My entire night last night was taken up with a long, involved #WeirdDream. Apparently my subconscious is both racist and terrible at history. I'm sharing because it was so detailed, long, and nonsensical that it's kind of impressive. As it opened, I was somehow teleported to what the dream called 1700's New York City. I decided that the best way to become wealthy and successful would be to invent the record player, years before Edison was even born! Unfortunately, I put tons of effort into it (somehow involving origami tinfoil birds), without realizing the obvious flaw: why would anyone buy a record player, when it's cheaper just to pay an Irish girl a penny and she'll come to your house and sing for you? As everyone but me probably already knows, every single street corner in 1700's New York City had an absolutely identical Irish girl clone on it. Same voice, same appearance, same clothes, and apparently no name or anything. But all the Irish girls could sing, and they all knew the same songs. If you taught one Irish girl a new song, all of the other ones would just immediately know it. So record players were just unnecessary and expensive! Thankfully, I had a second idea to ensure my wealth and success: I invented a slide projector, and an easy way to create slides that involved crystals, lenses, and movable type. It went gangbusters! The New York Times loved it, and said "Thanks to the invention of PowerPoint, mankind has achieved the pinnacle of human civilization." Unfortunately for me, not everyone was happy, and I found myself betrayed by the New York City police (all of whom were absolutely identical Irish men) who were still upset about the record player thing. They allowed me to be kidnapped by what my dream ambiguously identified as an African tribe. The tribe put me on a ship and we sailed to the jungle (lots of rocking and floating sensations), where the chief started to yell at me. He was upset because now that I had given the white man the mighty PowerPoint, his entire culture would be unable to survive, and the whites would surely use PowerPoint to exterminate all of them. Fortunately for me, I figured out how to dematerialize my hands (it felt extremely tingly, and I'm pretty sure my real hands had fallen asleep at this point) and slip them out of the handcuffs. Then the dream turned into a silly action sequence involving swinging on vines and climbing trees as I tried to escape the jungle. Lots of rocking and swinging and falling, and I think I was starting to wake up. Then my alarm went off and I woke up completely before my jungle escape could get resolved. Anyway, now I pretty much have the entire plot for a new 1920's style pulp fiction book for boys. Tom Swift And His Electric Slide Projector, maybe? Good grief, I have absolutely no idea where all of that nonsense came from. Yet it somehow felt meaningful; something about how bureaucracy is the first requirement for genocide, and slavery only goes away when the alternatives are cheaper, maybe? I dunno. But it was one of the extremely rare (for me) dreams where I woke up and felt like I was supposed to take...something...away from that experience. I just wish I knew what.