… and the bike purrs to life, snicks into gear, and leaps away from the parking spot.
I pull onto the interstate from Wendover, NV, and rip the throttle open. The inline 4 of the stolen bike screams as it punishes the pavement and zips me up to clearly illegal speeds. The wide open expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats, vaugely glowing white at 1 in the morning, remains clearly indifferent to my defiance of the law.
I shoot past car and truck alike, heading deeper into the empty darkness of salt and pavement. The wind roars in my helmet, and I can just barely hear though it and my ear plugs as my helmet speakers start pounding out Zombie-Zombie’s ‘Driving this road until death takes me’.
The unplanned and sudden death of scores of moths leave tiny carcasses that flitter to the ground in my wake of noise and …
Was it fiction or fact?
So, as I drifted in and out of sleep this morning around 8ish, I had this dream, that I had this DVD or something that I was showing to someone, that when played in this special player, produced virtual reality kittens. Really. The idea was that you had the kittens, and they made happy noises and you could pet them and it would make you smile and feel better.
During the demonstration, I placed my hand into the virtual kittens, and one of them grabbed onto my fingers and clawed the snot of out them when I went to remove them, so I had to go into a menu and delete the bugger.
The dream took a turn, and I’ve lost the rest of it. But I do know that when I woke up, my right index finger was hurting. I examined it, and discovered the whole side of it is scratched up with short, straight cuts.
My only explaination is that Spike was being particularly needy this morning, demanding attention as soon as I was slightly stiring, and at some point, he must have had a battle with my hand while it was under a pillow or a blanket. So, here I get to sit, with a slightly painful finger. I even have a scratch under the nail! Geeez.
It’s interesting how your brain can craft a story based on input it is receiving that you are not even aware of. I do feel that our dreams are trying to tell us something, and that something is some virtual story to help us process the data that has become jammed in the works, as it were. I read somewhere that an important part of dreaming is to present the logic parts of our brains with a false reality, so that it can ‘practice’ a response. Example, you are having a dream over and over about falling out of a window. The reason, according to this story I read that I can’t cite, is that you have a low level fear of falling out of a window, and as such, your brain is running it through ’simulations’ so that you can work out what to do and how to cope. It made a lot of sense to me, as I tend to have dreams that are take-offs from reality and the things that I experience.