Shy on material, I resort yet again to a recent dream. I've gotten pretty good at commanding a flying ability in dreams where my character is threatened. The bad guys come at me, and I fly up to a nice, unstrikable altitude and generally the dream ends after a few seconds. Lucid dreaming is pretty tough. As soon as I try to take control, it starts to fall apart. Just like real life I guess :-/
But the other night, it held together, and I tried to work on developing some additional 'powers'. My attackers came at me and I lofted upward only to be thwarted by a ceiling. Before my thankfully gunless nemeses could thwack me with a coat rack or a throwing knife, I decided I should tap some offensive skills. Disrupting the molecules of the head thug seemed like as good a plan as any. So I strained my dream knuckles into a clutching posture and commanded my disruptor powers. But, much like trying to push a cat from one room to another, the attempt failed miserably. The scene kept skipping and replaying as I tried again and again to fry my opponent while my dream pressed the 'cancel' button.
Rationalizing that my foe must be invincible, I swooped down, scooped him up, blew through a convenient ventilation shaft, and headed skyward. Into the sun with you, you indestructible villain! That's when I analyzed the whole thing to death and woke up.
As we flew toward the tenuous limits of the upper atmosphere (I figured I should be indestructible to vacuum too!), I tried to remember what Earth's escape velocity is. No sense in the bad guy eventually falling back, trudging out of the Marianas Trench and starting more trouble. I pulled a figure of 17,500 mph outta somewhere (it's actually 25,000 mph you see) and as that number came to mind, the dream started to flicker. I then thought, how will I know when I've reached the right velocity? I decided I would only be able to carry this dastardly fellow at 1g acceleration as I lofted him to his solar oblivion (I didn't consider summoning super-strength). So, how long does it take to accelerate to escape velocity at 32ft/sec^2? That's when the acceleration functions v^2=2ad and d=.5at^2 started to drift in, and the dream was finally analyzed to smithereens. What a sad way to go.
I have nothing more now, and my regrets & condolences on this cruddy post. Hopefully something better will occur to me soon.
Keep em comin.
I think you may have telescope poisoning btw. Did you dream that in a lawnchair deep in the frosty Arizona evening?
I think you may be right about the telescope poisoning! I have also broken my ability to recover from sleep deprivation.
I think you may have influenced a dream from last night: I was in New York. Looking for a job. I walked into the office of the New York Times, but the editor was busy interviewing some other prospective in his office. So I wandered around and marveled at the selection of handbags and shoes they had on sale in their downstairs lobby. Poof--the alarm went off. No time to analyze that one.