there’s nothing better than taking a nap in the middle of the afternoon when i’m supposed to be doing homework. Well except when it’s coupled with a bizare dream.
I was in a small computer lab with maybe 10 computers. we were sitting outside but inside at the same time. one and a half of the walls were gone and it was open to the sea. sort of a meditteranian sea in the late afternoon as the sky is starting to get pretty. The computers were some variant of a unix cluster. logging on was done in black and white in waht looked like an old hypercard (yeah OLD) stack interface. once i was logged on, there was the option to have color and use it like windows or just comand line style.
I was in the lab with a few other people for a class. The class was ENGR 407, which i’m actually taking. The real class has over 200 kiddos in it. this one had about 7, all people that i know. I cant remember who they are now though. The two people that talked to us on the first day of ENGR 407 were the professors for this class too. I didn’t want to be there AT ALL. Susan, one of the two profs, started talking about what they were having us do. We were supposed to create a program that could calculate the volume of a partial cylinder. It wasn’t that straight forward though. She explained it for about an hour switching between a lot of analogies for what the problem was and obscure math formulas, trying to encompass everyone’s way of thinking. I started getting very fustrated with all the BS and finally asked her in a loud voice, “when are you going to get to the point and give us the assignment?” she gave me a dirty look (as well as the male profressor who had been sitting down at a computer surfign the web and talkign on IM the whole time). I gave up waiting for her to get to the point and laid my head down on my queen sized bed which for some strange reason had materialized in the computer lab to my left in the corner where the walls were missing.
I moved my chair into a position that i could just put my head down on the comforter but still be in the chair and thus look like i was paying attention. She babbled on without end until i drifted off into some nice sleep. All of that noise about the problem she wanted us to solve using code got me dreaming (yes, dreaming in a dream) about the problem. In the dream, i started to write code in my head & create crazy 3d graphs of possabilities & circumstances that i needed to account for.
After a few hours of slumber in that odd position, i woke up to find that the classroom was empty and the sun had sunk a little lower, now casting everything in a rosey glow. The laptop that the male professor had been using was sitting closed on a chair but still turned on. i opened it and brought it out of sleep mode. he still had trillian open along with some websites. I closed the laptop and went back to my computer to try and code what i had dreamed. The sun had now sunk even lower in the horizon. There was another guy in the lab that i also know (of course i cant remember who it is now) & neither of us were having any luck trying to write the program because neither of us really knew what hte problem statement was. Susan had never come out and explicitly said that we needed to do xyz or 123.
We decided that the only remedy would be to go to the next floor up in the building and look around in the male professor’s desk to see if we could find the problem satement. The door out of the computer lab was located on the oposite wall that the bed was, so to the right of my computer station and in the back of the room. I went out the door and into a hallway filled with the rosey light of late afternoon. The floors were made of big flagstones that were sandstone in color but felt like granite on my bare feet. THey were warm.
We went up a flight of large dark wooden stairs. the woold appeared to be walnut or chestnut.
Now on the second level, we dodged through a few administrative offices where the staff had just left for the day. Yet even more rosey light.
The professor’s office was directly over the comptuer lab with one wall facing the sea missing and about half of the roof on that end of the room also just not there. I went over to his large mahogany desk with a green felt top under glass. It was facing the open end of the room but near the back of the room where we had entered. I started rummaging through his desk drawers while my friend stood guard by the door. suddenly a large japanesish looking cartoon charicter walked in. He was big and rolly polly with huge green glasses. One lense was round while hte other was square. The glass was polarized in different directions for the two different lenses. He asked us if we were looking for something. i said yes, we were looking for the problem statement for our class. He opened the left middle desk drawer and pointed to a paper. It was a lithograph of the complete source code for the problem plus about 200x more features than we needed. Our cartoon charicter friend said that he hoped it would help and that he was turning the power off now. We were both a bit confused but then a lightning bolt struck the building & knocked the power out. The lab was in the dark. We couldn’t do the assignment until it came back on.
I then woke up to kids squeeling as they chased each other around the basketball court outside my window.