geckoblue

This dream was rather exciting. It wasn't very long, but it was rather dangerous and busy in nature.

To begin, it was early in the morning. The sun had not come up yet and I had woken up for some unknown reason. I may have awaken because my parents were making some noise. I noticed that my door was open, so I got out of bed and went over to the door to close it. I could see the lights were on in my parents' room. They were moving around like they were starting their morning routine. I closed my door most of the way and head back to bed.

As I get in bed, I look out my north-facing window and observe that there are lights up in the sky. I first think that it must be a plane flying over, but it soon becomes apparent that this is not a low-flying plane, but rather a gigantic flying saucer. It was as though I first thought the lights were just a plane flying by, but then I saw the rotation in the saucer and realized that it was not flying toward the house but rather rotating to the southwest as I looked up at the bottom of the saucer. If I were looking down on the saucer from space, it would have been rotating slowly in a clockwise direction. I doubt it, but perhaps saucer technology is designed to rotate in the opposite natural direction of the earth's forces (toilets rotate counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere).

As I observed this saucer, I lay in bed in almost a trance of fear. I started saying very slowly, "Oh. My. God. Oh. My. God," and kept saying that faster and louder as I repeated it over and over. As I spoke faster and louder, I started to sit up in bed and started making a plan to get my mom away from where we were.

I wasn't out of bed yet, and was still looking out the window at this giant saucer. Suddenly, out of the bottom core of the saucer, a flaming meatball of sorts, probably ten or fifteen feet in diameter dropped out of the saucer very slowly and make a slow decent toward out house. I leapt into action and shouted to my parents that there was an alien invasion happening and we had to get out of here. As I was rushing to tell that to my parents, the ball of fire, crumpled into the roof of our house and quickly extinguished. I don't know why it didn't completely set our house on fire, but my understanding was that the ball was not very hot and was very fragile. It broke apart like volcanic rock that was filled with flames with no real source of fuel. I assumed only that the roof of house was smoldering from the fire but not bursting into flames.

I then observed out the window that the saucer moved southeast and another saucer quickly took its place and fired another fireball toward us or something else. It was as if they didn't have any set target besides laying waste to the entire region we were in. I then noticed that they were now dropping off alien creatures into our yard to attach the residents. The aliens had no weapons, which was very strange to me. I now had pulled some clothes on, grabbed my mom's hand, ran downstairs and out of the house, and went to confront these aliens. It was now light outside and not dark like before. They were not green green like we typically imagine aliens. They were indeed green, but more of an earthly brown-green color and they were somewhat hairy. But the did indeed have that head and eyes like the typical alien depictions tend to show.

I rushed outside and began kicking at these aliens and fighting in hand-to-hand combat and being ever watchful of the balls of fire bursting out of the growing number of giant saucers in the sky. The saucers would easily be 3 acres in circumference. They were not shiny silver like you'd imagine them. They were also very earthy in color with yellow boosters and had a very boxy core structure yet a somewhat circular outer hull. The hull was not smooth and round, but rough like you'd think of the Millennium Falcon, only not as modified and not at all cluttered with segmented paneling. It really had more of divergent coloring, like an army vehicle, but few panel separations, yet had mostly sharp edges (and some curving edges) and not at all glossy.

The aliens were very short, so a kick or punch at them threw them off quite easily as I made my way in a northern direction up the hill and in front of our house. I figured the safest place to be would be the spot where they already attacked. As I made my way and fought off the few aliens that rushed in the other direction, ensuring that none of them go forward unharmed by myself, I soon woke from the dream.

Now this dream I have very little clue as to its nature. It seems very impersonal. The interpretation of objects that I've found on the Internet have been somewhat accurate when taken with a grain of salt.

From the Internet: To see aliens in your dream signify that you are having difficulties adapting and adjusting to your new surroundings. You are feeling "alienated" and disconnected. You may also be having difficulties with how to handle or deal with a certain situation or person. On a psychological level, seeing aliens represent an encounter with an unfamiliar or neglected aspect of your own self.

If I interpret my life into that definition, it does make some sense. My parents morning routine represents my typical understanding of marriage. I recently came across some sermons and study material that's utterly destroyed what I thought marriage would be like and replaced it with a much more Bible-based God-centered view of what marriage and relationships should be, and I am recognizing that it will be a challenge to reverse some of my habits of thinking. There are parts of the interpretation, like grabbing my mom as I ran out, that would suggest that I see there are some good parts of my view that I do want to keep, but the damage to the house and the general alien invasion of Earth would suggest that I need to change a lot of things around me. Why it had to be an alien invasion? Who knows. Maybe it's because it's 2012. Surprising that a change in my view of marriage could turn into a dream about aliens invading.

I had this unlikely thought while watching a love story about a tattoo artist and a conservative teacher. They spoke the line, "Love should be easy."

I guess I always thought about Love being a lot of hard work, and in most cases it seems that way if you're trying to create heaven on earth. The whole idea of heaven on earth just doesn't exist when you look at the facts. Everyone is imperfect and heaven is suppose to be perfect, so I don't think you can create a perfect place out of imperfect people unless you can somehow fix all their mistakes.

But does that mean Love has to be hard? I think it only has to be hard if you're trying to obtain perfect love. And that's when all this recent studying and thinking all collided in an epiphany of sorts. I thought about King David in the Psalms and his constant desire to love God and be loved. I think he was looking for affirmation that God's love wasn't just out of a covenant.

We've been studying through Genesis and are now going over the covenant God makes with Abram and the people of Israel. The covenant acts as a revelatory mechanic to show the people what kind of person/being God really is. You don't immediately become friends with someone until something is revealed about that person to make you agree with them and decide to become friends. So God revealed His likes and dislikes. But knowing you agree on things doesn't make you real loving friends, it just makes you acquaintances. You need to show each other that you intent to keep your promises if you want to know that it's a real deep friendship.

That's what I think King David was looking for. It's hard to follow a bunch of rules made up by someone else just to show them that you love them. In a romantic relationship we're always shown that a guy sacrifices freedom for a girl to show he would work his hardest if the reward is the girl, and they always depict a girl breaking down her conservative walls if it would make a guy to get stuck on her. And if it's shown as a righteous relationship, both sides would wait until the other side confirms that they are comfortable with or happy with how the relationship is going, according to their expectations.

In those romance stories, however, you don't see what happens five or ten years down the road when you've played this game with each other long enough that it becomes second nature. I don't know about how it will be then, but I don't think our broken ideas of love make it any easier then. But I still wonder if Love has to be hard.

So if we consider that Christ died as the ultimate sacrifice for this covenant relationship between God and his people. I think God wants more than a covenant relationship with us, and I think David was one person who got it right and just poured out his love for God and asked God to do the same, to make the relationship more than just a promise of obedience in exchange for blessings. I think Christ opened up that opportunity for us by showing the real extent of God's love for us, and He wanted to show us that this love between God and man can be as simple as following Him. He simplified the covenant relationship down to a simple task of accepting each other and living together. He knows we're sinful, but he can forgive us our poor nature, and we know He is perfect, but we admire and want to be just like Him. We just need to accept that and the rest is simply how much we can manage to invest in the relationship.

I think David was tired of all the layers upon layers of rules to the covenant, and he just wanted a share in the love of God. He didn't want this to be a constant journey of proving his loyalty to God. He had enough of the paper and policy of the covenant and just wanted that real relationship instead.

I believe we have that now, but too often we feel we need to lay down more sacrifices to prove it, and we don't really feel God loves us unless we follow the rules. Certainly we know God likes or dislikes the details that were laid down in those old covenants, but we don't need to make it a painful life-long task to obtain some kind of validity. Instead, we can love and trust God and God will love us back, and following all the rules becomes like roses in the morning. Our attempts to act perfect last for a time, but our attempt will wilt just like a rose, but while those roses lasted, God was most pleased with us, but he still loves us when the roses are wilted.

So I think love comes easy, happiness and roses make it a little more pleasing, and in the end all we needed to do was love and trust, but seeing that smile for the extra effort is a prize we can cherish like our favorite memories.

So this morning I dreamt that I was at some kind of Trekkie resort place and a crisis was upon the crew that we couldn't identify. I'm not talking about a resort for Star Trek fans, but an actual resort in the confines of the Star Trek universe, if that make sense. I was involved in this crisis as much as the entire crew of the USS Enterprise was involved. We were in a rather spaceship-looking corridor with lots of instrumentation on the walls, not like the cleanly polished decor of the USS Enterprise, but a more of a cold sterile scientific corridor.

We were towards the lights and away from the approaching darkness that was assisted by the lights turning off all around us. Anyone too far behind and in the darkness immediately fell limp to the ground as we continued on ahead in a panic to save our lives and a deep sorrow of losing our crew to this unknown or mysterious threat.

One of the crew reached a light switch of sorts and tried to maintain our light source, but as soon as he pressed the button to turn the lights on, they flickered back off. He pressed the button frequently and faster, but the light continued its haunting disappearance in rapid concession. That crew member too fell victim like the other crew behind us.

We rushed out into an area under a massive dome that stretched over the entire habitat. There was a eatery and bar behind us to the East with mood lighting that make the wood decor glow a dark inviting brown. To our West we could see a massive garden with palms and flowers stretching up toward the dome and the last of the day's light shown through the glass structure, but it wasn't enough light to prevent the impending darkness from reaching us and killing us too. We escaped to the southeast where multiple junctions provided lights in a common point. But we knew we couldn't last much longer if this darkness found those light sources as well.

Just then, a women from our crew clambered out of the darkness and over the bodies of our fallen crew. Somehow, she was unaffected by the darkness like the rest of the crew laying about. She came up and plucked something from several of our foreheads that had a florescent orange mark on one side of the small device. She tore off the orange rubber-like substance and dropped it on the ground. Then she did the unthinkable and turned off the lights around us!

With the lights out and these devices removed from our foreheads, it became immediately apparent that there were short blue humanoid creatures all around us looking for people to connect tubes to. The tubes connected to the devices on the crew's foreheads. As soon as we removed the devices from each of our unconscious crew members, they woke back up. The aliens around us observed that the devices were floating around in the air, but could not see us at all. It was as if the aliens could only see us when the lights were on and could only knock us out and connect tubes to us if we were in the dark with the devices on our foreheads, but because it was dark and we had no devices on us, they could only see their own devices floating around, and were dumbfounded by how it could float.

Likewise, we could only see the creatures if the device was disconnected from our foreheads and the lights were out. If the lights were on, we couldn't see them at all regardless.

We freed the rest of our crew from the strange network contraption the aliens were attempting to hook us all up to, and then I woke up.

So I never noticed for the longest time that Eclipse Helios, the latest version of the IDE, has a completely broken compare feature. I guess I never noticed because I haven't been using the features at work. But I finally got around to getting some projects reloaded into Helios on my laptop at home. Apparently it's been broken for about 3 months or more and is only now resolved two days ago with a patch in their milestone branch. Never knew there was a milestone branch, or that it was stable enough to consider using.

I decided to document the problem here so I wouldn't forget. I use Eclipse Helios with the latest stable Subclipse add-ons. Quite useful for development with Subversion version control actually, but obviously without the ability to do code comparisons in your IDE makes version control about as useful as a two-legged dog. You can get there, but it takes you twice as long and you're likely going to makes a bunch of errors along the way. Anyway, this link below goes to the bug and instructions on how to install the milestone releases:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=326194

So if your Eclipse compare window is empty the next time you want to check what changes you made since you last syncronized with the code repository, go with the milestone and code happy. Wonder when we'll see this code make it into the stable release.

I had the most unusual dream last night. I was standing near the edge of a small slope that appeared to be man-made. The land set at the bottom of the slope held the limits of a small city. In my hand I held a thick reed. It was light, soft and dry with an acoustic much like styrofoam.

As I observed this, an older fellow was explaining to me the abilities of this reed. And while he spoke of the reed, a small blue bird hollowed out the reed. The man explained that once the blue bird, and specifically this breed of blue bird, hollowed out and completed the reed, that it would become a portal.

The bird finished its job, and then I looked at the job the bird did. The man I was with explained that I had to look through the reed like a telescope. So I looked into this reed and panned it around like a telescope until I was suddenly transported into a cave. My understanding was that on the outside, the reed fit in one's hand, but from the other side it became the opening of a man-sized cavern. The cave wound around deeper into the ground in a familiar pattern I've seen in a game.

Soon enough, some kids that I realized were the same age as I was, and I wasn't my real-life age, came up and started bullying me saying that the loser magicians were confined to these caves below and that they intended to use my reed to leave the caves and ensure I was stuck here. I wrestled with them until the man I was with came into the cavern and put the other boys in their place.

Whatever the other kids did, it forced the man to bring this magician's cave to the surface. We stepped outside, back to the city and my reed, and watched as a great many buildings came rumbling out of the ground right next to buildings in this small part of the city. One small booth, like a round dome with glass windows and ceiling, was denoted as the thinking room. Other larger rooms were denoted in other ways but I don't recall any. As the things came out of the ground, law enforcement officers started shooting at the buildings thinking they were almost alien in nature, but they clearly knew that these were magic buildings. They started shouting out about us being "the magi" and trying to stop our "invasion".

The man and I ran down the hill next to these circular buildings that kept rising up out of the ground and eventually calmed down the officers to ensure there was no threat going on here. And then I woke up.

I've always wondered what's been causing this growing trend of random attacks/suicides in schools, public transit, homes or various other seemingly peaceful surroundings. I could be wrong, but I knew a few things about these behaviors. I think it makes some sense when putting it all together.

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I read this article this morning about the fight over the rainbow symbol. While I'm more inclined to view the rainbow in its biblical interpretation, I think complaining to the gay community about their use of the symbol is just a lot of hot air. If you really want to defame the gay interpretation in the rainbow, then you need to send the anti-gay community to the store to buy rainbow symbols and plaster them everywhere. And you need to explain to curious passersby that you're commemorating the rainbow of the biblical flood.

Essentially, if you want to restore the original meaning, then you need to get everyone on earth to embrace the symbol. The symbol will lose its meaning, and when it does, people will look to historical references to redefine it, and obviously the biblical interpretation is where its original meaning comes from. So stop caring if the rainbow symbolizes gay pride. Redefine it for yourself and then the gay community will have to go find another symbol to stand behind.

The best way to defeat your enemy is to love them. So if you want to defeat a symbol, maybe sometimes it would work to embrace it. That at least works for post-modern symbols. I don't think I'd recommend it for something like the Playboy logo, but that one is kind of self-defeating anyway on obvious moral grounds.

I had this dream on Saturday, December 4th. I dreamt that I was at a beer tasting party with quite a wide selection of beers. Toward the start of the party, the drinks were served in full glasses. As the party went along, the available beer slowly diminished (obviously) and instead of using smaller glasses, they used special glasses that were the same size, but were instead only hollow enough to pour a double-shot of whatever beer you were tasting.

So, instead of having one tall glass of beer, everyone ended up with lots of really heavy, but insufficient glasses of beer. Out behind the home that was hosting the party, was a courtyard that was shared between several very upscale apartments. Several people lounged outside the home and there was even another party next door hosted by some other people we knew. As more people streamed into the party, we found it rather crowded to stay within the confines of the property, especially when holding three or four of these heavy glasses. So we decided to join the party next door and take our beers with us. After all, we were friends with these other people.

After we settled down at the second party, the hostess came up to us and argued that this was a non-alcoholic party. She also was a bit surprised because she knew we were Christians and didn't think Christians drank beer. We apologized and argued that we did not know there was such a rule set about alcohol and we also noted that it was unusual that they would take offense to us.

The discussion appeared to be going toward some kind of anti-Christian debate when she said she was tired of our "Jesus" this and that and our hypocritical ways and then brought up the question, "Name the one thing Christians hold highest above everything else." She made it clear that she'd not hear any more from us if we answered this in a way she would expect us to.

I somehow managed to leave her speechless when I said, "Love. All you need is love."

I then woke up.

Re-posted from Facebook, lest the people from Facebook try to take my message down.

The lack of due diligence by Facebook and its third-party application developers has reached a truly disgusting low. There should be a link to the application's "about" page next to every bit of application trash that gets tossed on your news feed just so you can see how invisible these developers make themselves to be. There's a sickening lack of information provided about these applications. This is Facebook's largest privacy violation yet. You should be angry right now. You should be revolting. Got to "Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Applications You Use" and click on the names of some of them and see for yourself that you're granting profile access to ghost developers.

Facebook has removed the links to the application about page and developer pages that once rested at the very bottom of the application pages and applications now have what appear to be fake "about" and "privacy policy" links at the bottom of applications that have no real name.

Take, for example, the "What Firefly Character are you?" application (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=68625766665). It doesn't even have a name. It's just a number. Maybe the name was already taken, so perhaps we can dismiss that fact. But look at that about page. There is NOTHING on that page that identifies it. There's not even a firefly-related image for the application itself. There's no wall posts, no additional page describing what this application is. It's just a poltergeist masquerading as pop-culture.

You know what though? Lets hop on this application for a second, and you will see that this app is a fake app that redirects you to a slightly less fake app called "Quiz Monster" (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7635383700). And what is "Quiz Monster"? Well it appears that that about page says "Create your own facebook quiz application. Quiz Monster makes it simple, easy and fun!". That's about it. Who made it? Who knows.

Oh, it has a link to a privacy page (http://apps.facebook.com/quizcreator/quiz/privacy) and it appears that that page doesn't exist. Nice. Well, it does appear that the application is hosted at Heroku (http://quizme.heroku.com/). Heroku is a company that hosts applications (not always Facebook-related) for other companies. So who knows who really owns this "Quiz Monster" aka "quizcreator" aka "quizme" application. The closest I got to a privacy policy was on their heroku hosted page (http://quizme.heroku.com/privacy.html). But there's nothing that identifies who made this application.

Now, maybe "Quiz Monster", or whatever entity owns it, is operating under their supposed "Save Nothing" policy, and I'm sorry if I'm taking this out on a legitimate person/company, but there is where the problem lies. We have no idea who these people are or if they're telling the truth. There's no due diligence on the part of Facebook or "Quiz Monster" to tell you, the user, who they are and if they're acting legally. There's no transparency and you're expected to trust these people with your private information. It is absolutely disgusting.

Shame on Facebook for creating a platform full of holes and shame on all these third-party "ghost" developers for giving us no eye into who they really are.

Now if you will excuse me while I go delete all these ghosts from my profile...

I had a couple unusual dreams today. To start, I had a dream that I was in some kind of building in a rather close-nit community and the wind suddenly picked up and rattled all the windows. We looked outside and observed that the wind had stirred leaves and sticks into the air within a fine mist. I mentioned to whoever was with me that it looked like a hurricane outside. Then I said, "this would be the first hurricane we've ever had."

We stepped outside to get a better view of what was going on. The enclosed courtyard we stepped out onto looked very much like the center of the academic quad at SUNY Albany's campus. Same steps dipping down into the center and white stone square look. We entered from a building to the south of this courtyard and then walked east to get a view to the south from the building. Spreading out from the south dark clouds stretched their arms up above us and filled the southern horizon. I then said, "this is only the beginning."

I have no idea where this hurricane dream came from, but I can say that clouds rolled in overnight last night, but that doesn't seem significant.

In a second dream, I was at a house party which seemed to be comprised of two homes put together. First the Messenger home and secondly the Schwenker residence. I imagine this imagery comes from the fact that Josh Messenger got married this summer and Dave Schwenker got married a couple weeks ago.

Toward the beginning of the dream, an older fellow greeted me rather warmly, and it seemed almost uncomfortable. I wasn't sure why, but some time passed between that greeting and when I went to use the restroom. When I finished using the toilet I washed my hands and took a look in the mirror. It was then I realized what just happened. I had extremely long blond hair tied into two pig tails and bangs in the front. I was also dressed rather unisexually. Looking at myself, I really had no features that blatantly stood out specifically being male. The pig tails were draped in front of each shoulder, which made things even less obvious.

After seeing myself looking completely feminine, I pulled my hair back then left the restroom. I took a few of what was left of the desserts that the Messenger family had set out in their half of this double house party. I then crossed over a threshold into another room which was clearly the Schwenker side of this party. They were moving couches and chairs around this rather open-layout room as we set up to watch a movie.

Still being disturbed by my image, I bobbed my head forward and let all my long hair dangle to toward the floor. I also observed either here or in the restroom that my hair came down to mid-chest. I was astonished at this because I knew that I just cut my hair about two and a half weeks ago prior to Dave's wedding. I started looking at my hair to see if I could see it growing because of how unnatural this was. 18 to 20 inches in two weeks was not possible.

I drew my hair back into one clump behind me hoping to ensure no one would mistake my identity again. Then we started the movie, whatever it was, and I woke from the dream.

I can pick up that this dream describes the two weddings to some degree. Josh's wedding came first historically and food was catered for us. The room in the dream was more contemporary, which matched the more typical banquet hall you'd expect at a wedding. Also, the desserts at Josh's wedding were especially memorable. The room relating to Dave's wedding was very rustic, much like the church building where the wedding occurred. They moved all the seating around after the ceremony to make it into a banquet hall, which is represented by the open layout and moving the furniture. There was a bar to one side of the room in the dream, and there was alcohol served at the wedding. Dave's wedding also seemed to provide more entertainment, and the food was set up pot-luck style rather than catered.