Cat’s Cradle and the coast of San Antonio
by ZetaGecko | Add Your Comments | Dreams
In my dream, I'm walking down the road off the hill where I grew up. I turn off onto another road, and the second house on the right is where Kurt Vonnegut lives! A lady goes to his door, and when he answers, proposes writing a sequel to Cat's Cradle. She describes some of her ideas (beginning with a big storm), and Kurt seems open to the idea. I keep walking with a friend, thinking that it sounds like a good idea to me too.Then I wake up briefly, and think in a half-dream state about how Cat's Cradle ended. What the lady was proposing had no connection to the book, and I consider how one might approach writing a sequel. One thought was that someone could discover "liquid water 10" ("LW10" hereafter), which would turn all the ice in the world to liquid water again. Another idea is that while LW10 is an unlikely concept (since it's not solid, it's not likely to be stable enough to seed anything else), one might have a device which, when touched to water, provides the shape upon which LW10 would form (superseding the matrix of ice-9). This device would be able to melt enough ice-9 for a person to get a drink, but not keep it liquid after the device was removed. A person would carry the device around in their mouth (or poking out of it) to reduce the risk of being ice-9'd themself.
I fall all the way back to sleep again, and dream that LW10 has in fact melted all the ice in the world, including the polar ice caps. I'm driving down to San Antonio, and discover that the level of the ocean has risen so that the Gulf Coast is in the middle of San Antonio. At the coast, the old freeway goes into the water. Just before that, there's an exit to a parking lot. At high tide, the exit is flooded, making it impossible to drive into or out of the parking lot. The parking lot and surrounding structures have become a popular hang-out spot for young people at high tide. I ride out of the parking lot on a motorcycle through 6 to 8 inches of water as the tide is coming in.