I dis­tinctly remem­ber wak­ing up this morn­ing with three dreams I wanted to record.  As I con­sult my men­tal notes, I can only come up with two.  These are they…

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Before I can start in on my first dream, I have to describe a par­tic­u­lar pil­low I own.  It is very unique in that it is oddly shaped (squat and long — I believe it is tech­ni­cally a neck pil­low or throw pil­low), full of actual feath­ers, with a cover that looks some­what like a Turk­ish car­pet with light fringe.  On the few occa­sions I sleep on my side, this is my “knee pil­low.”  On my side, my bony knees either end up hurt­ing (some­times bruis­ing) each other or hit­ting pres­sure points that cut off cir­cu­la­tion to my legs.  That, plus a pil­low in that posi­tion tends to help with pos­ture and what­not.  Going back to my orig­i­nal point: unique pil­low.  Check.

As the dream started, I was car­ry­ing this pil­low and fol­low­ing a group of peo­ple around a place that started out as a super­mar­ket.  The super­mar­ket grad­u­ally pro­gressed into a ware­house, like a Costco-style big-box store ware­house.  The group kept chang­ing direc­tion, going to dif­fer­ent sec­tions, and I was annoyed at hav­ing to drag this pil­low around every­where.  I did not want to carry it, but I also did not want to lose it in this place.  At that point, I half woke up and put the pil­low in its spot between bed and side-table.  Return­ing to the dream, I was no longer car­ry­ing it! 

The group even­tu­ally went deeper into this supermarket/warehouse until it started look­ing more like a stor­age facil­ity.  Put in your head the image of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and you will have a good idea of where I was. 

The group located some­thing sim­i­lar to a steamer trunk, but about twice as big.  They were call­ing it some­thing like a “Span­ish Box” or “Span­ish Trunk” and pro­ceeded to demon­strate how it oper­ated.  Open­ing the trunk revealed that, even though the out­side was about twice as big as a reg­u­lar trunk, the inside was only reg­u­lar trunk sized.  It was par­ti­tioned into four sec­tion.  Ini­tially, each one had ran­dom bits and bobs, mainly papers.  They also showed four hid­den and recessed key­holes, two on the front and two on the back, close to the cor­ners of the box.  Clos­ing the box, unlock­ing one key­hole, then reopen­ing the box revealed that that one quad­rant of con­tent changed.  It was no longer papers, but what­ever else, instead.  You could do this to each of the four key­holes, re-locking the pre­vi­ously unlocked on, then unlock­ing another, and the cor­re­spond­ing sec­tion inside would be replaced by some­thing else.  The net result being that the trunk had twice its capac­ity, which was not too sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing it really was about twice the size of a reg­u­lar trunk with only a regular-trunk-sized com­part­ment acces­si­ble.  A false bot­tom and/or mov­ing sec­tions might have accounted for what I saw.

Things really got inter­est­ing when you started unlock­ing two adja­cent keys simul­ta­ne­ously.  For instance, unlock­ing the two front key­holes, then open­ing revealed that the two front inte­rior sec­tions com­bined to form a new sec­tion with new stuff in it, in this case, rifles.  Unlock­ing the left front and left back key­holes com­bined those cor­re­spond­ing sec­tions to reveal a bunch of ammu­ni­tion.  Unlock­ing all four at the same time revealed a huge inte­rior, with­out par­ti­tions, in this case hold­ing what looked like ancient arti­facts.  As you can see, the net sum of all the con­tents — although you could not access them all at the same time — vastly sur­passed the actual vol­ume of the chest.  I had no idea what the weight was, as nobody demon­strated lift­ing it, but assumed the weight worked in the same way.

Later on in the dream, I learned that the group of peo­ple demon­strat­ing this to me was some kind of secret branch of the gov­ern­ment that inves­ti­gated such odd­i­ties, like the X-Files but a bit more insid­i­ous.  The point here was to carry lots of guns and lots of ammu­ni­tion in this bigger-on-the-inside-than-the-outside chest.  Open­ing it (while locked) at bor­der inspec­tions should just reveal the stacks of paper.

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The next dream I have a more fuzzy mem­ory of.  Some friends and I were going to “The Dig­gna­tion Com­pound.”  For those that do not know, Dig­gna­tion is a weekly video pod­cast that cov­ers some of the more inter­est­ing and pop­u­lar sub­mis­sions to Digg.  The sto­ries they cover are a lit­tle tech heavy and the show is low bud­get, but in a good grass­roots sort of way.  Any­way, it is a lit­tle odd that I dreamed about this, as the episode have been queu­ing up on the TV for a month or two because I just have not had the time to watch.  As far as I know, there is no actual Dig­gna­tion Com­pound; it is filmed in the apart­ments of the two hosts.

So this Dig­gna­tion Com­pound was one part Dis­ney­land, one part night­club, one part cas­tle, and one part pri­vate man­sion (with secret pas­sages, of course.) It was the only thing on a rocky island in the mid­dle of a lake.  Once across the water and inside the lower sec­tion of the cas­tle, there were long lines to get in.  This was not a big deal because the friends I was with hap­pened to know Kevin Rose (the founder of Digg, one of the stars of Dig­gna­tion, and the financier of the com­pound) who would let us cut right in.  They got in, but I some­how got left behind, hang­ing out in line.  The peo­ple there were crazy-fanatical, but fun, and there was good music play­ing.  Every­thing was clean and white and futuristic-looking (in direct oppo­si­tion to the look of the out­side of this castle-like place).  The line had lots of switch­backs and even had rail­ings, like Dis­ney­land lines. 

Even­tu­ally, Kevin Rose him­self (but in dis­guise so nobody would rec­og­nize him) came down to get me.  Instead of try­ing to cut through to the front of the line, he use a secret entrance.  He pulled on a lit­tle white cube stick­ing out of a shiny white wall and a lad­der, pre­vi­ously flush to the wall and absolutely seam­less, emerged.  We climbed that to the top, and I asked him why other peo­ple hadn’t found the lad­der and used it to sneak in.  He casu­ally replied as he unlocked some­thing, that once you got to the top, if you did not have the right key you’d be vapor­ized.  Oh. 

Once inside, it was very def­i­nitely a night­club.  With an open bar.

So that was dream num­ber 2.  Again, I have no idea why Dig­gna­tion was fea­tured in it, as it has been off my radar for a while.  Maybe it’s a sign I should catch up on episodes.  For all I know, they’ve bought a com­pound in the past month or two.

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Tagged as: box, castle, compound, digg, diggnation, disneyland, keys, locks, mansion, nightclub, pillow, spanish, tardis, trunk, warehouse, xfiles