Computer Disaster
This portion of the log was involved with an unfortunate disaster. A cable snagged a printer card switch and opened the address circuit to show it in two slots at once. Many strange things happened, including turning on all three disk drives in write mode and creaming the directories of the two 8 inch disks. No back-up had been made due to computer problems. This log is, then, rewritten from memory from 4-1-1983 to 4-11.1983, but it had been worked over in the morning and was well remembered. No significant detail was lost as there wasn't much recorded in the first place.
4-1-1983: Friday. Several wandering type dreams but nothing retained.
4-2-1983: Saturday. No dreams remembered.
4-3-1983: Sunday. Aware of dreaming, but nothing retained. *************** Disaster **************** The computer went flaky early Sunday afternoon.
4-4-1983: Monday. I was aware of a couple of dreams. The only one remembered involved a large whirlpool in a lake. There was a scene viewing the bottom under the whirlpool where I saw a wooden boat partially filled with sand. The water was crystal clear and the sand was very clean.
There was a scene where I examined a map of the lake with (Connie and Stew ?). The lake was very long and very narrow, with the whirlpool at one end. On the map, the water was colored blue and the whirlpool was represented by a circular brown patch. I could not figure out what it was that sustained the whirlpool. I thought perhaps the lake drained through the bottom in this area, but could not reconcile that with the clean sand. A lot of debris would have been dragged down.
4-5-1983: Tuesday. Up very late working on the computer. No dreams except possibly of computer program listings in Pascal.
4-6-1983: Wednesday. Same as Tuesday.
4-7-1983: Thursday. Same as Tuesday.
4-8-1983: Friday. Same as Tuesday. I thought I had it fixed Friday evening before going out to dinner with Sheila Moran. It was working, but flaked out in a couple of hours Saturday morning.
We went to a Korean restaurant. Sheila had lived in Koreatown for years but had never eaten Korean food. The place I selected was one Paula and I had gone to about eight years before. It was still pretty much the same, but a little the worse for wear. The food was good and no-one there spoke English except the waitress, and then only to us.
4-9-1983: Saturday. A couple of dreams. One was on board a (British ?) aircraft carrier. I was with a group of men, possibly in uniform, standing around in a circle. (Queen Elisabeth ?) was standing as a member of the circle while addressing us. I was a couple of places to her left.
In the other dream I climbed into a large open military vehicle, somewhat resembling an overgrown jeep. It was driven by a man (in uniform with a buret ?) who had a little trouble maneuvering this large vehicle in close quarters. He put a large but very shallow dent in someone's new van or trailer. There was another sequence involving (Jon Lackey ?) in an incidental role (the dented van may have been his, but he was unaware of the damage ?). 2023 note: The Jon Lackey of the waking world never owned a van, and never owned a new vehicle of any kind, ever.
4-10-1983: Sunday. Same as Tuesday.
4-11-1983: Monday. Up untill 1:00am working on the computer. No dreams remembered.
4-12-1983: Tuesday. I was definitely aware of dreaming for a good part of the morning, but I did not wake up right and nothing was remembered. There was some interesting miscellaneous stuff, I recall, but nothing spectacular.
*************** End of Disaster **************** The computer was running like clockwork. Too bad I will never know for sure what was originally wrong with it, it got so screwed up in the process of trying to find the problem.
2023 note: This computer was a S100 type, a big box with 8 inch floppy drives and large plug-in boards. It was newer than the ones with a "full panel" of 0/1 switches to enter the boot code byte by byte. This one could boot off a floppy disk. It was very much more expensive than today's far more powerful (and way smaller) computers.