01/11/2002 Archived Entry: "Dreaming of employment"

I've been talking more and more with people from my George job, and more and more of them are quitting and being sad. I talked with the guy who used to be the NT administrator, who is still jobless. The job market, frankly, sucks.

I had a dream last night. Damn, was it crazy.

I dreamed I was a crewmember on a spaceship that was a cross between the Discovery, from 2001: A Space Oddyssey, and a cruise ship. There were a lot of passengers and people dressed fancy and having fun, and we were on an expedition to Jupiter. I had to shut down the central computer--HAL, of course--before it went insane and killed everyone, so I was running through dimly-lit hallways and across ballrooms filled with laughing, slow-motion-moving people, and every few steps would be these round security robots with suction cup arms, and as soon as I ran past them they would come to life and start trying to attack me. Every door I ran through I tried to lock behind me, and I approached the central computer nexus place, which was like a huge broad hallway from the 1960s, with a foam-tile roof and linoleum floor and drab, white plaster walls. The corridor was very long and very wide and had glass doors every few feet, and each of them had a combination lock.

Figuring, "Hell, I'm a crewmember on this ship, I should know these combinations," I went up to the first one and spun it around randomly. Wonder of wonders, it opened! I slipped through it and locked it just as a line of security droids came into view and started moving toward me, slowly but inexorably. I tried the next lock, again spinning the dial randomly, and it also opened. I just yanked on the next one and the lock fell off--they weren't actually locked. Furthermore, I discovered that the doors behind me were staying open, and the robots were just marching through them toward me. The feeling was both terrifying and completely unreal.

I made it into the computer's control room and sealed it with a huge sliding partition, which fastened with some kind of automatic latch. I disconnected the computer by jabbing the wall with a screwdriver--hey, it seemed the thing to do. Once the computer was off, windows opened all in the room, and I discovered that our spaceship had already REACHED Jupiter, and we were orbiting inside its atmosphere and the ship was falling apart. Through the portals, I could see that the ship was moving at incredible speed over an orange landscape of clouds and mountains, and that pieces of the ship were flaking away as we moved faster and faster. I walked out of the computer control room toward the aft quarter of the ship, and I had to avoid the huge holes that were appearing in the floor.

This dream is probably a metaphor for something important, or something. Stupid dreams.

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