But What Is The ISBN Number?!

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Mental Note: For smooth (that is, non-chunky) coffee, remember to put a filter in the coffee maker.

I do not remember much about my dream last night–specific scenes and specific objects, but not a whole lot by way of plot. I was on one team, but there were others. The other teams may or may not have been human. I was part of a research, intelligence, security, and/or military organization, trying to gather data about the various alien species. It turned out I had to work with some of the other teams because we were missing large chunks of data. Toward the end of the dream, I found myself at the Earth headquarters because I had to ask a very important question (which I do not currently remember). The lady there looked at me with extremely scared eyes, and started punching things into her computer terminal. A section of her keyboard, above the keys, slid open and another couple of buttons came out, which she pressed. I assumed she was looking up the answer to my question, but another lady, at a neighboring terminal, noticed what was going on, stood up, issued a few warnings, then shot the scared lady. It turned out, she was initiating some kind of planetary auto-destruct sequence (as a defense mechanism), because of the nature of the questions I had asked. She had succeeded in starting the timer, and we had to go disarm a core thingy somewhere.

Anyway, that was not the point of this dream story. The point was that all throughout the dream, I had a book. This is a book that has appeared in other dreams in the past: red leather hardcover, 4 or 5 cm thick, and typical nice hardcover look. You can only open the book to one section because it has no “pages” exactly. It is like a little computer, but more. A screen takes up about 3/4 of the page on either side, with touchscreen-like buttons that automatically reconfigure. You interact not with a normal keyboard, but by zooming into and out of “scenes” or “maps” or some sort of thing like that, and the buttons that would automatically reconfigure had no symbols–they were various colors and shapes. They were not just simple shapes, like squares and circles, but one looked like a sci-fi spaceship or futuristic jet, for instance (actually, there were two buttons that looked liked that–one blue and one green). I had no idea how to work it, I just pushed buttons until it started to kind of show the things I needed. The section of the pages, at the bottom, that were not part of a screen, also tended to reconfigure itself. Sometimes there was a section that looked like the elastic part of a glove, that you could put your hand in. “Inside” it was kind of like that whole “portable hole” concept. There was a large storage area (larger than the physical volume of space the book itself takes up), in which you could put and take various objects. The book seemed simultaneously very old, very antiquated, and extremely high-tech and futuristic.

Posted in: Books Dreams

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