A Dream

I jot down my dreams in the waking hours, not always, and even less so share them — random recipients of limerence too distant to be told “hey I dreamt of you”, surreal space designs, and for a Hot Wheels collector I dream about shoplifting quite a lot (never actually). In all I write about dreams at a much lower frequency than I dream interesting ones for sure. But today’s one is worthy of future memories.

I dreamt of a clinical room, in which I’d met my grandmother. I’d visited her last month I went home and had long chats, I also bought her a (in hindsight) tiny souvenir from the Cornell Lab, she loves birds. I know she’s undergoing a surgery right now. I’d still call from time to time, but their health and mobility have reached such a point that answering the phone casts a significant burden and I was advised not to.

In the dream I found a projector that functioned as a TV in this unfamiliar room, and plugged my laptop into it. I launched Space Engine, as I’ve done a few times to kids when I volunteered at various science fairs.

I showed her the solar system, zoomed from Earth to Moon in an instant, flew between the rings of Saturn, and tumbled with Uranus as we saw it orbit the sun in an accelerated time. I scrolled even further out to bring into full view our galactic neighborhood, pulsar binaries, the microlensing planets humanity has discovered just off the core regions of the Milky way, the central black hole tearing up stars and gas for breakfast … and towards the edge, the ripples in the galactic plane and all the little satellite galaxies around.

Places I’d only see rendered on my screen — and in my dreams, evidently.

The projector wasn’t doing a good job showing specks of starlight on the intricate geometry of the room, so I turned on displays in other wavelengths and features, I rendered the dark matter haloes around the Milky Way and its satellites. In the dream these would be reminiscent of what my simulations look like when rendered with Paraview or YT.

I began talking about the DM astrophysics I read about and researched for my graduate program. And I began to zoom further out the simulations, teary eyed, and woke up.

I suppose it ended on a note of how much I know about how little I know.

Also I probably should tell my real family more about what I do.