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One night after karate we’re all listening to the radio (not sure why), and we hear a news bulletin about how a sniper has been shooting people in the east bay. There was no more information, but the report makes me extremely eager to get out of the east bay and back home. I think about the news a little as I head toward the bridge – on foot for some reason, but covering the same amount of ground as if I were driving – but for the most part I’m concerned about something else that has me in a melancholy mood (can’t remember what).

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I’m standing in the kitchen of my family’s house with my mom and dad and one of my sisters. It’s kind of a flashback dream, apparently; my sister and I are both teenagers. But it’s sort of a false flashback, since this is quite a posh kitchen, much posher than ours ever was, and by the time my sister and I were teenagers our parents had longsince been divorced.

But here we are, and my dad is a movie star, and it turns out he’s just landed a huge contract for a role in what will probably turn out to be a landmark film. We’re all ecstatic and celebrating together.

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In August 2006 my college roommate Monica and I spent 3 weeks in Holland and Scotland. I recently had a dream in which she and I had decided to do a whirwind tour of Western Europe. Only we decided not to plan ahead of time — we were just going to go, and figure out the details on the fly. We decided to do this during the winter holidays, from about December 15 to January 15, mainly because neither of us felt up to visiting our families during the Holidays. We also figured it might be a fun time to travel, because who goes on European vacation during the winter holidays? No one, obviously.

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I don’t remember a lot about this dream, but it stuck in my mind enough that I thought it was worth writing it down.  In this dream, the world was definitely in some kind of serious crisis.  For some reason I was visiting some super advanced high tech place where they were working on techniques for identifying and locating people who would be able to help the world get through the crisis.  Their main technique involved a bunch of supercomputers and some INSANELY insanely ridiculously complex math which ultimately produced a 4 x 6 matrix, which could then be fed into ANOTHER machine that could somehow decode the matrix and come up with a list of about twenty-five of these very important people and their addresses.

The thing about the matrix technique was that it had been proven theoretically, but the people who worked at the super-secret, super-high-tech facility were still trying to get it to work in practice.  They seemed very frustrated.  I also remember there being some weirdness around the fact that there was something sort of mystical and religious about this whole process, which made them a little touchy about it.  While I was there, I was looking at some of their research and decided to take a shot at coming up with one of these “magical matrices” by hand.  So I thought about it and played with the numbers for a while, and then wrote down the following matrix:

[0 1 1 0 1 0]

[0 0 1 0 0 0]

[some numbers I don’t remember, all integers]

[some other numbers I don’t remember, all integers]

(& if you’re a linear algebra type, you’ll have noticed that this ain’t such a bad start toward row-echelon form.)

Then I went up to one of the  researchers and showed her my matrix and asked if I could put it in the machine.  She, of course, knew it wouldn’t work, since I’d basically come up with the numbers out of my head (almost; somehow intuition had told me that I definitely wanted one row that was basically solved, and another that was in only three variables, & all in the same proportion).  “There’s no way it’ll work with only integers,” she said, seeming a little put out as she took the matrix and put it in the machine.  And low and behold, the machine spit out a beautiful list of smart and talented people (& their addresses) that might be able to save the world from its crisis!  No one could believe it, but then it turned out that I fulfilled some kind of prophecy or something by just coming up with the numbers out of my head.

Weird, huh?

I only remember this one in bits & pieces, really.  I started with a little girl that had been terrorized by some evil presence (we don’t know at first what it was exactly), and after being saved several times, she’s put into a sort of protective custody with a man who’s supposed to be this great protector.  Somehow, we are able to see what’s going on there (it’s like a big greenhouse or something?), but can’t take action right now.  Someone starts to notice that something is wrong; it’s like the man is putting her to bed, only someone suddenly notices that the bed is actually a kind of sacrificial altar that the evil uses.  Everyone starts to panic a bit; then the man looks up at the camera (or whatever), and his face has changed, and he has a knife in his hand.  People get hysterical and are trying to figure out what to do, only this is happening too far away for anyone to be able to stop him.  And, sure enough, he winds his arm up and stabs her right in the center of the chest while she’s sleeping.  We hear her screaming and see her writhing around, trying to escape, only the knife has gone right through her and pinned her to the altar.  It is a gut wrenching scene.  Then the evil man is gone.

The people who had been in town trying to protect her decide that there is nothing to do but leave town.  There is an older man (he’s like the master evil fighter), and then he has a few sons & other apprentices who work with him.  At some point, there is another child that needs protecting; he bundles her up in the back of a wagon with the supplies.  “The wolves will come after us,” and we understand that the wolves are a manifestation of whatever evil is at work here.  “They’ll be on our trail.”  There are pillows that have some sort of protective significance, and definitely some protective sort of bread.  He gives us bags of grain from which to feed everyone; I get frustrated that we only have flat pieces of cardboard to use for plates, and the people in my wagon don’t seem to understand that you have to bend it in order for all the grain not to just roll off.

We also have at our disposals some magical knives, which are about the size of little plastic butter knives, but are made from the bones of unicorns, which makes them powerful against the evil wolves (though you have to get into very close range to use them).  We also have the spirits of the unicorns themselves, which are ghost-like, and seem to appear when needed.  At one point we get ambushed by the wolves; the magic pillows go missing and a few people are freaking out; and at one point I see an evil wolf sneaking up and slash satisfyingly at it with the unicorn knife.