached straight to the board - glue, maybe, or solder? I see a couple of other things attached directly to the batteries, and it looks like he may have even drilled into them. I ask the professor about it, and he tells me it's fine.


Destroying a room
Three guys are in a student's room, preparing to destroy it. One of them is crazy - he's really enjoying himself, and to motivate the others he has a bomb strapped to his own chest with a thirty-five minute countdown visible on a huge blue 7-segment counter. The others are working as fast as they can to be finished and away from the first guy. The first guy is going around the room sticking small explosives on just about everything. The second guy is following behind adding wireless blasting caps. The third guy is checking their work.

On one wall, the explosives guy has attached clear containers of glowing pink liquid. The blasting cap guy is putting a second container of the liquid above the first. This second container has a pouring spout and a heating element. One of the units near the end of the wall is having problems and is pouring early. Most of its pink liquid has poured out and into the bottom container; I wonder if this will make it explode prematurely, but the guy isn't concerned, so I assume there must be some other detonation mechanism.

Now the three guys are leaving the apartment. It was the corner apartment on a long single-story building. They're expecting the school administration to be waiting for them and are surprised when no one is there. One of the opens the door, reaches inside, and locks it. They figure locking the door will make pursuit a few minutes slower.

Now my wife and I are getting into our nearby van. It's been backed into its space, so everything feels backwards. We're getting confused about whose side is which.

Something about driving into a bank's drive-through, except it's down a ramp to an underground room.


Fukushima infiltration
I' m walking with someone in a huge plaza dominated by a huge fountain. The fountain's pool is shallow - its walls are a foot or two high - and rectangular. In the middle is a pillar with a giant ball at the top. Everything is gleaming white. Every so often, water starts shooting up out of the pillar, raising the ball even higher into the air. After a few moments, the water pressure goes down and the ball comes back down to rest on the pillar. I point out the sight to my companion, and we keep walking around the pool, on our way to somewhere. The next time it happens, we get splashed by a little of the water. I mention that it's Fukushima water that's been treated and cleaned; it's a PR stunt to show how safe everything is. My companion becomes furious - he doesn't trust them at all - and storms down some nearby steps leading into some kind of administration building. We're having trouble getting inside, because there's a whole crowd of people leaving. We have to force our way against the tide to get inside.

Now we're inside, in a small waiting area. I'm sitting in an overstuffed chair; my companion is standing at a counter, talking to someone over a phone (like in a prison visitation area). He mentions a name; immediately, an executive is walking down the hallway, yelling to the lady on the phone that the name my companion mentioned is the top name on the list of "if they ask about this, direct them to management." It seems my companion gave a different name on the form when he was filling out the reason for his visit, so his real question caught them by surprise.

Now the people are gone, and he's taking the phone apart. He thinks there's something in the phone's guts, maybe a small slip of paper containing the secret they don't want anyone to find.

Now I'm watching a group of guys going through a fridge that's full of platters of party food. A lot of it looks really good, and it's making me hungry. There isn't nearly enough to drink relative to how much food there is; that's suspicious. I get distracted by a random thought about fridge organization, about how silly it would be to organize the food by <something>. If you do it that way, then it might make it easier to add stuff to the fridge, but it would significantly increase the retrieval time, so it wouldn't be worth it. Back to the fridge hunt, the guy poking through the fridge is looking for keyholes. There's a strange sense of deja-vu, that he's done this before and found a keyhole, but he's having trouble finding one now. He finally finds a tiny one at the bottom of the door; but since he doesn't have a key, there's nothing he can do with it. He goes back to looking through the fridge for anything out of the ordinary and finally comes across a beer bottle with something in it. Triumphant, be pulls it out, thinking it's what they've been looking for; but once it's out in the light, he realizes that what he sees inside is a stick of dynamite. He quickly puts it back in the fridge, and the group heads back down the hallway.

Elsewhere in the facility, I'm holding a beer bottle with something in it. I'm in the corner of a rec room; there's a toilet here. To be less suspicious, I decide to use it. Unfortunately, there's no stall, so I pull an easy chair over in front of me to try to be a little more modest - without the big chair there, anyone in the room can look at me. Thus protected by the chair, I try to get the thing in the bottle out. I end up pouring out some of the beer into a trash can. I think about tearing the label off, but I decide that would be more suspicious than leaving it on. It's a Sierra Nevada of some sort with a diamond label on the front of the bottle.


Free produce
I'm driving, stuck in a long line of cars. I see that up ahead there's a table where people are giving out bags of fresh produce, but only to people who walk up to the table. People are pulling out of line, walking up to the table to get their bag, then getting back in their cars and getting back in line. I consider doing this myself, but I don't care that much, and I hate trying to force my car's way into a traffic jam. Now I'm past the table, walking. I see my in-laws carrying a funny plastic container into which they've transferred their produce; they seem pleased with it. I see another lady from the church with her own container; she's also pleased. I have a moment of regret that I didn't get some myself, but I still don't really care.


Biking invitation
I'm at my computer in the office. A friend IMs me an invitation to go biking with him and some friends. There's a bike path that goes along a beachfront, and it's "not too far" away. I pull it up on Google Maps. The path is unusual: there's what looks like a narrow, short river with a narrow beach on one side. The bike trail runs right next to this beach, occasionally passing through threes. The trail isn't just a straight line or a loop; it goes back and forth through the trees, often crossing itself . I'm still not sure where it is in relation to me, so I try to zoom out. Zooming out is going really really slowly, and there's no marker on the bike path to indicate where it is. I finally manage to roughly figure it out; it's on the east side of the city, 81 miles away. I have to turn him down; that's just too far to drive, since there are other nicer trails that are only 45 minutes away. This trail looks really short; we'd be going back and forth if we were there for any length of time.


Friends
I'm driving behind a house. It has a nice, green lawn surrounded by a "fence" of small pines. I turn left after passing the house. On my right, I see some friends walking up a driveway. Now I'm with them in the garage. Jeff, Seth, and Ben are there, along with a lawn mower. Ben is far too nicely dressed to be mowing lawns. Jeff is dressed in working clothes, but he needs to be leaving soon. Seth is drinking a beer. Off to the side of the room, I see a fridge with a glass door - Jeff's beer fridge. Looking inside, I'm surprised to see that it's almost empty. That's not like Jeff at all. Jeff says that something's come up and he won't have to leave as quickly as he thought he would.



Analysis
Dreamsigns:
- A room I'm not familiar with (the kitchen)
- That little gas burner
- Things going poorly and making for an awkward situation (multiple times)
- Uncomfortable driving situation
- Uncomfortable bathroom situation