February 2002. Dream. Again, a single image which stands out from a much more complex, in this case almost epic dream. In this dream I was a tourist visiting 'Las Vegas' but I was very aware that it was not the real Las Vegas. Certainly many elements of the city in this dream seemed a bit futuristic--of course one could say this about the real Las Vegas as well--but it would be stretching it to say that it felt futuristic. I rather felt that I was in an 'alternate' Las Vegas--a somewhat darker and more mystical version. Some friends and I were involved with a 'crime underworld' and seemed required to do various errands to extricate ourselves, having some stressful, if somewhat psychedelic adventures. At one point we entered a Blue Casino. Virtually everything in this fabulous building was almost the exact same shade of blue. (It occurs to me to note here that I have visited another building in dreams which is entirely red to the same optically bizarre degree--carpets, walls, furnishings--in this case, an airport.) Anyway, we were allowed into a 'special section' of this casino which apparently required membership--there was a lot of security issues. We walked down several flights of very plushly carpeted deep blue stairs that descended into a gorgeous deep blue lobby. There was one enormous pane of glass on one wall, partly draped with massive deep blue velvet curtains, which looked out into the night and the neon city. The intoxicating effect of all the same-colored objects in the moody, blue neon-lit dimness of this sprawling casino was almost like a camouflage to one's 'depth of field' perception--so that there appeared, at first glance, to be much more 'emptiness' in the space than there actually was. This effect was broken here and there, mostly by the clothing of the patrons and other objects. There were hundreds of people here all sitting at arrays of television monitors, ostensibly betting on and watching for the outcome of a very strange and complex game which involved something like a cross between multiple pinball and roulette events happening in remote locations. Like a lottery, this game would, through a process of elimination, come down to three balls which always represented a calendar date. I understood that there were very low odds of producing a future date in this game, but one could 'win really big' if one was produced. The game seemed to take quite awhile to produce a result, but while I was there a game ended with the date "11-29-03." I asked a friend who seemed to know more about the game about this date and he assured me that it was either 1903 or 1803, apparently judging from the fact that there seemed to be no winners. At the top of these banks of televisions, three screens displayed the result:  Below were innumerable other television monitors which displayed the locations of various pinball-like mechanisms through which these balls had traveled. Moving in and out of the patrons were an army of waitresses which I didn't notice for some time because they were camouflaged like most of the rest of the environment: they wore a dark, slightly metallic blue makeup or greasepaint (apparently) of precisely the same shade as everything else on their skin and hair and were dressed in long richly sequined tunics which served to camouflage them even more, reflecting the same colors from nearly every surface. As they moved about among the patrons I noticed they were each wearing, as I first thought of them, an 'electric crown' of small, brilliant red, green and blue lights, looking very much like Christmas tree lights. I assumed each tiny bulb must be projecting from a sort of headband on tiny, flexible wires which were invisible in the pervasive blueness, and they bobbed and quavered slightly and responsively to the waitresses' movements. It was a strikingly beautiful, if simple effect, I thought. Then one of the waitresses came very near to us and interacted with some of my friends, ostensibly taking drink orders, floating a tray gracefully before her. Her manner was very austere and her movements and speech were very slow and purposeful to the point of being slightly alien and I thought to myself that this too was merely an intentional theatrical affectation in keeping with the 'theme' of the casino. She was very beautiful--'classical'--in fact, and I noticed that all the other waitresses looked almost exactly like her. They reminded me of a mix of the 'Royal Guard" who are commanded never to change their facial expressions and 'clones' of beautiful, identical women--but I could see that they were not entirely identical, just of the same basic 'type'--strong-featured, Mediterranean, slightly muscular and long of limb. Up close the tiny lights of her headress were dazzling, piercing, and even seemed to give off a palpable warmth and perhaps a barely audible hum or vibration--I could feel the light of them on my face--delightful and intoxicating. Now I noted with awe and amazement that these tiny light sources were not connected to anything. They were simply, truly floating there in a perfectly tilted ellipse- a halo of actual satellites.  Their responsive movement was some kind of controlled electromagnetic phenomenon. It never occured to me for a moment that there was anything 'supernatural' in this, I was certain it was an amazing new kind of technology. I strongly suspected a small battery-pack-sized 'homing unit' worn in the hair--a 'control center' of some sort. I put my face very close to her now, to inspect this device and determine how it worked, and she almost impercetably flinched and drew her head very slightly away from my advance. As she did this her halo of lights seemed to become 'rigid' and slightly tighter and higher, and then immediately began to move very rapidly in a counterclockwise orbit, strobing on and off and creating an effect like a the sequenced lights of a marquis. No sooner than they had begun this new movement, they again 'relaxed' into their looser, 'geostationary' and gently bobbing orbits. I noticed other waitresses creating similar and different effects periodically: for a moment a single bright light would be chased rapidly by progressively dimmer 'tracer lights,' brief 'alternate blinking' would occur or a sudden dimming followed by rapid 'fading up' to a brighter than normal intensity, mimicking the glow of tiny bursting fireworks. These effects were always very brief and the halos would return instantly to their looser pattern. This dream continued for quite some time and I left the Blue Casino and went on to different adventures, but throughout the dream I was fascinated and delighted--haunted--by these strange waitresses and kept mentioning them to my companions who didn't seem to be all that impressed by them. |