There is the story of the scientist--I'm too lazy to look up the name right now, and it slips my mind--who dreamed of a snake holding its tail in its mouth and rolling along like a hoop. The scientist upon waking up flashed on the structure of the benzene ring. So such things do happen, I suppose.

My dreams usually involve some onerous task or difficult situation I'm trying to solve. Sometimes problems in books. Books in dreams are fuzzy things...my subconscious is not precise enough to slap a consistent page of text in front of my eyes, and words move around and change. When I got home from my trip up to Oregon and Washington, I spent a long night dreaming about trying to catch airplanes and missing flights (we actually missed a flight for the first time this past trip).

It doesn't help such dreams that I actually did spend the New York blackout in the New York airport, running back and forth late at night through miles of darkened corridors lit--for some insane reason--only by flashing xenon bulbs like some stupid "Alien" movie. All the while trying to track down which gate might--just might--have a flight out of the blackness for the entire tour group I was traveling with.

Waking up to find out that these problems don't exist is almost worth it.