Elf Sternberg

On Sunday, I was Indiana Jones. Dressed in white robes for high desert, I had just escaped from a high, round tent to find myself in a compound filled with angry looking, vaguely Indian or Pakistani men. Kashmir, maybe. It was early evening, already getting cold. I had to escape. I snuck around the edges of the compound, found some high explosives, and arranged them in a tripwire pattern so that they cause one hell of a distraction. I got away.

On Monday, I was Indiana Jones again. Same place, same time. It was hot now. The explosives were gone, though. Somehow, I managed to jerry-rig an ancient truck to drive in fast, widening circles, running over tents and wrecking stacks of rifles. The distraction was enough. I got away.

On Tuesday, I was Indy once more. The explosives were gone, and now the truck was secured. At one end of the camp, which I saw now was more of a permanent installation, I discovered a strange sort of small bottling factory, filling large soda pop bottles with a dark liquid and capping it. I realized that I had to figure out how to use the bottle cap machine to create enough kinetic energy to wreck the factory, causing the distraction I needed to escape. I don't think I figured it out in time, and I don't know if I got away.

On Wednesday, I was myself. Very odd. And I was with Kouryou-chan. We encountered Robert Redford and Paul Newman, looking as if they'd just walked out of The Sting, taking up residence in the room across from us in a Hilton hotel near DisneyLand. We learned the next morning that they'd robbed a bank. After a confrontation and a fist fight, Robert Redford fled with the cash, but Kouryou-chan successfully finagled Paul Newman and I in a hotel room and locked the door behind us. Through the door we could hear her on my cell-phone, calmly talking to the police. "Does she do this often?" Paul asked me.

"Yeah," I said. "She's good at this kind of thing."

On Thursday, I was myself again. We were sitting on folding chairs in the cupola of the International Space Station. As I watched, calm and detached, the ISS re-entered the atmosphere, then made a water landing. Water splashed over the cupola. "This can't happen," I said to the guy next to me.

"But what if it did? What if you needed to evacuate the station in an emergency? Would you know what to do? What Would You Do?" He then walked me through a series of procedures for opening the hatches in an emergency.

What the hell is going on with my dreams this week?

I dreamed last night that I was in a hot-tub with a crowd of excessively hunky and beautiful men and women. Someone burst into the room and shouted, "The Aliens! The Aliens are landing right now!"

From out of the hot tub arose Kurt Russel, bigger, more tan, more hunky than he had ever been in his entire life. Buck naked, well-hung and holding an enormous war axe, he shouted, "We know how to deal with them, don't we!?" Then he grabbed the nearest dwarven-beared man, kissed him hard, and headed out the door, through which I could see a desert and classic 1950s flying saucers.

Like, what the f#%! is my brain trying to tell me?