I had a dream.

Or rather, I had two dreams. Last night. Which isn’t all that unusual – what is unusual is that I remember them this morning. Usually when I wake up in the morning, I try and remember my dreams but I can feel them slip out of my grasp like trying to catch a fish with your bare hands. And as they’re slipping away completely, what spells the final doom is that Vicki tries to tell me what she dreamt about that night. I’m so incoherent in the morning that it’s a wonder I can find my way to the toilet some times.

My first dream I was cross country skiing. I don’t remember too much about it, but it was back when I was amazingly fit. It was a very icy course, and I had to double pole and skate the whole thing, but my skis were getting good bite with the edges so I wasn’t having control problems. It seems like I did three loops of a course that wasn’t too hard, but which included some hilly bits and some flats and was challenging, especially in the icy conditions. I recognize bits of the trail at Mansfield Forest Club and the trail at Horseshoe Valley North (two places where I trained a lot), but including elements that weren’t on either trail. Near the end of the trail you could look down on the parking lot, which I think I remember from Arrowhead Provincial Park, a place I only trained at once. I don’t know why I’m so sure I went around three times – some of the details are slipping away already. But what did stay with me strongly was the feeling of being fit and strong and totally in control. I miss that feeling so much I want to cry.

The second dream was a lot stranger. For some reason I was visiting Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade. Ok, that’s weird enough – it’s a great web comic and all, but I’m not really a big gamer so I figured we’d have about as much in common as you’d expect a 43 year old Linux geek and two guys who spend their days playing console games and writing web comics to have – plus I have no idea what they look like in real life, only in their comic. The thing that made it really weird is that evidently being a web comic writer pays pretty damn well – these guys were living in a huge mansion with dozens of computers – mostly top of the line stuff, highly overclocked and tricked out with water cooling and case mods and gigantic LCD screens and the like – one machine had two of the old-style Pentium I black plastic cases with something pink oozing out between the cracks in the case that was enabling them to overclock it to ridiculous speeds. I didn’t see any consoles, which is strange because they write a lot about consoles. Gabe had two gigantic LCD screens doing nothing but showing something which I identified in the dream as being a “Winamp visualization”, but since I don’t know Winamp that well, was something like what iTunes calls it’s “Visualizer” only with a massive progress bar/slider in the middle. Tycho was writing a news post on an iMac, and I confessed to them that I’d become a bit of a Macintosh fan lately too, but he swore me to secrecy about his Mac use. Mostly I remember trying to convince them to play CounterStrike with me, which is even weirder because I’ve never played CS. I used to be a big fan of Half Life and Team Fortress, but I never ventured into Counter Strike.

You know, in retrospect maybe it’s just as well I don’t usually remember my dreams.