The Information Super-Frog

New Orleans conversations included service people's encounters with celebrity asshole Shia LaBeouf (who has been repeatedly arrested in the city), and account of account of a raccoon in the crawl-space under a house getting into a fight with a neighborhood cat.

So in a dream, pest control workers were setting up catch traps to capture Shia LaBeouf.

That one sort of makes sense.

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In another dream, I wrote a Valentines Day card for a greeting card company, and it unexpectedly became very popular, and there was demand for reproductions on t-shirts, mugs, etc.

It was a cartoon drawing of a skeleton, with the caption "Eye candy in your brain, Brain candy in your heart".

That one makes less sense. Complain to my subconscious; awake I don't understand it either.

I dreamed I was a survivor of the sinking of the Titanic - not the one from 1912, but somehow from another Titanic that met the same tragic fate this year.

I and other survivors were rescued from a small life boat, brought to a large modern airport along the coast, and given some food. Then we were separated and sent to different parts of the airport.

I was on my own in a gate terminal for hours, then a full day; I asked agents at gate desks for information as to what next but none of them had any information. I became worried I'd been forgotten and lost. Then I found someone working at the airport who was an old acquaintance, and at first things to be going better. We talked briefly and pleasantly about events we'd both been to in New Orleans 25 years earlier. He put some effort into making a couple of phone calls to his superiors to try to find out where I should go next, but without luck.
All I had was the clothes I was wearing and a blanket. I'd lost all my paperwork which had gotten waterlogged and disintegrated. So I worried I was in danger because I had no documentation. So I asked the fellow at the desk if he could vouch that when we were in New Orleans I was presumed to be a citizen. He said he couldn't swear that was so. I said I'm not asking you to swear certain knowledge, as you never examined my papers, just that when we were there people were acting like they presumed I was a local. He said "I wouldn't go that far" and his eyes narrowed as he looked at me. I became worried that he was going to turn me in to ICE for a reward since I was undocumented, and I'd be disappeared in some horrible concentration camp.
I backed away from him, and looking around the airport found another acquaintance, a musician from France who often visited New Orleans. I said I survived the sinking of the Titanic, I had nothing and nowhere to go. He said he was about to fly back to Paris, and happened to have a pass for an extra so he could bring me along, and could put me up in his apartment in Paris for a couple of days. I said, yes please, I'd very much appreciate that.
So we flew to Paris, then took the train to where he lived. I was slightly disappointed to find it was in one of the outer arrondissements, far from the historic city center, and the architecture and streets looked to be rather generic modern urbanized suburb. But that was secondary to relief, as I knew at last I was safe.

In my dream last night I was enrolled to start taking some sort of classes at the University of New Orleans.

In real life, I've never taken any classes at UNO. I've visited the campus for special events and to do research in the library/archives. It's a rather spread-out post-WWII campus with lots of 1960s and 1970s modern architecture.

In my dream the campus also had a large rectangular 4 story concrete building painted dark blue, that included dorms, classrooms, offices, cafeteria, auditorium, library and bookstore. So I was going to spend pretty much all my time in that building. The building seemed older than the rest of the campus, with elements similar to real-life high schools around New Orleans - early Art Deco auditorium in somewhat worn state like McMain before it was renovated, old hardwood staircases with ruts from wear of generations of feet like the old Ben Franklin school when it was in a repurposed early 19th century town hall.

I didn't know what I'd be studying nor why, just that I was enrolled and this was what I was going to be doing. I was headed into the auditorium for orientation. An acquaintance stopped me and told me "Did you hear about the explorers who went to the Sun? They got burned up, but the Sun cooled down because the heat was all transferred to them when they burned up!" We both knew this was absurd, but he thought it was a funny joke but I just thought it was stupid. I just said "Later - I got to go" and continued to find my seat.

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Tangential bonus: When I first saw an "UNO" game deck in the 1970s, I assumed it was a University of New Orleans card deck.

A bit of a dream last night giving insight to the extent to which I can read or write in a dream.

The parts of the brain related to reading are generally inactive or minimally active in dreams. Many people can't read at all in dreams.

In my dream I had to write something about a horse. I started writing, but then was unsure if the word "horse" started with a "j" or with a "g". Trying to figure it out pulled me out of deep dream to semi-wakefulness, realizing "horse" started with an "h" of course of course.

I dreamed I was at an out-of town conference at some university. I was in the very nice conference center, half-an-hour before the keynote presentation, to be given by Gwen Iffil (former tv journalist/writer) and Gwen Thompkins (New Orleans music reporter/writer). It was billed on promotional posters "Special Double Gwen Event!" I realized I didn't have my camera nor smart-phone with me, so I couldn't take photos, but fortunately my room was in a hotel just across the street so I had time to go get them. I crossed the street and went up in an elevator to my room, got my camera and phone, then decided to lie down on the bed for a minute. Then I realized I'd fallen asleep and was unable to wake back up and would miss the key event of the conference! Oh no! I finally succeed in waking myself up in my dream, and found out to my relief that missing the event had just been a dream, and actually it was first thing in the morning and I had hours to spare.
I exited the hotel bedroom through another room in our small hotel suite, sort of a breakfast nook, where Ms H. and a good trumpeter who I used to play in a band with were chatting. They'd gone to the nook room to talk so as not to wake me, which I found very considerate. Apparently our band was to play for the conference in the evening.
I noticed some ants eating a dead termite on the floor of the nook room. I knew that these termite-eating black ants didn't bother humans, and if you had to have ants indoors these were the best kind of ants to have, so I decided not to complain since the hotel accommodations were otherwise very good, so I could put up with those ants for a couple of days.

I went down to the hotel lobby, where there was a cafe and a row of small shops. I spotted my father sitting at a cafe table flirting with a woman who I was pretty sure was a hooker. I knew this was after my mother died and before my father got remarried, so I thought that was his business and none of mine. He spotted me and seemed embarrassed, but I pretended not to notice him. I decided to walk the long way around to keep distance, even though I found that to do so I had to climb up a ladder on a tower supporting photography equipment then climb back down the other side.

Then I found that I was in a multi-level shopping mall in Tokyo. Floors, ceilings, and walls were all white with a plethora of multi-colored neon signs, all in Japanese, which I couldn't read. I could only recognize a couple of symbols, and there were a very few words in Western Roman script, but not enough for me to get any useful information from. I had memorized the layout of the place the previous day, but over-night they had completely redecorated and rearranged everything, so I had no idea how to get back to my room.

I took out my phone to call Ms H - If she didn't know the answer off hand, she could use her business manager talents to get the needed information. However I found that instead of a telephone keypad, I would have to dial the number using a book of colorful postage stamps, pressing on an individual stamp of a certain value to enter a number. This took me a while to figure out, and after a few unsuccessful tries succeeded in dialing H's number. However it gave me a message that I had to add a country code, which turned out to be a long text phrase I had to input using the awkward postage stamp input.

There was also an incident, it might have been somewhere in this dream or a different one, involving a type of hot chocolate mix we recently got from a Latino grocery, except in the dream the hot chocolate had letters like alphabet soup made of chocolate. I and some other fellow were quite sure that there was some sort of message in the letters, but we couldn't figure it out before the letters dissolved.

Like pretty much everyone who spent any time in the USA in the 2nd half of the 20th century, I was aware of Lucy Ball on television.
As an adult, I was somewhat surprised to find out she had 3 separate shows, "I Love Lucy", "The Lucy Show", and Here's Lucy". My impression had been that it was all one very long running show, with Lucy and various subsidiary characters, that had been on the air since about a decade before I was born and was still going when I was in my teens. Episodes were often on tv on reruns. I watched only irregularly. I thought it was sometimes very funny indeed, sometimes not, and often repetitive and annoying.

I haven't watched a Lucy episode in many years, so I'm not sure why it popped up in my dream. I likely saw a brief promo for it on "METV", which Hollie and I watch regularly for the "Svengoolie" comedic horror host Saturday nights.


Anyways, my dream:

Ms Hollie and I were hired as extras for Lucy's show. It was the original one filmed in black & white. Most of the show was a series of chase scenes on foot. Lucy & Ricky, sometimes with Fred & Ethel and sometimes not, were in one group. Hollie & I and a couple of other extras were in another group. A third group of people was chasing both of us. Sometimes we were running the same way, sometimes in opposite ways, our paths intersecting and clashing in wacky hijinks. At one point we were running through an office building, and Lucy shouted "We're being chased by a tiger! Quick, we need to find a veterinarian!" which was a laugh line. Then we were being chased up some stairs and Lucy's group and Hollie & my group were separated again.

At the end of the take Hollie was out of breath. I contemplated that I couldn't always do running like this (in my dream I was in condition where some days I could run but other days not), and I wondered if we were put in an episode with so much running to get rid of us, since the show usually didn't have much running. Then with the extras and crew we sat down at picnic tables to a meal served on paper plates. It included zucchini and french-fries, and I was pleased to find they were quite tasty.

I dreamed I was hired to play trombone for a concert with the New Leviathan (despite that they're a mostly reading band and I'm a mostly ear player - but I know the repertory). However it was apparently a last minute thing - I needed to wear a tailcoat, which I didn't have, and my trombone was across town and I didn't have time to go get it. So I went into a big cluttered maze-like used goods/antique/pawn shop to get a tailcoat and workable trombone. One of the workers there was leading me to where there was a tailcoat in my size when I lost him, then I woke up.

Colonial era buildings in New Orleans sometimes had an extra story called an "entresol". The ground floor of buildings in the old town was often given to commerce, with living space upstairs. The entresol was between the two, serving as warehouse space - sort of an attic in the middle rather than top of a building. They were often short in height, sometimes with ceilings too low for taller people to fully stand up in.

Some old buildings constructed with entresols have been modified to raise the ground floor ceilings or otherwise rearrange the interior to effectively eliminate them. Other enteresols have been long blocked off, but some others have continued still in use.

The Old Absinthe House on Bourbon Street is an example; the entresol story here has the half-circle windows made to look like fan lights over the ground floor doorways.



I dreamed that a friend had opened a bar in the entresol of an old building - a speakeasy, since it couldn't be up to code, as it was a particularly low ceiling only about 4 feet tall, and people had to be hunched over in there, had no windows, and it was only accessible via twisty dark corridors and old narrow staircases.

My friend tried to encourage me to patronize his place. I begged off, pointing out that it would be too difficult for me since I hobble around with a cane. (Sometimes in dreams I walk with a cane, other dreams I'm more mobile and lythe like yesteryear.) Really that was in part an excuse, because even in nimble youth I might have gone once just to look at it and never went back. There are fans of dimly-lit spooky bars in New Orleans, but I was never one of them. Indeed I've never been much for bars in general except when one happened to be the place where good live music was happening.

Back to my dream - I expressed skepticism at my friend's business model of a hard-to-get-to and hard-to-be-in bar, but he argued that in Venice there are bars that can only be reached by boat that have flourished for 200 years. I thought that analogy unconvincing but decided not to argue and wished him well.

I had a rambling dream last night that I recall several parts of.

Here in real life, Ms. H said she wanted some bubble tea, so we plan to pick some up with some up along with food at a Chinese restaurant we like later today.

My dream started out with Ms H and I going to a shopping mall for bubble teas.

After that, I wandered around the mall on my own for a while. It was large, clean, had many shops (most of which I had no interest in) and a modest amount of people. It was rather maze-like, and I kept discovering new corridors.

I was glad to know that the pandemics were finally over and masks were no longer needed.

Then I came to some sort of work station in the mall. A friend who works in tech and I sat at big computer terminals to do some work, behind a glass partition from a wide mall corridor. He was playing silent movies on a side monitor. I was playing the sound track from the Marx Brothers film "The Cocoanuts". This went on for a while, then my friend remarked that the sound and pictures really didn't go together, which I had to agree with so I turned my sound off.

Then I roamed the mall some more, and came to a part that was along a dock or wharf beside a canal or bay. I got into a conversation with a musician I knew who was seated in a mid-sized power-boat. After a bit she invited me to join her in the boat, and we'd go out and watch some fireworks. I got in the boat and we cast off.

That's all.

I've on & off had more trouble sleeping than previously, what with my mind going towards... you know, *STUFF*

However when I have, I've sometimes woken up to note that I had pleasant dreams, which is a relief.

I don't remember several, but one I do: For background, in the 1980s I worked at what was then the largest bookstore in Greater New Orleans. In my dream, I was back there, but rather than being in a 19th century commercial building on Canal Street, it was inside an old castle, like the set of a 1930s horror movie. No monsters nor other horrors, that was just the building the bookstore was located in. So as one of the ranking employees, I had an amulet I wore on a chain around my neck. The item on the chain looked like a buffalo nickel coin, but had a special power. When one held it up to any book, it would show how many people were reading copies of that particular book. This was useful for the store so we'd know how many more copies to order. I was aware that it sometimes generated 'false positives' from people who were browsing in the store and happened to open the book to take a brief look at it.