Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I just woke from a dream about installing cell-phone antennae for various carriers on an existing bare mast. My first impulse upon waking in the middle of installing the second antenna, was to try to fall back asleep so I could read the rest of the installation manual and memorize the instructions before the dream got too far away to recall. (It didn't occur to me that the instructions from the manual in the dream wouldn't apply to the installation of any waking-world antenna until after I'd decided to roll over and start typing this.)

Real-life people, recent events, many-years-ago events, and an earlier (mostly unremembered) dream were referred to in this dream.

In the dream, I had a one-shot contract to install five antennae for five different carriers on a bare pole that had been recently erected on a suburban street corner. The pole -- only about as tall as a city lamppost, a little taller than a pole for stringing stoplights across a street -- was a painted steel tube with a few holes pre-drilled, set into a concrete base. (That is, it looked like they'd scooped out a hole with a backhoe, set the pole in it, and poured the concrete into the hole around the pole -- long enough ago for soil and weeds to have started creeping over the edges of the concrete.) It turned out to be in the yard of an acquaintance I haven't seen for several years but heard someone mention recently, and next-door to another person I haven't seen for a long time. Both eventually appeared in the dream, coming out to chat. I encountered one other person, a cross between Homer Simpson and someone I know, who thought aloud (Homer-style) so that I knew what he was thinking when he drove his pickup truck down an embankment that he probably wouldn't be able to drive back up. ("No slope greater than [mumble] degrees, huh? This is a pickup truck, and 'truck' means 'king', and rules don't apply to kings.")

Going out from one corner, the corner with the pole I was working on, was low-density suburban, with huuuuge lawns and long driveways, like some parts of upper Montgomery County (Maryland), where the houses look like they were built one-by-one at different times instead of as one big development. Across a street from that were itty bitty box-houses close together -- not quite as close as some parts of College Park, more like the tiny-houses section of Silver Spring. Across the other street from both of those was density about like where I grew up -- the Levitt-developed part of Bowie -- but with architecture that looked more like Arlington. It looked like late summer but wasn't hot enough, more like the comfortable part of early fall.

One of the antennae resembled ones I've seen on cell towers in real life, but scaled down to "Glenn could carry this up a ladder alone" size. (Considering that the height of the mast was scaled down so much from real-life cell towers I've seen, I guess that fits.) One was a dish. The others, I don't remember clearly. Four of the five were to be mounted on steel pipes a little thicker than broom handles and about five feet long, which would then stand off from the main mast with some sort of bracket. Each had a different complicated mechanism for attaching to the threaded end of the pipe, none as straightforward as a simple threaded socket. The other antenna was to be attached directly to the mast and I would have to drill a hole for it -- the installation kit included a drill bit and two router bits (I didn't get far enough to find out what those were for) and the instructions implied that I would have to tap threads in the hole I drilled but I don't remember seeing a tap in the dream.

The injury to my right wrist, which has been bothering me for four months in real life, was a factor in the dream as well -- it made tightening a set-screw on the AT&T antenna difficult.

The instructions for the Verizon antenna were rather complicated and included having to look for loose construction materials of the types used in the local houses, for calibration purposes (the installation manual said to do so "unobtrusively" and to try to avoid giving a direct answer if anyone asked what I was doing when gathering loose bricks and stuff, lest property values fall when people realized a cell antenna was going up in their area -- it seemed like a really odd instruction in the dream, too). I found a couple of loose bricks near the road in the yard of the house across the street.

I was in the middle of re-reading those instructions and considering skipping ahead to a different antenna and coming back to the Verizon antenna later, when the folks I knew came out to chat.

Our conversation referred to things I knew only from an earlier dream, involving someone we were talking about who, as far as I can tell, was a combination of three people I know in real life plus a bunch of fictional characteristics and background -- I don't remember her clearly enough, but I do remember being vaguely aware that I was dreaming, and that some of the things I remembered about her were from the previous dream (which I seemed to remember well enough during this dream, but which I only remember one image from now that I'm awake). One of the acquaintences I was talking to mentioned having, years ago, had an affair with the absent person's mother, and I said something about how, if I hadn't been dating her at the time, I totally would have tried to woo her mother. Remembering that line after I woke made me all the more curious as to whom that person was supposed to have been -- who she seemed to be a combination of features from ... not that I'd be inclined to tell y'all who it was even if I did remember clearly enough, after a revelation like that. ;-) But trying to remember is going to drive me crazy for the next hour or so, until the memory of the dream gets far enough away to stop being a distraction.

Time in the dream was stuck at mid-afternoon, no matter how long it took me to do things, figure things out, etc. Which was just as well, considering how long that second antenna was taking me.

A few more details faded away while I was typing this, but that's most of what I remembered when I woke up.