This afternoon, a guy from the IT department came by to ask if my computer had had the latest security patch. I told him, yes, I'd patched it. Now if he'd come three days before the computer got infected with a worm and asked me that, he could have saved us both a lot of trouble.

In fairness, our IT department is rather small, and probably massively overworked. Which is probably why he took my word for it when I told him I'd patched the OS. I mean, really, for all he knew I just applied iron-on denim to my CD-ROM drive.

I dreamed last night that I got a letter from Realms of Fantasy saying, "Ooops, sorry. We made a mistake. We're not actually publishing your story after all." It was quite funny - at least after I woke up. I got the contract earlier this week, so I think it's really official.

I've been reading a lot of stuff by the psychotherapist Irvin Yalom lately, and he's very interested in patients' dreams. Not in the way that therapists stereotypically are, though. In classic Freudian psychoanalysis, dreams are interesting because they reveal deeply buried and repressed feelings and desires. Yalom thinks that this is bunk - he believes that dreams are typically quite superficial and mundane in terms of what they deal with - they tend to reflect whatever the patient has been thinking about a lot in their present waking life. Since people in psychotherapy aren't always capable of accurately describing what really goes on in their everyday life, dreams can be a useful window onto that.

I like this theory. Or at least, the idea that dreams are just random churning of whatever happens to be going on in a person's daily life seems to me to more accurately describe most dreams than the Freudian interpretation. After all, it's pretty hard to come up with a deep Freudian interpretation of the stuff I dream about most frequently: work, getting stories critiqued, going back to Clarion, video games, sex.

Well, okay, you can probably always get a Freudian interpretation out of dreams about sex.

It's interesting that I almost never dream about writing per se. I've gotten a lot of really insightful critiques in dreams about stories that I haven't actually written. Yet.

Oh, yeah, and I sometimes dream about being a character from one of my stories. When I was writing "Grail Knight", I had a very vivid dream about being Mordred, so vivid that when I woke up, I had a very powerful sense of disorientation, as if I'd woken up in the wrong body.

Perhaps if I could teach myself to lucid dream on a regular basis, I could use that as a story brainstorming technique. That could be fun. The first time I ever had a lucid dream was after reading an article in Omni magazine about lucid dreaming. The article had a bunch of suggestions on how to lucid dream more regularly, one of which was that you get in the habit of periodically asking yourself, "Okay, am I dreaming right now? How could I prove that I am/am not?" I never really got the hang of this, partly because it's silly, and partly because it tends to set off long musings on Descartes.

So, before I go off on a long musing on Descartes, I think I'd better sign off on this journal entry.