Consulting/Music/Holiday Dream

Guh ... that was a long, complicated, shifting sequece of dreams all blurring into each other ... when I woke, I wasn't suree whether it was morning or evening, nor did I think it was the right day (I wasn't even sure which month I'd woken up in, for a moment) -- it felt as though I'd lived through, and dreamt between, about three days, even accounting for ordinary amounts of time compression in dreams.

It combined a team consulting gig working for Karl, Pennsic, blogging, and bits from multiple bands, in a most confusing mishmash. I was on electric bas guitar at the end.

Most of the dream took place in a bizarrely laid out office, combining the worst elements of a) cubicles and b) enclosed offices where there wasn't really enough space to build walls and still leave room for people to walk. I was on a team captained by Karl (I think about a third of my friendslist knows whom I mean; for the rest of you, think fannish entrepeneur with a strong personality who for a while seemed destined to employ most of mid-Atlantic fandom as computer-jocks), who seemed worried about our behaviour in the offices of the client, because it had been so long since most of us had worked together|worked for him|done consulting|something like that, I forget which. Some of the other folks on the team were people I'd worked with under Karl IRL, others were bandmates, others just random friends.

The office was a warren of tiny, irregularly-shaped offices containing one to four desks that looked like desk components of a cubicle rather than standalone desks. Each desk had a very shallow sink in it, and running water. And a narrow, verical window next to the door. And for how narrow the passageways were, it might as well have been on a submarine.

At one point I tried to sneak away to write a blog entry about Pennsic, on a tablet-PC (something I've only ever read about -- for anyone not sure what that is, imagine a PDA grown up to legal-pad sizr instead of in-the-palm-of-your-hand sized, running the same class of OS you'd expect on a laptop or desktop computer, but using a stylus instead of a keyboard). At the time, the Pennic-ness of the situation was somehow clear (perhaps an in-dream recollection of the previous dream?) but the connection had faded by the time I got to the last scene of the dream. At various other points, I was talking to members of the client's staff about music. (Our group was occupying extra desks scattered throughout the client's warren, and there were still many vacant desks, but the space was still terribly crowded. And we were constantly squeezing past each other in the corridors to find more people we had to talk to to suss out more parts of the problem we were hired to solve.)

And then sudddenly it was nearly Christmas, and baked goods started appearing, and I was attempting to arrange things in such a way that I had a reason to pass through the reception area in time to grab some of the especially interesting cookies (very colourful, incorporating hard candy in a way that was tasty in the dream but wouldn't really work in waking life) that someone had brought, before they were all gone -- the reception area (a barely-wider spot in the middle of a corridor, with what looked more like a nurse's station than a reception desk next to it) was so crowded at that point, because of the cookies and brownies, that it seemed like an excuse was needed to allow oneself to get caught in that office traffic jam.

I've forgotten the transition scenes between talking about bands I play in to being invited to perform, but somehow we wound up in an auditorium that had a lot more space but was otherwise just as poorly designed as the rest of the office, led by a person who seemed like a bizarre combination of every band-leader, music director, and recording engeneer I've worked with. Some of the client's staff were acting as stagehands, the rest being spread out in the bizarrely-arranged auditoreum. We discovered that a famous rock musician was in the audience (I don't recall who -- maybe Brian Setzer, but I don't think that's right), and we asked whether it would be okay if we performed one of his songs that was in our repertoire. I was supposed to lead off the piece on electric bass, and struggled to remember it because it had been six or seven years since the last time I'd played that song.

I somehow got the song started, and woke up in the middle of it, after being told my bass wasn't loud enough and trying to find the preson who had control of my volume knob (my amplifier was halfway across the auditoreum from me) to get them to turn it up ... we wound up making the song sound like a Mark Knopfler version (Dire Straits) instead sounding anything like the original, but I can't remember which song it was (because once the thought, "this sounds more like Dire Straits" woke me up, I got an odd mashup of "The Sultans of Swing" and "Love Over Gold" stuck in my head).

There was, of course, a lot more in the middle. I can only faintly recall some of the associations in it, no additional details. Toward the very end of the dream, my awareness narrowed to just my fingers and the bass guitar and trying to remember the tune I hadn't played in so long.