I was at work, making cables. But instead of a cube farm in an office, our workspaces were outside, on a hillside. We still had our office chairs and desks and dividers of some unspecified sort. The grass was all brown and the sky was gray because it's winter, I guess.

I left for a while to find a soldering iron or some connectors or something, which I found at the intersection of the Southwest Corridor bike path and the path past the golf course parking lot. When I got back to the office, Megan and Mitch were talking about some problem that they were working through together. Some Linux or Java thing that I had some experience with so I was passively following along. But mostly I was focusing on the thing I was constructing. I had a large orange or yellow cable that resembled twin-lead (why don't we use that anymore?), but was maybe 15″ wide (tall, because I had it mounted to the rack behind my desk) and 4½″ thick, with large rectangular conductors, oriented so the wide dimension was perpendicular to the wide dimension of the cable. This huge fat cable was for AC wall power. I guess I was planning on running a lot of current through that. The cables I was making now were much smaller, but I liked to look at and touch the fat orange one sometimes.

Then Sara and I were woken up by alarm clocks. But we went back to sleep.

The houses across the street from us were being gradually replaced by big gray concrete buildings. Some to the left (from our perspective, looking across the street at them), some to the right, and then the only houses left were the "cute" blue one and another, maybe gray one, directly across from us. And then one day those were gone too, replaced by an expecially overbearing building. But to the right of that one, in-between it and another big building, was this small little building that almost looked like the entrance to a subway station. So I went in.

Immediately inside the door were steps that went down about half a floor to a hallway maybe 20 feet wide and tall that sloped down and curved slightly to the right and then stopped, like the hallway version of macaroni noodle. On each side there were 2 floors of apartments, with a walkway for the second floor, and steps to get up to it. Instead of windows to the outside there were large screens (both in the hallway and on the exterior walls of the apartments) showing 'pastoral views' (which were mostly over-saturated blue sky and green grass), which gave a rather Black Mirror vibe. Since the lower apartments were only half a floor below street level, I determined that this place didn't have a proper basement, which is always a sad thing (though now that I'm awake, that the hallway sloped down towards the back of the building would seem to provide an opportunity for deeper apartments, unless the ground above also sloped down, which maybe it did).

I noticed a table with a bunch of stuff on it that I recognized from Renee's apartment. And I thought to myself "Is Renee moving without even telling me?". But then she showed up and was like "oh yeah I got kicked out of my old place on short notice" (because her building was being replaced by one of the big new ones) "and had to scramble to get my stuff moved."

And then Renee left to continue moving stuff. And then a few seconds later a girl walked in who I sort of recognized, saying "is anyone here?" because she wasn moving into this building and wanted to know where to go. She walked right past me. So I went up and offered to help her move into her apartment, which was one half a floor higher than the upper floor balcony, above the main hallway. She turned out to be 'Emily from second grade'.

Then I was living in an apartment in the upper back end of that building. Or maybe it was actually two apartments, one in the upper back and one in the upper center (above the hallway, like Emily's). Sara and I were both in somewhat polyamorous relationships with othe people in the group. When I came back in from being out making cables or whatever, she switched from cuddling her other boyfriend to cuddling me, which felt nice.

I was working on constructing a bunk bed in one corner. Others had concerns about its safety, so I was making it extra solid to ease their concerns. It was painted blue.

I was in a dark room with a couple others looking at a computer screen showing a 3D point cloud visualization of the topography of some deep part of the ocean. Purple was deepest, with red, orange, and yellow being less deep. There were places where we lacked data, sometimes surrounded by purple dots, maybe indicating even deeper holes in those spots.

And I guess we were going on a mission to check them out, because then the whole building was at the bottom of the ocean. Instead of those screens of pastoral views we had windows into the ocean, and we could see fish and seaweed and stuff. It was not dark, but all bright like Spongebob's neihborhood.

Then it was like I was watching a show of something that had happened earlier. Our building had a terrace outside, and one of our friends, who was a muppet with a long snoot, was being attacked and dragged away by some large, white, scary arthropod with VERY SHARP CLAWS. No other character in the show was around to see this happening, but as he was being dragged away and/or eaten, our muppet friend yelled out "Bone saw! Bone saw!" As in: to defeat the monster, use a bone saw.

So then we were all scared of that monster coming back. Another long-snooted muppet occasionally peeked over the wall, pushing some plastic sheeting that was hanging above the railing out of the way with his face, which always had a very frightened look on it. And I was ordering 'bone saws' (which in the dream were long hedge clippers with pointy, serrated blades) from Amazon.

As I walked down the hallway to the door (and now the hallway sloped down, rather than up to the door, and there weren't steps there anymore, and outside the building was ocean), I asked myself why it was so bright and airy down here. How were our muppet friends out on the balcony? And a diembodied voice (which I associated with someone who looked like Leonardo DiCaprio but talked like Jason) said "there's always air inside the dream", which I thought must be some kind of metaphor, because this was a TV show or something, not a dream.

Anyway, I got to the door and opened it because the UPS man was here delivering my 'bone saws', Adding to the 'where is all the water' mystery (water did not rush in when I opened it, and the UPS man did not appear to be wet or give any hints of being at the bottom of the ocean, other than maybe having the Spongebob background behind him). I took my package and headed to back to my room to assemble the bone saws, because I figured the monster could come back any minute and I wanted to be prepared. My roommates chatted with the delivery man from the kitchen, which was right off to the side of the main hall by the front door. They were probably talking about powerpole connectors and/or gridbeam.

I was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet (because I was pooping?) and assembling the bone saws, which came in a bunch of smaller pieces. A camera in white plastic casing screwed onto one handle, and then the blades screwed onto that. I worried that the camera made it flimsy. And that messing with the camera would make it take too long. So I skipped that and just screwed the blade directly to the handles. And I thought that I should order two more of these, so I could keep one in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, and oh no the monster was in the bathroom with me! I ended up on the floor, in an awkward position, trying to stab it with my just-assembled 'bone saw'. It had a fuzzy white face, like a big cat, which I felt bad about stabbing, so I tried to chop its arms instead.