I was in New Orleans with Tara and Jennifer. The three of us were walking along a narrow street headed toward a building whose entry way I knew was in an alley. When we got there, Tara and I were still together, but Jennifer was gone. Tara and I walked into the alley-way entrance and into a huge room with marble floors and tall white columns. We stood on a balcony overlooking the main floor and saw Jennifer below us walking quickly toward a hallway. She was following a tall, dark-skinned man in a gray suit. She was wearing a frilly black and white pinafore over a flouncy skirt with little red ankle socks and shiny black flats. She looked like a little girl.

Tara and I caught up with her in the hallway and followed. At the end of the hallway, Jennifer climbed up on a bed with a man and began to take her clothes off. Tara split into two people. One Tara went through a doorway into a dark room where a man lay wrapped up in rumpled covers on a bed. The other Tara stood next to me in the doorway. I couldn't decide what to watch, so I kept leaning back and forth, looking into the hallway at Jennifer, then looking back into the bedroom at one of the Taras. I was fascinated and scared.

Later I was at an outdoor swimming pool where a swim meet was taking place. I stood behind a tall man with my arms wrapped around his waist and leaned my forehead against his back. He was my boyfriend and my brother. He had long blond hair with brightly-colored feathers woven into the strands.

It was my turn to swim, and I wasn't prepared. I stood at the edge of the pool and waited for the starting gun. I was in the center lane, and the only other swimmer was a little girl in the far right lane. I was embarrassed to be competing against a child. We dove in and started racing. On the return lap, I rose out of my body to look across the lanes to see if I was winning. The little girl was keeping up with me easily even though I was swimming as hard as I could. I went back into my body and tried harder, but I knew it was no good.

I got out of the pool and looked for my boyfriend. I saw that he was looking up at a Native American woman standing on a balcony overlooking the pool. She was his new girlfriend, and he was in love. He told me they were going to get married, and that I should buy her a wedding gift. I thought flowers would be nice and asked what kind she liked. He began to reel off a list of Latin botanical names, and I told him he was crazy if he expected me to hunt them down. I told him I'd just go to the grocery store and get a bouquet of tulips wrapped in cellophane.

Frustration

I was in the snowy woods with my family. Diane and I had struck out ahead of Mom and Dad. The trees thinned out, and we crossed a wide expanse of smooth snow. We came upon a cabin. It was a one-story building, square-shaped, and the back was covered with many fluttering, colorful tapestries. We approached it, then rounded the corner to the front. It was more of a shack than a cabin, with only three walls. The sides were painted turquoise blue. Inside there was a large bed platform with notebooks, photographs, scraps of paper, and books strewn everywhere. No one was around.

Diane left, and I went into the cabin, crawling on my hands and knees onto the bed platform. Then there was a man there. He was shirtless, in his 50s, balding with a beard, and very fit. I kissed his neck, but he didn't like it. I took off my clothes, and we kissed and held each other. I asked him if he was someone I knew from before, and if I would find a picture of myself among the other pictures in the cabin. He was mysterious and noncommittal. I thought he might be from my childhood, from a dream I had had then, and I felt very lucky to have found this place.

Suddenly Mom and Dad peeked around the corner into the cabin. I stood up and pulled a blanket to my waist. I was embarrassed to be naked in front of them, but I didn't pull the blanket all the way up. I told them to leave me alone and go away, but they just stared at me stupidly. I was frustrated.

I was sliding down a concrete snow tunnel at high speeds. It was like a water park slide, but completely enclosed and built low to the ground. I was wearing snow pants, a parka, and a red felt hat with a brim. I controlled my direction by pointing my toes in the direction I wanted to slide. The tunnel was located near the cabin, on the snowy plains. On my second ride down, I slid around a corner and almost collided with two women who were making their way up toward me. They were drunk. I was angry at them for ruining my ride, and I took them by the arms, sat them in my lap, and slid to the bottom.

When we got out of the tunnel, I saw many people on the snow field, and there were a number of little cabins everywhere. Each cabin was a restaurant/night club, and there were kids everywhere, hanging out and having a good time. I went off to find the cabin that I had been in before, but when I got there, it was different. It had become one of the nightclubs, but it was also a coffee shop. I went in and saw that the mess of books and papers had been organzied and shelved, and people were laying on the floor around small tables, reading and smoking from hookahs. There were little lamps on each of the tables, and beautiful colors everywhere. The man was gone.

Lake

I was with Jennifer and Tara at someone's mountain home. They were adults, but acted like children, and I was in charge of them. There was a party at the house next door.

The house was on a road at the base of a mountain, and I stood on the back porch looking up at the deep V created by a narrow valley. There was an enormous lake on the side of one of the mountains. It was oriented vertically on the slope, and the water continually poured down toward me, but was sucked into a huge whirlpool at the bottom of the slope before it could fall out of the lake and flood the houses. The water was beautiful--swirls of white, blues, and greens flowing into a frothy spiral.

When I lay on my right side, I fell into a light coma. My body tingled and I saw a square-shaped silvery patch of light shimmering in the air above my left eye. I was paralyzed. I hated falling into this state because I felt so helpless, and because when I was there, I was too close to some sort of scary being. At the same time, I also liked the coma because it was a very different sort of consciousness, and I felt good to give up my body and live only in mind.

As I lay there, I could see a piece of notebook paper floating in the air. There was a list with bulleted points written on it in black ink, but I couldn't read the words. The writing veered off to the side and clumped together at the bottom. I was very afraid of the last item. It was a link to whatever evil entity existed in my coma-state.

Later I was walking down the center of an incredibly wide, frozen, but rapidly thawing river with two men. The shorter of the two and I wanted to continue even though there were enormous chunks of ice careening off of one another and the bank. We would jump from chunk to chunk and be carried down the river with the current. The other man wanted to walk on the bank instead because he thought it would be safer there. I wanted the taller man to feel comfortable, so I reassured him that we would be fine, and suggested that he walk along the bank. We would meet him at our destination. I left him and continued leaping off the ice chunks as I sailed down the river at top speed. Every once in a while I would fall into the water, but the cold was invigorating, and it was easy to pull myself up onto the next ice chunk. I looked up at the ravens flying over the river.

Getaway Car

I was an old married woman, and my husband (whose name was Herb) and I were time-travelers. By moving back and forth through time, we had stayed alive for centuries. Our time-traveling ability was a secret we kept to ourselves. Sometimes we had to move quickly to avoid being found out.

Such a time came one afternoon while we were in the year 2008. We lived in a ranch house in the high mountain desert somewhere in California. We had received advance warning that a man was coming to our house to expose us. Herb and I ran outside and got into a car parked in the driveway. Although I knew it was a car and not some sort of a space ship, Herb did not, and he referred to it as our beautiful Sun Ship. It was a huge 1970s American car with a gold paint job. Herb was convinced it would fly, and I hoped he was right. Herb got into the driver's seat and managed to start it up and get us moving. As we cruised very slowly down the street, I explained to him what to do when he saw stop signs. In particular, I stressed that even if there weren't other cars on the street, he should always come to a complete stop whenever he saw that red shape on a pole.

I was talking to Katie on the phone. I held a dark brown package in my hands that I thought was meat. I told Katie that I was really sorry, but I had taken her steak out of the freezer, and I didn't know what to do with it. She asked if it had defrosted. I looked closely at it through the plastic packaging and realized that it was just trail mix. However, it did have orange wedges in it, and I was concerned that they wouldn't freeze well again.

I went to visit Melinda in the country at her house there. It was a perfectly square, single-roomed house with flowing sheer curtains at the windows. A storm came up, and we decided to leave. The wind blew so hard that the house tipped up on its corner. I ran to the other corner to redistribute the weight and tip it back down, as if I were in a capsizing boat. I was mad at Melinda for living in a house that wasn't attached to its foundation.

A Departure

Information Explosion?

"Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of information in 2002. 92% of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks [not discs]." (italics mine)

"How big is 5 exabytes? If digitized, the 19 million books and other print collections in The Library of Congress would contain about ten terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections."

"The United States produces about 40% of the world's new information, including 33% of the world's new printed information, 30% of the world's new film titles, 40% of the world's information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media."

"Information flows through electronic channels--telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet--contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. 98% of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls."

Some questions the report doesn't really examine are:
What exactly is new information? Do metadata and article databases count?
Where are the other information production hot spots on the planet?
How much of this information is good information?
Which of these storage mediums are actually going to last? (URLs are notoriously unstable.
Is this information being organized?
Who is benefitting from all of this new information and how?
And, most importantly ;), in light of all this new information (and information about information) why aren't librarians paid a whole hell of a lot more money?