윤

I was at a family picnic in a school park, standing between several groups playing games. One hit a softball in our direction and I stopped it with my palm. A football then tumbled nearby and I pitched it back. And at some point I joined a frisbee troupe. When I returned I became disoriented because everyone had gone or the buildings didn’t look right anymore. I approached one of them and inquired with a balding person there (who resembled the fellow seated across from us the night before at Musha) if he’d seen the people I was with. He couldn’t help. The skies turned gray and the crowds dispersed, and as they did, I caught up with my friends and their organizer: Bernie Mac. My “wife”, a short round Asian woman hurried past me with a disapproving look. The description of tonight’s episode read that I, “Jay Lum” caused a disaster, apparently by making a “whoosh” sound while throwing and catching that frisbee. The clouds were indeed churning ominously in the distance.

(I’ve dreamt daughter before. But this time I think it’s Tejas’ imminent fatherhood I’ve got on the mind. They’ve left the sex of their child with the gynecologist, so I get my shot at playing oracle.) Maybe four or five, he wore a red suit with extra padding at the knees and reminded me of Perry’s older boy—who cracked us all up at the picnic by sitting down to the watermelon-eating contest and taking his time to enjoy his piece—with a penchant for perching in an open window, in our room a thousand feet up. He was being cared for by someone else, and seemed comfortable enough on the sill, but I removed him from it anyway.

Nothing. Gaiman’s Caped Crusader story is clever, but I don’t think it was enough, because we were watching 44.6 last night about a shop in Taiwan that evolved beyond the easy copyright infringement on the mainland with amalgamated character goods featuring such fanciful transplants like a Hello Kitty head on ドラえもん’s body and a Batman’s on Superman (which reminded me of Grant Morrison’s Most Excellent Superbat and makes more sense, I suppose, than the dead guy who’d result from the other way around), and still dreamed of meeting the Man of Tomorrow instead. He was demonstrating his “heat breath” and burned my cheek, whereupon I reminded the big indestructible oaf—my impression of Frank Quitely’s depiction—to do like a thermostat and switch his setting to COOL for me. Another super-poweree showed up and played Snow Miser to his Heat, and their clash of oral jets created a localized weather disturbance. It began raining inside the building, the moisture forming off the surface of the ceilings themselves, and I knew it’d get worse, so I warned everyone in the office to flee. The doors were locked by the mounting meteorological pressure from outdoors, and I ran upstairs to an open skylight to access the roof and a sprawling metropolitan vista.

…And all I have to show are dreams about a Brad Pitt Western where he was an old gunfighter beset by an equally aged rival and they morphed him back to his youth, like Benjamin Button, for a second before his duel in his current long white hair; and another showing how a high-profile Asian head-of-state escaped arrest when his supporters arranged for him to be mobbed by a crowd during a public appearance. He was garbed in orange and kept on a metal leash, but he pretended to fall, and everyone jumped on him at once, hiding a switch with a willing cohort while the spring-like cord to him was surreptitiously cut and re-soldered unbeknownst to the guard. (Must be hearing 남재 talk about fashioning his own SFII joystick.)

Could be 老婆 playing with the gas fireplace last night and not remembering which way the key was turned to with the valve closed, but I dreamed of looking out the window and seeing missiles launching in the distance and filling the skies with columns of white smoke. Retaliation was inevitable, and soon enough, I’d also watch as a wall of the same cloudy color moved in and presumably destroy my room with a view, along with the small group of people gathered inside. (I know I’ve had this one before, as I must be conveying a dread not so much of said nuclear holocaust, but of being put on the spot with moments before it actually hits and not knowing what to do with them. As if I’d regret it afterwards?) I am reminded, courtesy the Shakespeare app that Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet Act I, Scene IV, called dreams “the children of an idle brain.”

…That’s my theory, anyway. I put it together after watching 바람의 파이터 (which come on, wasn’t as nationalistic as they claim) about 在日韓国人の大山倍達, né 최영의, and guessed that the boys at Capcom must’ve had 「空手ばか一代」 on the mind when designing their country’s representative—who was E. Honda; just watch his victory celebration. Although maybe the look came later. Their new movie appears to be further proof that mankind is incapable of learning from its mistakes and moving forward, at least on a scale visible to us with lifespans measured only in decades. So last night I had a dream I was also a bad-ass martial artist taking on all-comers. Me and House teamed up to solve super-crimes. Oh, and Alvin deserves special recognition for getting us the Season 4 DVD’s.

From: Homer J.
To: spinn42@aol.com
Cc: hjerng@leland.Stanford.EDU,jae_yoon@hotmail.com,rajg@erols.com,rchenx@bigfoot.com,spacecobra@aol.com,cronnie@bigfoot.com
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 20:59:43 -0700
Subject: Tenchu Shinobi Hyakusen
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On Fri, 22 Oct 1999 15:56:51 -0700 Henry Hungtao Jerng writes:
>Maybe after reading this, Raj, you’ll want us to go back to talking about videogames?

And for my part, excerpts from my daytime preoccupations (videogame excluded), not always work-related, but passionate nonetheless:

….So the angle of my right hand must be kept as sharp as possible just before impact, for therein lies its strength and, ultimately, travel distance. (I have noticed that performance and accuracy, too, is increased when the left also assists by following through the swing motion in tandem.) And my stance, remember, should place the tee at my left foot. The titanium-faced club head definitely accounts for some of the drives which belie my standing as a mere beginner; perhaps this year’s tungsten models might make the expense worth it? No, another 1-wood would hardly round out my sparse bag–indeed, I remain equppied to play only holes less than a hundred and more than two–and must accustom myself to shorter shaft lengths with a set of irons….

….Just who was she, anyway, walking a small white poodle down busy Torrance Blvd. under the noon sun this balmy late October day? 5’2″, long, straight hair, 36C chest, per eyeball (a measurement proudly 85% accurate)–if not for my cursed luck in finally making that light at Sportmart I might have been sure. Or is this visual hallucination the start of complete psychological collapse due to failure to tide my obsession with big-breasted Asian women? Perhaps I can repeat the route on Monday; dogs require habitual maintenance, I should know. At least if I frequent the Subway nearby I can stock up on free sandwich stamps….

….Makes enough sense, that if the Purchase Order won’t post because expected receipt was set later than scheduled shipment for items reserved on it, then the solution is to change the date on the Sales Order. Integrated systems, bah….

….A machine that displays dreams has been my own dream since the cult classic “Five Million Years to Earth” (“Quatermass and the Pit” to die-hard fans), but whereas a Martian invasion of the Earth may never happen (not again, especially after that deplorable job by Tim Burton), I don’t think the idea’s that way off. Computers can do such wonders today–provide incontrovertible evidence that reshapes history, chart the course of galaxies, ruin the Star Wars trilogy–why not use their amazing processing power to interpret the visual signals that cross the brain during REM sleep? Sight, after all, is the product of neurochemical sensory stimulation, and identification of the resulting cues; if these could be catalogued in digital form, the more the better obviously, then compared to the same dream-time data, the cross-referenced images could be viewed. The principle would work like voice recognition or OCR software (or Homer’s brother Herb’s baby talk translator). Who knows? Someday it might be just as popular. Millions of web channels, and so little original content for them (Internet jokes today are recycled to the point where I’m receiving the same ones from the same people a year later), the subconscious imagination, however wildly psychotic, might be the last refuge for creativity. I could certainly dream up a better Star Wars prequel….

….Or was it D?

Okay, ignoring all the other chaff for a moment, this dream machine is a lot like my idea above. And oddly enough, I just got Quatermass and The Pit for John, since he’s the only other person I know who remembers it.

Storm. “Shockingly bad” is right. Might as well have added a buzzer-type shock to each press of the screen. Incidentally I had a dream last night of watching an old Brit comedy show with Hugh Laurie spoofing 60’s spy shows, including the Prisoner.

Cameo. I sent an image attachment via e-mail to the display model in a 3-1 employee-to-customer ratio T-Mobile store and waited for as long as I could before the sad state of tech got to me (approximately 15 minutes), and it never showed. Neither did the picture message one of their guys tested.

Animal Crossing for Wii. Another chance for Nintendo to leapfrog Sony and Microsoft with an online world for their brand, wasted.

My thumb, after dusting off the Super Famicom with the Fighting Commander, having confirmed that the PS3 supports it through the SmartJoy. I pushed the new blister through the 8-star Super Battle, but it broke at Sagat, oozing fluid onto the pad—a new, slippery sensation, to be sure, at least for someone once protected so ably by a callous there. Like a champ who completes that last mile with a torn ACL, I kept up the fireball/dragon-punch combo against M.Bison and reached those ending credits where I used to swear to my friends I saw a beer can in T.Hawk’s hand. Didn’t you get a shot of the whole cast if you completed it without a defeat?

My second sleep-related self-diagnosis escalates matters, if not for the fact that I’m just dreaming them. After off-roading onto a river path in a rural area, I feared I was trapped behind inaccessibly larger rocks until I spotted a street sign. I settled in a cabin to rest, and would wake to news that I had been sleepwalking, and during the night did some ditch-digging in the rain. My flat-mates showed me a gray T-shirt which I wore while working and rendered worthless, tearing it at the collar. They also described how I chattered about not forgetting to register for Comic-Con.

When I’m not a superhero (or a rapist), my nocturnal alter-ego of choice is alien, as another explanation for the flying. I was driving away with the real me, the human whose body and life I had assumed while here on Earth, in a well-preserved old-fashioned convertible, either a Thunderbird or the Sunbeam from the Get Smart movie the other night, which flew off the highway as I floated beside it. Turns out I didn’t need to worry about the thin tires absorbing the impact as my Ford Prefect-like extraterrestrial buddy traveling with us had made the requisite modifications to the car. We were taking my unsuspecting host on one last romp, as the corner turned and the familiar spire of a casino hotel appeared, to Las Vegas. We set the car down, returned in a little while to say good-bye, re-outfitted as ourselves in casual striped shirts, and left “me” with thousands of dollars to enjoy the town and the ladies. The earth exploded with the sounds of my debauchery.