7/25/2022
The dream was not about title searching, but it set the plot in motion. Everything in the dream felt recent and I told myself that I was ruminating over the three jobs and one note I printed out on Friday afternoon for Monday. I didn't review them and they're waiting in the printer tray for Monday morning. During my dream there were a recurring set of symbols popping up in regards to how I was going to perform a particular title search. The present owners were named Frank and Linda, yet during the course of the dream Linda's name changed to a name starting with 'A' and the surname in the dream is lost. I do recall their surname did start out as 'Freund' but that name changed to something generic as if they were trying to hide their identity, blending into a crowd full of common surnames like Smith, Brown, Russo, et al.
My recollection of the information on those printouts is spare, but I do remember the pile of papers were very square. Very perfect. Those qualities disturbed me since they felt unreal, even within the context of a dream. I was dreading doing those searches on Monday. Still I perused the available documents now and again, like peeking into a dread Lovecraftian tome which would blast my sanity if read from cover-to-cover, but I could peek at random couplets.
A better analogy, maybe, would be Langford's basilisk. Langford's basilisks were a series of images, featured in his fiction, taking advantage of weaknesses in the wiring of a human brain. When a person looked at them, their brains would crash like a computer as expected during 'Y2K' because human brains weren't evolved to handle those kinds of patterns. In keeping with my previous description, David Langford wrote a few tales using these basilisks up to a story involving a "Shudder Club" where kids would look at the images and see how long they could look until they had to look away. Turns out they wound up 'vaccinating' themselves against the basilisks. But that's more of a digression than anything pertinent to the dream, just wanted to illustrate how I felt about a particular oneiric job.
The scene was sometime late in the evening where the sky was dark blue along the horizon and black at the zenith. I was wandering around some strip mall on Fischer Boulevard in Toms River, probably the one across the street (kinda-sorta) from Sniptease Salon. It was in the parking lot where I encountered Frank and Linda, or whatever her name had changed to thanks to the viscissitudes of the dream. They didn't acknowledge me but I overheard the tone of their conversation rather than the words. He was completely devoted to her and she knew it and exploited him. Of course their relationship was consensual but she led the 'dance' of their marriage and kept him in his place lest he aspire above his station. What drove the point home was how Frank was wearing a pink polo shirt with a sweater tied around his shoulders along with khakis or Dockers. To me that's the uniform of a husband conveying to the world, "I'm safe. I'm loved" with the tacit subtext of "My spirit is broken but I consented to this."
There were weird transitions in the interim where I found myself reviewing the job to be done again. Upon the rats nest of my desk, completely unlike my waking life desk, I uncovered a pink folder with six to eight pages. The cover featured a happy, cartoon elderly couple and they wore blue in contrast to the paper stock. The font was something thin and sans serif. I didn't so much as read this folder as hear it in my head as I flipped through those few pages. I heard things such as, "Phrase: I still love you. Response: That's sweet but that's in the past and not today" among other conversation suggestions for a controlling wife. Some of these I recall hearing from Leah's mouth in waking life. Upon the centerfold of this folder was handwritten, "Leah, Keep this hidden from chris. Maria."
I tried to call my therapist but she wasn't answering. Fortunately in the dream her office was just across the hallway from my title searching office. An interesting paralle considering my therapist's office recently moved from Hooper Avenue in Toms River to being mere blocks from the Ocean County Clerk's office. Anyway I stepped into the fluorescent-lit corridor, found her office door was open but the session room door was closed and the white noise generator was going implying someone was pouring their heart out in hopes of catharsis and having their head set straight. That's when my therapist came up behind me and said hello.
"Look at this! Look at the centerfold! It's not that kind of centerfold but take a look and see for yourself. Someone gave this to Leah to coach her in throwing me away. I don't know what's going on anymore!"
Emotions in the dream were running quite high to the point they jarred me from sleep around 8:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, the 24th of July.
as for the rest of my day
I wrote for the fortean website. Continued a very good game of Nethack where I'm playing a orcish barbarian. Over the course of Saturday night and Sunday morning I reached Gehennom, which is the early part of the endgame for Nethack, wandered around gathering up needful gear for the final ascension run.
Ascension?
The goal of Nethack is to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor from the depths of Gehennom and return to the astral plane whereupon the Amulet of Yendor is sacrificed in the name of one's deity and you win the game. I've ascended once back on the 13th of October in 2005 as Kuresu the Samurai. I forgot how much fucking work there is to do in order to get one's ducks in a row to win the game. As of Sunday night my barbarian convered from chaotic to lawful alignment, his piety was in the negative and he sacrificed something on an opposite altar to convert it to Set and wound up changing his allegiance.
There are two drawbacks: First as a lawful character it means the mysterious force, which is intrinsic to the Amulet of Yendor, acts more often than if my character were neutral or chaotic in alignment. Secondly he lost the blessings from Set, the chaotic barbarian god, which lowered his armor class. The latter was fixed by donating about 30,000 gold to a temple returning his armor class to -18. As for the former, I need to acquire a cursed scroll of teleportation and put on my ring of teleport control. A cursed scroll of teleportation moves a player one level up in the dungeon and a ring of teleport control will give the character to choose which level they teleport to in the Dungeons of Doom.
Right now my barbarian orc is an asskicker and I was surprised by his resiliency. A few times while delving through Gehennom I thought to myself, "Oh this is where he's going to die. It was a good enough run" then I'd be surprised. It's easy to get caught up in the game and now I'm taking a break until Monday so I can unwind from the stress.
Besides those, I went food shopping and did laundry. Sitting outside was remarkably hot and uncomfortable. For the past week temperatures were averaging about 90℉ / 32℃ / 305 Kelvin with little in the way of respite. Supposedly it's gonna rain on Monday and more humane conditions will return to the outside.
