There was nothing I could do

I had this really strange dream, and in it somebody led me into a room that was full of baskets. "Count them," he said.

The whole thing seemed totally futile. I mean, there was a lot of baskets in there, and when I say a lot I mean just that. The room was really large, and the baskets were more than a single man could count in a day.

The whole thing became a lot more futile when the man turned off the light, closed the door, and left me standing there in pitch black darkness. I couldn't see a thing. I mean I knew I was surrounded by lots and lots of baskets, but I just couldn't see a thing.

I don't know what possessed me, but I really felt like I absolutely had to count those baskets. Call it sense of duty or whatever. I tried to find my way back to the door, hoping I'd find a light switch there, but kept stumbling over baskets all the time and never made it to the door.

I thought that one way of counting the baskets could be by somehow getting them all on one side of the room and then moving them to the other side, one by one, but when I wanted to start doing that, I couldn't find any of the baskets; it was as if all of a sudden they were all gone.

Then at some point I thought I saw a tiny speck of light, and sure enough, as I moved closer towards it, I noticed I had found the door. I opened it, but it was just as dark outside as it was inside. I walked out, and just as I closed the door from the outside, the lights went on again inside, and I could see that indeed all the baskets had disappeared.

The door slammed shut. There was nothing I could do other than wake up.

Going up

Lately, I have these weird dreams involving elevators. This may have to do with the fact that we have a lot of elevators where I work, and they seem to be out of order most of the time.

Anyway, in this dream, which is set somewhere similar to where I work, I and some colleagues are trying to get this elevator to take us somewhere where we need to go for some reason, but it's like it's either possessed by ghosts or controlled by some sinister power, because it never takes us where we want to go. In one case we end up on the wrong floor in a part of the building that is still under construction, with no walls or floors or anything, in another case it takes us to some really spooky basement. It seems all the time we are pressing buttons, but not getting anywhere.

At some point we are outside the elevator, waiting for it to arrive, and lo and behold, the elevator does arrive from below, and it also looks brand new. As the door opens, we notice it's also brand new inside (white and dark bluish, sort of). It is then that we see there's a young man lying on the floor, mid-twenties, blond. He looks like he's asleep, but soon it becomes clear that he is actually dead.

I hear somebody say, "Poor guy, he couldn't take the pressure. He went up too fast." Somebody else keeps saying, "He doesn't belong here. Send him down. It's not our elevator either, it doesn't belong here, send it down", repeating the sentence with greater and greater urgency, as if something terrible were to happen if we didn't send it down again.

So I step in, push the button, and jump out before the door closes again. We all watch the elevator go down. As it disappears, everybody seems to be very, very relieved.

Counterpoint

You with the
          green shirt, you
with the
          cocky smile your
speckled elvish
          eyes I'd
love to
          hold that which you
are in my
          arms and feel your
warmth
          your
soft breath
          on my
skin and all that is
          you
within
          me.

Disconnected thoughts

If you don't support Greece in today's Euro 2004 semi-finals, you're an evil person. The Czech team are going to win anyway.

What does it say about contemporary film scripts when rave reviwes of Shrek 2 call the film "one of the most mature movies about adult relationships ever made"? Or what does it say about relationships in the USA?

The weather is tedious. Extremely tedious.

Update: No they didn't. Greece stood up excellently against a strong Czech team for 105 minutes and shot a totally unbelievable goal in the very last minute. Thanks for your support.

However, the Shrek mystery hasn't been solved yet, and the weather still sucks.

Tickets, please

I had this really weird dream last night, which at some point turned into a veritable movie about crime, despair and, finally, romantic love. I actually managed to dream it to the end, closing titles and all, even though I was a bit disappointed that the credits for writing and directing went to some German guy called Uli Becker (I ckecked in the IMDb, he doesn't exist) and not to me.

Apparently the movie was edited together from some epic TV series called "30 Jahre Deutschland" about three decades in the lives of four rather weird characters — a former Russian athlete, an autistic boy, and I forgot who the two others were, even though I can still kind of see their faces on this set of publicity brochures for the movie.

I personally featured only in two very brief scenes of the movie; one, in which I was kind of a bad guy and had to say a few lines and look menacingly at some other character, and the other one, and this is the one that totally baffles me, where I'm sitting on this train, and one of the colleagues from work shows up, and he's obviously the train conductor because he starts checking the tickets.

I don't remember where I was going on this train, but I was going there and back again, and I had a 24-hour ticket, which I showed to the colleague/conductor on the way there, and for some reason I wanted to really confuse him on the way back, so I bought a second 24-hour ticket for the ride back, even though the first one was still valid.

It confused the hell out of him — he just didn't know what to do with the second 24-hour ticket ("But your first one is still valid") —, but as it was totally legitimate, there was nothing he could do about it.

And while we're at it...

My God (QuickTime, 22 MB, 14 minutes). From this DVD.

Surrealism

Apparently my surrealist predisposition is considerably stronger than my pornographic imagination. I suppose this explains a couple of things about my sex life, but reading this spam mail, it also prevents me from seeing anything other than three women sitting around at table at a pastry shop in Budapest, first dancing with, and then eating weird things that have escaped from some Gary Larson cartoon.

At least that's what you said

Since I walked away
I haven't spent a single minute
not thinking

Since you walked
away
I haven't spent a single minute
not

Doing things that don't
matter, while
trying to figure out if your hands were
metaphorically stretched out

(mine were
ready to touch
but I didn't because
it wasn't a good
idea)

or not, just
remembering

I never gave you
anything but a silly silly
flower; it seems a bit
cheap now, compared with
the hair clip you gave me—

At least you said
good luck take care
at least you said that
at least that's
what you said

Why oh why (2)

So this thing starts with some kind of background noise. White noise. Or pink noise, I forget which is which. How did they come up with those names anyway?

So there's this sound, like static, or whatever, and you think it's just noise until you suddenly hear something that sounds like

EMRAEHUOYNAC EREHTHGUACMAI YAWAOGTNOD
OWTYTROFEERHTYNEWTNEETXISNEETFIFTHGIERUOF

and you ask yourself, did I really hear this or did I simply watch too much Lost yesterday? Especially if you are perfectly aware that you did watch too much Lost the day before.

But something is not quite right, it's either the way the cat looked at you on the way to work this morning, or something in the colour of the sky, and you think that the mushroom sauce that you had for lunch might have been made of, you know, the wrong kind of mushroom.

But there's no proof to confirm your suspicions, ever. And this sort of thing just goes as it came, and you end up sitting in your comfy Poäng chair, the one piece of Ikea furniture that for some reason never shows up as a prop on any TV series, let alone Lost, and you start to wonder if all of this ever really happened.

And then you start wondering about why the Poäng chair never shows up as a prop on any TV series and you know that if you don't find an answer soon, then you might be in some kind of trouble.

And then you realize that you're already in some kind of trouble. Not very serious trouble, but trouble nevertheless.

Scoot

Of all the nonsensical dreams that I've had in my life, the one from last night was one of those that made least sense. In it, all that happened was basically that I rolled around the city on a micro scooter. Nothing else, as if me on a micro scooter was really everything my subconscious wanted to tell me. I don't even own a micro scooter. Never have. Never wanted one. It makes no sense at all.

Then I woke up. Again. Thanks to my pollen allergy, the inside of my nose has swollen to dramatic proportions, so much in fact that I am now snoring at such a noise and vibration intensity that I wake up every time the snoring starts, which, as I had to notice last night, is apparently quite often.

I fell asleep again after the crypic scooter dream (and probably a few others that I can't remember) and woke up this morning to an unpleasant pain in my nose-throat region. It felt as if I had snored myself sore.

I could up my dose of antihistamines. Or I could buy a micro scooter and roll off to see an ear-nose-throat specialist. Maybe that's what this dream was all about.