Idiots Don't Wake Up

All this meditation must be doing something because lately I've been having really long and plentiful dreams. Time to put some paper near the bed again so I can write them down as soon as I wake up. I'm pretty sure I see around 4 a night.

There was a beautiful one today that had almost no action - not usually my favorite recipe - but this time was very satisfying. I'm in Cambridge, looking over the Harvard bridge, and I watch as the last few cars get off the bridge and only the illegally parked ones are left. At this moment, a pair of headlights lights up the horizon from the Boston side, but the car responsible for them doesn't come into view, mostly I think because I don't want it to. At the other end of the bridge there's a castle instead of Boston, and the headlights put it in a perfect light. It's really majestic - the kind that deserves some poetry from someone other than me. I decide to take a picture with my cellphone.

The camera on my phone works really weirdly - this is where I should have gone lucid (if not when I saw the castle instead of Boston): for some reason (I'm thinking in the dream), the camera input is coming from satellite, and it's coming in really slowly. So first I see the view of everything from above, and then it slowly gets to me, and then it starts moving towards the castle. I keep snapping shots as this little movie plays out on my cell screen, all the way up until the view is moving up the castle walls, discovering towers in the darkness and whatnot. It was like a movie director's wet dream.

Another dream today had to do with two groups investigating some mystery concerning a giant mythical creature. The two groups were the Smart People and the Beautiful People. By some hideous flaw in the system, I was placed with the Smart People (how could I not have realized that I was dreaming? Just the fact that I didn't should have eliminated me from the Smart People group!). Anyway, the Smart People were in charge of figuring stuff out, and the Beautiful People were the ones that got all the action and took all the credit. But the two groups didn't cooperate well at all - I guess we wanted credit too, because the whole dream was really about running away from the Beautiful People and not giving them our intel. There was this really stupid door scene that reminded me of Signs - where the all-powerful aliens with their hyperspace drive and Kosher pork and whatever other crazy technology, can't get through a two-inch-thick wooden door.

Hopefully there'll be more dreams tonight. Hopefully I won't be an idiot and I'll realize that the third arm sprouting from my nose isn't normally there, and will go lucid. It's about time.

This online Chinese dictionary I'm using is too good to be true. It gives you example sentences for each word, and these examples are exactly the kind you want to be using on a daily basis. Take the word "guy" for example. In Chinese it's 家伙

Common usage examples:

他不是那种和你一样的坏家伙。
He is not such a bad guy as you (are).
这个平时温和的家伙简直发疯了, 开枪打死了十个人.
This ordinary quiet guy just freaked out and shot ten people.
你这忘恩负义的家伙!
You ungrateful wretch!
他是个卑鄙的家伙.
He's a scurvy wretch.
他是个笨手笨脚的[古里古怪的]家伙.
He's an awkward/queer old cuss.
你瞧那戴怪帽子的家伙!
Get a load of that old bloke with the funny hat!

Or "kill" - 杀

他们在密谋如何杀害他。
They are plotting how to murder him.
那只骚扰绵羊的狗被杀死了。
The dog that molested the sheep was killed.
因为宿怨，他最终杀了她。
He eventually killed her because of a long-standing feud.

I could read this thing all day, it's like a joke machine. And I can't wait to use all of these in China. Come visit me when I'm back, I'll be the guy in the little urn.