Snippet from an otherwise unremembered dream a few nights ago:

I was reading a Shakespeare play, and at one point a character praised another character by listing a bad quality and a good quality and saying that the “limit” of their “ratio” was zero – it was something like “the ratio of his cowardice to his forbearance” – and this bit of dialogue was written in the text using actual mathematical notation, with a numerator and a denominator and “lim”

I don’t remember what variable the limit was being taken on, but it seemed to make sense in context.  And it was regarded as yet another example of Shakespeare’s innovative and expressive use of language.  At first I was like “whoa, cool” but then I started wondering how Shakespeare could had written this centuries before the concept of a limit was formalized

In last night’s dream, I had to take some psychometric test, which I was expecting to be an IQ test plus some other things.

When I arrived at the testing facility, I was surprised to find that it was a restaurant, currently full of customers.  I met my tester, a brusque, taciturn, and kind of creepy middle-aged man.  He told me that my first task was to “serve a beer to everyone in the restaurant,” and gestured toward a nearby table, on which there many glasses and some bottles of whiskey, but no beer.  He then quickly walked out of sight.

I was confused, but decided that I should serve everyone whiskey since I couldn’t find any beer.  I went around doing so, which took a long time, as the restaurant was packed.  In one section there were lots of huge, burly men standing up and yelling at one another, in what looked like the start of a giant brawl.  I could not bring myself to interrupt them and bring them whiskey.

After much time, my tester reappeared, and immediately yelled “raise your hand if you’ve got a beer!”  Everyone heard, but no one raised their hands.  He glared at me, with such frightening intensity that I could say nothing.  Then he beckoned me to a staircase.

This led to a spacious study lined with bookshelves and filled with tables.  He sat me down at one and put a test book on the table, telling me to just answer one particular question.  The question was in the form of a long paragraph about some period of history I had never heard of.  Unfamiliar names swam in my brain; I couldn’t even parse the long tangled sentence, much less answer it.  I wrote something in, more or less randomly.  The tester picked up the booklet and grimly shook his head: it had not been the right answer.

He gave me another test booklet.  A reprieve: easy math problems.  I wrote in the answers.  The tester asked me, in an exasperated voice, why I had put “an ellipsis” in one of my answers.  I said I hadn’t.  He pointed to an answer.  “Right there.”  There was no ellipsis.  “I don’t know why you would think an ellipsis would go there,” he said.

As I had been working, he had been pacing around quite quickly.  Now he had disappeared out of sight again.  I looked around for him, then looked down at the table, and suddenly heard his voice right in front of me.  I looked up to see a woman sitting on the table.  She went on talking, but in her voice, not in his.  From hereon out the tester changed appearance every time they were out of my sight, and whenever I saw them again their voice suddenly changed to match their new appearance.  Their words were difficult to make sense of, but seemed to express some sort of exasperation that I wasn’t doing some particular thing.

“What is this test?  Whatever it is, it’s more about my emotions that my cognition, right?”

“Of course,” said the tester, a short and very old east Asian woman, rolling her eyes.

(That’s the last thing I remember)

how does one remove a nostril? do they, like, fill it in, or are they removing the whole left side of your nose?

IIRC it was removing the whole left side of the nose except for the part above where the nostril closes up, i.e. leaving the skin on the upper part of the nose where the skin is just covering bone

Remember nothing about last night’s dream except that at one point I was told that, due to some medical condition, I would have to have my left nostril surgically removed.  I was mostly fine with this, on the dream logic reasoning that “my headaches tend to be stronger on the left side than the right, and if removing my left nostril makes my headaches more symmetrical, it will be worth it”

Dreamed that in some Lymond sequel, time somehow fast-forwarded so that WWII was happening in the 1550s with exactly the same nations and leaders but with 16th century technology, and Lymond was popping up unexpectedly in war rooms to make irreverent comments about Stalin and stuff.  It was messed up

(”Actually the estranged love-child of a major politician” has now come up twice in my dreams, after the case where I learned a friend was the son of Donald Trump.  What on earth does this mean)

I’ve been having these really intense dreams in the last few days, maybe because I’m sick, and at this point when I lie down to go to sleep I’m just like “ah, it’s time for the nightly dramatic life-changing event simulator, here we go”

The one last night felt mindblowing and important right after I woke up from it at 1:30 AM, and I was determined to write it all down in precise detail in the morning, but then I fell asleep again and it now seems like a random jumble of disconnected weirdness rather than the profound tapestry it felt like at the time, but here’s a whirlwind tour anyway

So my parents and I went to “Eliezer Yudkowsky’s birthday party,” except it was this big public event involving a stage performance more akin to the New York solstice, and after the public performance people split off to different rooms in the venue, and the room I went to was this small dimly-lit bar where we were supposed to have a group “crying session” about sad things that had happened in our lives, and the dream (inconsistently) introduced the concept that my father had died months ago and I had never allowed myself to feel anything about this, so I bawled about it and it felt very cathartic

Then, immediately ditching that element, I met up with my parents again, still at the venue, and the event was apparently high-profile enough to have received an immediate pompous NYT review which described it as “confused and often pretentious,” and we laughed about this, and then planned to drive home

But then suddenly my parents and I were instead in some dimly-lit maze-like series of narrow passages, and none of us remembered how we got there, and when we got to a section with better lighting we noticed that I had a bunch of scars on my chest and no idea how they had gotten there, and we eventually found out we were in some stranger’s house near our own, and quickly left and went back home, and also I was mixed-race and was the adopted, estranged love-child of Barack Obama and all of this seemed normal, but when we got home there was some sort of explosion (?) and we ended up swapping bodies, and we were like “WTF we need to figure out what is going on”

So we asked each other about the last thing we remembered before waking up in that house, and it was being at the party in this bizarre novelty room where these non-human creatures could temporarily sever your head from your body and attach it to a large colored wooden post via a giant screw, which would cause you to experience a hallucinatory/virtual reality until your head was unscrewed and reattached to your body, and so we inferred that we were actually still heads screwed onto posts and experiencing these visions (the scars on my chest were from the head-removal process?), and that since they had gone on for this long, the party had probably ended and there was no reason to expect anyone would come and unscrew us, so we might be trapped in this unreal world involving body-swapping (and me being related to Obama) forever (possibly as intended by the non-human entities), which was horrifying, and I felt the full brunt of the horror as I would if this had happened and I wasn’t dreaming, but then we discovered some clever way I can’t remember to “escape” into the real world at which point I realized that the whole “experience” had been deliberately “curated” as part of the party, and seemed in retrospect like something Yudkowsky would think was “cool,” so it all made a kind of sense, and I was left feeling both disturbed and impressed by the whole thing, like “wow, that sure was not a birthday party I’m going to forget any time soon”

Last night’s dream was mostly a humiliating ordeal in which I missed a flight, was able to re-schedule it for the next day, missed it again, worried I had now given my parents the impression that I was absolutely unable to function as an adult, realized I had lost my luggage, searched for it in the (of course) vast and labyrinthine airport, lost my way in a parking garage-like area with many stairwells, tried to ask a group of strangers for directions, found that they would only provide directions if I first joined them in their extended conversation about the relative merits of different Japanese beers, etc.

But it had the silver lining of an amusing sub-plot in which it was revealed that an IRL friend of mine was actually the son of Donald Trump

He was superficially stoic about it, but you could tell it rankled

Last night I had the “leaving grad school and re-enrolling in college” dream again except this time it was re-enrolling in high school.  After school I considered taking the school bus home because it would be faster than the city bus, but then decided that taking the school bus would be “humiliating.”

On the city bus, I ran into my undergrad thesis adviser.  He said he forgot to bring anything to read with him, so I handed him the Lymond Chronicles book I was reading.  Somehow he managed to read the entire book in the course of the short bus ride.  He handed it back to me with nothing but the terse remark “what a cruel book.”  But his expression suggested he had not been unsatisfied with it.

In last night’s dream I saw The Force Awakens (still haven’t seen it IRL) and in the dream it was largely about this glowing psychic woman who controlled the Death Star with her mind, and the romance between her and Han Solo.  I remember being pissed off because they didn’t seem compatible and Han acted OOC (too serious, too impressed by force stuff).  I loudly complained to people afterwards that she should have been Luke’s love interest instead