Interview with the terrorist mastermind

It was early Saturday morning and time to interview Osama bin Laden. I and my translator went into the room, which looked like a high-ceilinged school auditorium without the seats, where there was a long sofa heaped up with blankets. My translator looked at me to begin.

"Good morning..." A one-word answer came back: Good morning!

A figure popped up out of the the bedclothes and began stuffing a colorful knit blanket (the kind I now realize in retrospect to be known as an Afghan) into the end of a 2m long cardboard tube standing on its end. It didn't fit. We were about to ask another question when the person, a girl apparently, darted away. My translator got up, went around the sofa and snuck a peek at the lower part of the tube. I asked him "what does it look like?" He gave me a look as if he didn't want to say aloud what was on our minds, which was that it looked rather like a bomb or something equally suspicious. Somehow I gleaned from his expression that at least he didn't see a fuse sticking out. "Oh, it's like a balilkbayan box - from Osama."

We laughed, then noticed something stirring among the blankets: a man, suprisingly young-looking, I took to be bin Laden. He looked as if he were still pretty sleepy.

I wa composing a question to him in my head, something about whether he had gone up to the mosque on the previous day, when up pipes a fellow on the opposite side of the room. He was sitting on the end of a piano bench and his face looked like a cross between Russell Crowe and Kenneth Branagh. He addressed bin Laden directly, ignoring the translator straddling the bench behind him, going into a rambling remark about religion - something about Catholic Masses and Protestant services and other things i thought irrelevant and clueless. He flashed a smile at me and at Osama, who rolled over a little and ignored him.

Freakydreams [via] completely ignored the al-Qaeda angle and preferred to focus on words like time, room, school, up... "Up?" How can that word be a significant part of my dream? I think it probably has more to do with a problem with getting information in the course of doing my job, or maybe tension dealing with people I meet.

Die, giant sea snake

I woke up this morning dreaming about a sea snake the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I am thinking this image stuck with me because of having read this thread about rattlesnake stunts. Anyway, this snake was in some fairly shallow water and rearing up in a menacing fashion.

Fortunately for me, I happened to be carrying a battle laser. It was a metal case about the size of a suitcase, with a long coiled, orange hose going to a sort of nozzle like a sprinkler. I hit the switch and sort of charred some parts of the top of the menacing snake. The beam was invisible, but you could see its effects. I aimed the nozzle a little lower to hit the snake on its underside, and it kind of capsized and drowned.

Anyway, I kind of liked the idea of a lethal battlefield device which looked less like a firearm and more like a piece of gardening equipment.

A mix of ideas from the unconscious

I woke up with this dream this morning.

The beginning of the dream is lost, but for some reason a group of us were in Montclair on some errand, visiting a thirtysomething guy I vaguely disliked because he reminded me of a difficult customer I had had. At the end of our business he asked where we were going next and we said Uigur Ave. He got excited and said that that was a great sledding hill and that he took his kids there all the time. This dream was set in summer, however.

We drove to Uigur Ave, which was a narrow street with a pronounced slope, and someone produced a small mechanics creeper about the size of a garden kneeler and rubber on the top. Somehow a number of us got on the creeper on our backs, luge-style. We went down the hill, across a small bridge over some water, and up the other side, at a somewhat sedate pace actually.

At the top there was a serious-looking young girl with dark straight hair who asked if she could ride as well. Even though we agreed, we went into the back door of her house where her immigrant parents were sitting in the kitchen, not very surprised by our arrival. We went through the house and took a wrong turn into the girl's bedroom, which was spotless like everything else in the place.

We left by way of the front door and a little way down the street was a huge church with a gigantic golden steeple the shape of the Empire State Building. The clock struck and a mechanism made one side of the steeple open, a panel the size of a billboard, and there were some flat icons of Christ and the Apostles animated moving to music. On the façade of another building was a large screen showing a menacing-looking man in black robes making some kind of speech. Beneath the steeple on the grass was a severe-looking boy glaring at us, making me think that we probably should not laugh and make fun at the farcical puppet play going on.

Sometime during this the dark cultish leader came out and handed out paper cups to drink, but I hesitated.

Well, it was more of a nightmare than a normal dream I would say, though I think the church steeple with drop-down animatronic display might be a workable idea.