Blogger Tips and My Weird Dream

Greetings once again to all who read this.

This morning I spent about a half an hour trying to figure out why the Blogger plug-in for Microsoft Word wasn’t working, so my time is short right now… I might add some later though.

In case you are interested, I eventually figured out that for some reason the Blogger plug-in’s toolbar does not appear unless Outlook is closed before I open Word.  I know Outlook uses Word as its email editor, so my guess is that it opens Word in some special way that prevents the plug-in from loading, and then when I go to open Word it tries to be smart about things and presents me with the instance already running, sans Blogger plugin.

All in all, though, I think this blogging thing is pretty cool.  I did some looking around and found out that I can have people (such as you, my dear readers) alerted when I post new entries, and even have the entries themselves emailed to you, so if you want any of that, please let me know! (for your records, my email address is tblaisdell@avst.com).

I’m feeling kinda funny this morning.  Last night I had a weird dream.  It was one of those very-vivid dreams that seem real for several moments after you wake up.  In addition to that, it was one of only a few times I can remember in which I fell asleep in the dream and dreamed a second, equally vivid dream within the dream.  

In my dream-within-a-dream I was driving a mustang convertible I had borrowed from my cousin-in-law Reese, and got into an accident on the way to my office.  I then got out of the car and was running down the sidewalk toward my office building (which for some reason was my old office in Kirkland) to call Reese. I was very upset and worried about everything that was happening, when suddenly it occurred to me that I was only dreaming! I stopped running and looked around. The sun was shining and it was very bright.  All the office buildings were around me, and I could feel the heat of the sun on my face, but the realization that I was dreaming was becoming stronger and I began to realize I was waking up.  I swooned a little and started to fall over.  It was so real.  As I fell, I felt myself fall into my sleeping body.
As I said, this was a dream-within-a-dream, so the sleeping body I fell into was not my real body, but merely my first-level-dream body, which was asleep in the borrowed Mustang convertible, which was now safely parked in the parking lot of my office.  I had fallen asleep in my car.  This is something I sometimes do, especially if I stayed up late the previous night and had to get up early to take Josiah to school.  I was so relieved to find that the borrowed car was safe and all my troubles had merely been a dream.  I lay in the seat for a few minutes and thought about that.  How real the dream had been and how wonderful it felt to be able to simply wake up and find that all my problems had disappeared.

I then got out of the Mustang and began to walk to my office (still my old Kirkland office).  As I walked I turned and looked back at the Mustang and a single thought hit me like a thunderclap.  Reese does not have a Mustang. I can’t express to you how that thought felt.  It was like a mild shock of horror.  Maybe something like the shock you got when you first realized Bruce Willis was dead in The Sixth Sense, but there was some plain old scare mixed in.  I remember that the Mustang started to shake, and become sort of two-dimensional, like it was a movie.  The way it was shaking was somehow menacing in itself.  I felt like it was trying to tell me something.  As I woke up (for real this time – I think), that was what was on my mind – that the shaking of the Mustang had some hidden, ominous meaning.

When I woke up, I lay there for a while just feeling the room around me.  It was really weird.  I still felt groggy, and the feeling was very like the swooning feeling I had had in the dream-within-a-dream before “waking up”.

For most of my commute to work this morning, that’s what I thought about.  How real the dream had seemed, and how did I know I was not still dreaming? It seemed quite likely, especially that first half-hour or so after waking up, that I might wake up once again and find myself in some other life.  And what did that shaking Mustang mean?  

If you know what the Mustang was trying to tell me, could you please write me at tblaisdell@avst.com?  I would be very grateful.  But write quickly.  Before I wake up again.

Tim