Note: stan requests that his name and address be kept with the dream text. - richard
stan kulikowski ii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
DATE : 14 sep 1998 08:09
DREAM : cindy timko's dissertation
=( a sunday night, mom and i watched the 50th emmy awards. it was nice to see clips of all the old tv programs we watched when i was a kid. howdy doody, the lone ranger, captain kangaroo, pinky lee and so on. mom went to bed around midnight and i started late grading homework for my programming course until about 03:30. i thought i would just do a few, but ended up doing them all. there were a lot of them, i was surprised they went so quickly. )=
it is dark outside and getting rather late. we are sitting in the driveway of somebody's house on folding chairs listening to cindy timko give her doctoral defense. barbara partee is the main thesis chair, asking pertinent questions at the appropriate intervals. the topic is some esoteric bit of physics, i believe. i am there as a guest, not really following the topic all that well. i have been asked to do some of the technical support work with the technology use in the display of data.
now cindy has completed her formal talk and has asked that the video be shown. i am a little uncomfortable with this, and try to explain to everyone that the video was too long for the floppy disk and i had to cut a lot of it out, so the work may be missing some crucial parts. i tried to keep the longer dialogs intact, but a lot had to be cut. no one seems to be listening or understanding what i am saying so i fire up the video projector and have at it. let the work speak for itself, if it can.
down at the end of the driveway there is a portable screen set up on a tripod. the video begins to roll. it is obviously a bunch of college students who have been press ganged into acting this skit. i try to follow what the thesis is all about, but cannot really tell given the short and choppy nature of the cuts i made. well, i can apologize later if i missed the central point somewhere along the line.
the video comes to a quick end. only about three minutes of video could be compressed onto the floppy. cindy says something i can not quite hear and the group breaks up with congratulations all around. i break up the equipment load it on the short yellow school bus parked along the empty highway. there are a couple of these small sized buses waiting to take us back. i get in the one that contains my equipment.
the ride back home is long and tiring. it must be two oclock in the morning when we arrive back in the neighborhood of my mother's house in ohio. i am rather tired, but i decide to walk down to daniel dorrough's house as i know that cindy will be staying over there with a few others for the night. i hope to explain to her why her video was cut so short and to suggest that she burn it on a CDr which has more than enough storage space. a floppy disk is much too small.
when i get to daniel's house, i can see that his parents have spread spare mattresses over the floor of the living room for people to sleep on. no one else is here yet, and i am tired so i lie down in the middle of the first one.
i am not there long before others start coming in from the second bus. i am only about half asleep, but enough so that i do not get up and greet the others. perhaps i will just stay here and talk to her in the morning. to my great surprise cindy lies down next to me prepares to go to sleep also. wow, getting to sleep with cindy timko just like that, no hassles or awkwardness.
but the mattress is a large one, and her friend, angelina popovich comes and takes a space between us. hm. much of the thrill is gone. angie was cindy's best friend but never much on the exciting index. oh well, i am truly tired and nothing other than imagination was going to happen in a house full of people anyway. i decide to drift off into deeper sleep, but without much success. i can neither move nor get quit of consciousness. it is that moment of sleep when the normal paralysis has set in, but the mind is only part aware of its surroundings.
i am lying on my back with my arms extended upward, taking up more space than i ought to, given the crowded of the facilities. cindy and angie are on my right. angie gets up and goes somewhere i can not see. then a thin black woman crawls up on my left side. apparently i am in the place where she slept last night and she seems determined to get her position back, even if she has to share it with me. through my slightly open eye lids i can see that she is very pretty so i do mind it when she snuggles up on my left arm. she is looking at me very closely as if attracted or making some serious decision. "i think i am is love with this man" she tells someone in a soft voice.
no sooner than she has settled down, than she sits up again. this time, turning her back to me, she pulls her blouse off over her head. i can see that her back is well muscled and tight like a long distance runner or maybe a professional dancer. she turns back quickly and snuggles up again into my extended arm and side. i can feel her small firm breasts caressing my side through my shirt, but can move to either accept or reject her nearness, no response at all from me in this half sleep. well, maybe i will wake up later in the night enough to move in closer.
with a jerk, i suddenly am awake and sitting up. the bright sun is pouring in the room. it is obviously late the next morning and most of the people have left. only cindy and i remain, she still asleep after her long efforts last night. i wonder what became of the black girl and regret that i never even knew her name though i enjoyed the few moments of furtive contact from her.
rather than wake cindy, i go upstairs into danny's small attic bedroom. he is sitting on a bed typing on an old portable. i ask him if he has another machine as i want to type in my dream log before i forget what this dream has been about. he dusts off an old DEC rainbow microcomputer and says that it will fire up if i give it time. i look at the dusty keyboard and wonder if i can remember the qwerty typing pattern well enough any more, so accustomed to dvorak nowdays. yes, i can still get by.
=( i wake around 07:44 and cannot get properly awake. no alarm or anything, i just wake and still feel very tired like i felt in the dream. i believe i went back to sleep for a few minutes but wake up again, still feeling very leaden and tired. i suspect that this sleep reentry provided the part about going to type in the dream on danny's computer, as i had thought about putting this dream in the dream log, as it was fairly easy to recall all of it. eventually i force myself up to write this in. barbara partee was on my dissertation committee, a brilliant semanticist. cindy timko was valdictorian of my high school class, a very bright woman, much smarter than me. as i recall, the last time i saw her was a christmas party during sophomore year in college. she had returned early in the term from some college out west. people rumored that she had left midterm because of some difficulty, i presumed of some sexual nature but no one spoke of it directly, at least not anyone who really knew. angelina was her best friend and i think that christmas party was the last time i saw her too. i do not think she went on to university anywhere but was working somewhere local and so was not on the academic cycle like the rest of us. as i recall we did some divination late at night with mirrors and candles, a russian new years practice. create a hall of mirrors with two mirrors face to face and two candles between them, stare down the recursive reflection until the flames mesmerize you enough that you will see your future spouse step out somewhere in the infinite regression. i did not see anyone: prophetic, i guess. cindy never said who she saw. )=
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