Spam Gives Me a Nightmare

I received a spam mail in my inbox. It was from a friend. I can’t now remember what it exactly said, but it was something about how eco-unfriendly the Intel Pentium 4 processor is. The mail ended with a warning that a bird would come and get me if I didn’t throw my processor into fire. I, of course, reported it as spam and went on with my normal routine. One couldn’t expect me to really throw it in fire; the processor is as important as my heart.

Later that night as I switched off all the lights and went to sleep I could hear the flapping of wings and see foggy fiery lights outside the translucent panes of the window. I checked to see if it was locked and made a trip across all the rooms checking every single window in the house. One of them in another bedroom had been open.

I wiped the tiny beads of perspiration across my forehead with the back of my palm and peeked outside anxiously. The air was thick with smoke and there was a huge fire at the far end in one direction. I thought I heard something and ducked inside closing the window. My ears were already cold. As I tiptoed back to my bed, I could hear the flapping of wings inside the house. I started closing the door to each room after confirming that each was free of birds. Finally, in my bedroom, I found the bird. It was large, dirty half-white, and gave me a piercing look enough to make my heart stop. I quickly closed the door of that room and assured myself that it wouldn’t bother me for the night.

I then walked into the other bedroom, closed the door shut, locked it from inside, and forced myself to sleep.

After some time, I started feeling lighter. And lighter. I slowly opened my droopy eyes and saw the bird perched on my torso doing something. I didn’t move. It was busy, perhaps sucking my soul, and I felt no weight. I thought I became one with the world.

***

With that scary thought I woke up from my actual sleep realizing all that to be a nightmare. I sat there thinking about the dream. I never finished Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams but I had exercised before trying to connect different aspects of my dreams to reality, recording a lot of them dutifully.

First, I blame Tana French’s In The Woods, a wonderful book, for sleep deprivation. I had been reading it late into the nights, the only time I am able to manage to read books these days. Second, I watched a Google Tech Talk about measuring performance that morning — I’m a software performance engineer — and the speaker mentioned how Intel’s policies make it extra hard for the academia in particular in pinpointing the exact reasons for the phenomenon called “measure bias”.

I just wanted to share with you because this is the first time ever that spam played a role in my nightmare, though the spam too had been part of it. Did this ever happen to you?

Disclaimer: I am not accusing Intel of anything. The dream could as well have been about an AMD Athlon processor.