My dad is driving the family to my paternal grandfather’s funeral-dinner. My maternal-grandmother. my brother. and myself are the passengers. My mom is supposedly a passenger too, but she seems to never speak or do anything the whole dream. My grandmother is asking me about the something about measuring information in writing, so I tell her there are many ways of measuring information, such as Kolmogorov Complexity or entropy, and I explain to her why simply counting pages is not a good way of measuring information (what if one guy’s handwriting is bigger than another?) and I’m about to explain why even counting letters is not a good method, since some letters provide more information than others, but we arrived.

I don’t remember what happened exactly (maybe my pants got torn or something?) but something happened that caused this next decision to make sense, so I took off my pants and went to the dinner nude.

We were in somebody’s residential lounge, and there were 3 sofas around 3 sides of a small square table, with a TV (turned off) at the final side, and a corridor leading off to the rest of the building, just to the left of the TV, and a glass-sliding door leading outside just to the right. Facing the TV, I’m on the couch to the left, as is my grandmother. My dad and another adult is on couch to the right, opposite me.

On the couch opposite the TV is my highschool friend Koffman. He was a big geek and a loner back then, but right now, he’s got two hot girls on either side of him, they occasionally sitting on his lap. There may also have been one more adult there, but I can’t exactly recall.

My grand-mother she starts asking me about “int long date;”. I tell her that’s only tangentially related to measuring information, and I realize she’s probably going towards the Y2K problem, given the names of the variable and the “measuring info” question (as in, we only gave 2 digits for the year, but we should have given 4), but she asks me why the compile error messages have to be so bad. I begin my explanation by saying “The compiler…” but Koffman interrupts and says it’s the linker, not the compiler. I tell him I like to refer to the whole thing as the compiler, of which the linker and the parser are sub-parts of.

My grandmother goes over to Koffman, and forcefully sits next to him, even pushing one of the girls aside, and Koffman is visibly displeased. I start telling her about Alan Turing (who happens to be gay, but I don’t mention this to her) and I being laying out the proof for his Halting Problem proof, when everybody starts to leave, presumably because of some signal that dinner is ready.

This boy, maybe 11 years old or so, runs up while holding a note pad, and sees I have a pen next to me on the couch. He picks up my pen. It’s one of those technical pens, and after he finishes jotting down something, he tries to push the tip of the pen in, and it gives and bends and breaks. He says “If you come back here next week, I’ll give you a new Tecnica pen.” I tell him “I live in Westmount, which is far from here, so can we meet like halfway or something next week?” He says ok, so I give him my cellphone (it’s some old candybar type thing, not my current sleek touchscreen smartphone) to enter in his number.

His older brother (17?) comes in, and I’m suddenly self conscious that I’m naked and getting an 11 year old boy’s number, and he takes the cellphone, and says he’s gonna enter in his number too. When he does, and returns it to me, I look at the screen and see that he dialed a funny number, and that my phone now has a virus, and is playing a weird animation and making strange music. I turn off the phone, and the brother becomes a bit confrontation, getting up in my face, but trying to be overt about it. I try to make him be uncomfortable to make him go away, so I start acting gay, but he plays along, and neither one of us wants to bail out of our bluff, so we start making out.

We’re compelled to go the dinner (maybe one of the parents called out to one of the brothers?) so they get up to go, but I ask the younger one if he has any pants that he can lend to me, and he says he’ll go check.

While waiting, I idly stroll over the the glass-pane door and I see a student-orchestra rehearsing with instruments that they themselves built. The instruments (piano, woodwind, percussion, etc.) have some sort of paint that makes them illuminate in different bright colours under black-light; a part of their performance I suppose.

Onto the corridor, I see various aquariums with a plaque describing their contents. The first one was unremarkable, but the second contained an angler fish. The plaque said something about how the angler fish uses light to attract fish, but that sudden flashes of lights are more likely to scare fish away than lure them (so it seems this is intended to be a young children’s museum).

Next I saw a sink, so I decided to wash off the silly-putty that seemed to be covering my arms and legs. I tried to manually peel off the thickest layers first, and they removed without too much problem, but there was a thinner film-like layer beneath which stuck to me so well that when I tried to peel them off, layers of my own flesh came with them. This happened for both my arms and legs (my torso was thankfully free of the substance), so I put my arms under the water, trying to scrub off this film, when the boy came back with some cotton gym pants.

That’s when I woke up.

The cell phone virus is obviously symbolic for AIDS, and the silly putty for semen and shame. The pen with the broken tip is my penis, and Koffman is my insecurity about my sexuality. I don’t know what the aquariums, the student-orchestra, nor my intro-to-comp-sci-to-grandma represent.