Keyboard Dreams

It sounds ridiculous but amongst the vivid dreams I had last night, I should say this morning because I didn't fall asleep until after 1:00 AM, was a dream about computer keyboards. Keyboards are on my mind regularly, and, by the way, the word keyboard is not pleasant to type (since we're being honest).

I have problems with the keyboard I use every day and I've tried several different ones that I have around here from older computers. My big gripes are that the apostrophe is too close to the return key and so I usually err on the left side which means that I hit the semicolon a lot. Most of my contractions have a semicolon before the T or S. The A is too close to the Capslock and there is a Ctrl key on the lower left corner of my keyboard that I hit with my palm, especially when I reach for the T with my left hand (which opens a new tab in the browser when I'm writing on a web based document).

The keyboard I'm currently using is a compact Chiclet type that came with another computer I got, or maybe this one, I don't know. But for years I was using another board with it. I don't switch keyboards unless I have a good reason. Some just work better for me and I can be rough on them. Especially when I really get going.

Anyway in this dream, this guy, I can't remember if I knew him, came up to me with this keyboard that he said was fantastic, I should try it. It was a black plastic compact model that folded in the middle. It folded in the middle. Now I guess that was so you could slip it into your coat pocket. I've seen folding keyboards before in the new gadgets section of pages. But when you think of it, they are like the Three Stooges gimmick of selling pens that write under whip cream. Somewhere around here I'm sure I still have the pen my wife gave me for Christmas 20 years ago that was advertised to write upside down and in outer space. It said it was developed by NASA for space flight because regular pens required gravity. (How about a pencil?) I'm pretty sure it was expensive, but again, I don't ever remember writing anything upside down and I haven't been weightless since the womb.

Anyway, this keyboard in the dream didn't make a lot of sense to me for its folding value but it was also missing some of the middle keys. Now, I'm not sure why, but there was about a four or five-inch notch taken out of the top middle of the thing.  I don't know why the notch was there but I pointed out to the guy that the notch is where the letters like T, Y, U, and the numbers above them should have been. He just kept pointing out how it folded.

This is the kind of shit I waste my time with while I'm trying to sleep. another dream had to do a giant slide type of feature, made of wood I believe that was interrupted every so many vertical feet by a short flight of stairs. This slide was very long and wide, maybe 50 or 60 feet wide. Cars were involved with it somehow and a few of the cast of the West Wing. It was the last things we watched before bedtime last night. There was some conflict going on about the slide. I don't know what it was but the short flights of stairs were supposed to allow people to go up the slide more easily.

Don't ask me. Ask the little man in my mind that runs these movies for me. Somehow I suspect he lives a very interesting life up there and it has nothing to do with me.  If it does, he's keeping it a secret from me, so what exactly is the point of these little foreign films running in my head.

I had a few more but they were even less entertaining.

Ah me, (Sigh). Better get on with it.

More later,

(photo by Jamie Street)