Dreams
I had a horribly complicated and very emotional dream on Saturday which involved being back in Massachusetts. It seemed to have gone on for hours, considering the number of topics touched upon, but I'm never sure how dream time and wall-clock time interact.
On the following night, I had a vivid nightmare in which I was a character in an action movie. it was a spy movie in which a bunch of technically-proficient former employees of an evil organization had to figure out how to break into that organization's lab (using their knowledge and perhaps their old access codes and tokens) in order to do something -- I think sabotage the lab's project.
I assumed that the effort would turn out all right because I had some kind of sense that I was in a movie and that movies always turn out all right, but I didn't know how it would work out. So I was one of the team which had to break in, and we were sitting around in some kind of camp we'd set up in a building on the outskirts of the lab compound we had to break into, arguing about technical issues related to how we would break in. One of the problems was that we had to acquire several objects without alerting the guards.
So at a certain point, I picked up one of the objects, and all of the other people there became angry at me, because that object had been alarmed, and they'd all known it and I hadn't. And the alarm went off, and I figured there would be a chase scene, but instead all of the guards showed up and captured us. So then I figured there would be a clever escape scene, but there wasn't, and instead a representative of the evil organization showed up, threatened us, and then put us into a scary "biometric-destroying machine". The idea of this machine was that it would physically reconfigure every aspect of each of our bodies which might have served as a biometric identifier, so that none of us could use any part of our bodies in the future to establish our identities. (Apparently some of our biometrics were still listed as "trusted" in the databases of various organizations, and the solution they'd decided on was not to delete our biometrics from the databases but to delete our biometrics from our bodies.)
The representative told us that the biometric-destroying machine didn't hurt, but none of us believed her.
As it turned out, the machine didn't hurt, but we were inside of it for several hours, and it was scary because all of our physical appearances changed somewhat, because the lengths of our bones were altered slightly! When we came out of the machine, none of us looked quite the way we had before, and it turned out that the movie was over, and had had a happy ending, but for a completely different reason, thanks to a different plot involving the actions of other characters. In other words, we weren't (as we had believed ourselves to be) the heroes of the movie; it was OK for the plot of the movie that we had been captured, because the success of our plan was superfluous in the end. So we were free and the movie had a happy ending, but all of our biometrics had been altered.
