Library Dream

Books

My daughter and I are going to the library. We're driving down a narrow street in a small town. As we approach a corner a hot-head in a red car passes us on the right side and cuts in front us. Now he is stopped behind another car at a stop sign. No sweat off my brow, our corner is just before we get to him. We pull up at the 'library'. It appears to be an old cinder block garage with a gravel floor. There is a glass person sized door to the right and an automobile size opening to the left with no door. There are a few people sitting inside. The place looks like a second hand junk shop. I follow my daughter in through the person size door and we start looking for the books. It's a library, therefor there must be some books in here somewhere. We find a big ol' wooden wardrobe towards the back, but nope, no books in there. But next to it is a small bookcase, and there are the books! Must be several dozen at least. I'm looking through this collection and I find a magazine sized paperback book with a colorful cover that says Pergelator on the cover, which is very surprising because I have no memory of ever having written a book of any kind. The book is in kind of rough shape, it's been wet and is still sort of damp. I debate whether I should buy it or not and finally decide that I need the actual object for show-and-tell at lunch next week. A photo just won't do. The book will go in the trash afterwards, it's rubbish.

Dream

A young woman comes down from upstairs and tells me there is a problem with the skylight, something about a curtain or a vase, so I go upstairs with her and I see there is indeed a problem - there is a big hole in the roof. I get all the way up and I see that half of the roof along with the upstairs ceiling has been torn off. There is no debris to speak of, it's just all gone.

Dream

I was making some repairs to an old, ramshackle, beach front store. I had to get a ladder and nail down half a dozen shingles on the roof of this single story building. When I came down an acquaintance drove up and complained about the way I parked. If I had pulled up behind the car ahead of me, he could have pulled in behind me, but as it was he was going to have to parallel park. Isn't that the way it always is? The situation was complicated by a section of yellow curb. A casual glance gave the impression that there was room behind my car, but if you step across the road, you can see that the restricted area was supposed to be a little longer, but the paint had been flaking off and was no longer clearly visible. Wouldn't make any difference to the meter maid, if one even showed up at this remote location. Anyway, he pulled a U-turn and parked in motel parking lot across the street.

Dream

I was working for some organization, maybe the police, and we were moving into a new building. Not a new, new building, a new to us building. It was likely, previously, a school. Went to the room I had been using and there were a couple of people in there doing moving things - cleaning, setting up stuff - and then I remembered I had been assigned another room which was the adjacent room. Go in there and there are several people all busy with the work of the day. There's a new a guy and he asks if we can turn up the heat and I reply something along the line of 'it's hopeless, there's never any heat, I wear a couple extra layers', which is what my real life is like now because we're keeping the house around 65 degrees because that's what the boss wants.

So to work. I'm in the right room, we have furniture and equipment so I sit down to check on something on the computer, but the monitor I have has this very small screen like you have a on a smart phone. It is mounted in a case the size of an old fifteen inch CRT. The case is also triangular, and this small screen is wrapped around one of the corners. Then I realize this is some kind of auxiliary screen and the main screen is on the opposite side, so I turn it around so the main screen is facing me.

I want to look up the name of the town where my current problem is. I know the town is like 30 miles northeast of where I am and it starts with a P, but for the life of my I can't remember the name even though I had a firm hold of it just seconds ago. This too mirrors my real life. At this point I am waking up because I am thinking I will go downstairs (in real life) and look it up on my computer. But then I realize there is no such town because this is a dream.

Anyway, back in the dream, the problem in P town was a code 30, and I sort of knew what that meant, but all the other details have faded.

Dream

Crystal clear and very detailed. I haven't had a dream this clear and detailed in a long time.

I was called out to do a minor bit of work. I needed to connect a couple of wires to a circuit breaker and plug in a 110 VAC plug, nothing too complicated, but it was on some machine at some remote location. I did the job and went home.

The next morning I had some other work to do, but when I was done, I thought I better check with the customer and see if everything was okay. Don't want unhappy customers, so I go to the job site. It's a commercial construction project and there are several people there. I hear some guy talking to 'Kim', and then I hear him talking to 'Kim' again. I walk a little way and I come across a skinny teenage girl with limp blond hair. This is 'Kim' and she is happy that her dad, the guy who was talking to her, is happy with her. He's a middle aged bald man wearing a very nice brown suit. Anyway, he has given 'Kim' some treats which she proudly shows me. She's holding one of those little Tootsie-Rolls and a couple of small packages of Rolaids. She gives me the Rolaids. 

Now she asks me if I know that we are related. I had no idea, I have never seen or heard of her before. She tells me she is one of a set of triplets that were born to Mia Farrow who died when she was in a car crash when she was three years old. I thought that was a bit curious, so I thought I ought to check out her story on Google, so I started formulating what I was going to put in the Google query bar.

Then I woke up.

Snake Dream

This one wasn't much of a dream in that it wasn't long and complicated, but it was entertaining. Iowa man and I were down in Texas and was driving some kind of truck, like a big pickup truck, and he found a snake under the hood. He managed to get the snake out of the truck. When I asked him what became of the snake he told me that some guys from some government animal control agency had come out and dealt with the snake. Anyway, I woke up about this time and now I'm thinking about all the words that have the same ending as snake, and there are a bunch of them:

• bake
• cake
• fake
• jake
• lake
• make
• rake
• sake (Japanese rice wine)
• take
• wake

Sake isn't pronounced like all the others. Jake could be a name but is commonly used slang that means things are okay.

Cadillac Dream

Black Panther 6

It's summertime and I'm out on the farm walking around. The house is about a quarter mile away, uphill. This a pile of air conditioning duct work next to the house. I see one large piece of duct work start moving. Weel, that's weird, so I keep my eye on it. It jiggles around for a bit and then it slides down the hill until it is free of all the other duct work, and then it starts making a bee line for the neighbors. I figure an animal has gotten trapped inside and is pushing it along. Better go see what's goin' on. When I catch up to it, it's gone about a hundred yards, and it's not duct work anymore. Now it's some kind of fancy Champagne color Cadillac Eldorado convertible with two seats and two front axles. Well, I'll be, so I get in and go for a ride. I stop and pick up my wife and we go cruising around..I stop and and she gets out, and I drive around the corner and pull into a gravel parking area where there are several other cars. The parking lot is adjacent to a big building and there are signs on the wall above each parking space with baseball player's names. I get out of the car and look around. When I get back in, the car has a roof and the interior is more like an Escalade limousine and there are two women in there, one big and beefy and one kind of scrawny. It's hot out and they look happy to be inside this air conditioned lux-mobile. They appear to have been playing baseball. They are talking about getting sno-cones. My wife shows up and gets in and we decide that we all would like to get some sno-cones, so I start counting out some cash. So ends this Cadillac dream.

Tam has a nightmare

Well, that was an awful dream...

Sidewalk Dream

I'm walking up the street on the sidewalk. The street slopes slightly downhill towards the river. I am on the left side because there is no sidewalk on the right side. I want to cross to the right side of the street as I am facing uphill. I get to a traffic light but it's a complicated intersection and the lights don't give you enough time to cross the street. People in cars going downhill sometimes unintentionally get in the left lane but they want to go straight so they switch lanes in the middle of the intersection which is unnerving if you're in the middle of the crosswalk.

While this dream was going on, I was sure I knew where this street was. I was so sure of this that when I woke up I pulled up Google Maps to see if I could locate any such place in Portland, because I was likewise sure it was in Portland. But the more I looked and the more I thought about it I couldn't think of any such place.

Kind of strange that I had three vivid dreams within 24 hours. I was feeling kind of puny the last couple of days so that may have something to do with it. But I wasn't running a fever, least ways not enough to notice. I don't know what it was, but it seems to happen periodically.

Component Dream

I'm at work and I'm talking to a younger guy there and I'm telling him about a tiny camera I found in a story. It is the size of a grain of rice, and I'm wondering where you can find something like that and he  hands me a catalog. It's an old parts catalog book. It 's about 3 inches wide and about 7 inches tall and about an inch thick and it's got a thousand pages in it. I open up the book and start looking through it and it's not obvious where anything is. There's several sections but the section that looks like an index is in the middle and it only goes up to the letter I. There's other sections for different subjects but I'm not seeing anything that would lead me directly to miniature cameras. So I go to the front of the book and I start leafing through it page by page and I notice that the first half dozen pages are all about brakes: brake rotors, brake pads, parts for automobiles. And I'm thinking, well, people who deal with electronic components are probably do-it-yourself kind of people and brakes are something you can do yourself that can save you a lot of money so maybe they're just tapping into that market here. 

Anyway I keep looking through this book and I'm still not finding anything and then a couple other guys come and sit down at the table where we are. I don't recognize them. They are both wearing clean, button down shirts, but they're a little scruffy looking. Their haircuts look like they were done by a third rate barber and their shaves are a little sloppy, but they're smiling and happy. They ask our last names and I tell them mine and I ask them their names and he says he's afraid to because my name is so unusual. So I guess Smith and Jones and they laugh because I'm not far off, or I'm not wrong but they don't tell me their names. So I asked them what we can we do for them and they won't tell me that either so I start guessing that are they here to pick up or deliver something or they here to give us a sales pitch, but none of those are correct. So now I'm guessing that they're fixit guys that have been called in to correct a problem with the company which means we're probably all going to get laid off and they don't say I'm wrong but all they'll say is that they're mowing the grass tonight or reaping the grass tonight or something like that.

$7 Bill Dream

I'm back in Beaverton, we still have the Windstar, but the kids are older and we're playing car shuffle, you know the old drill where you have one more driver than you have cars and someone has taken one of the cars to run an errand and now all the other drivers have to adjust to driving a different car than usual. I need some small bills to pay someone but all I have is a couple $100 bills, and now I have to walk a couple of blocks to pick up a car. There is a two story business building with outside stairs and an outside walkway around the second floor. Going through this building is shorter than going around the block, but I only ever visit the businesses on the second floor. I get halfway up the stairs before I realize I am only going past this building, I don't need to go upstairs at all, so I turn around.

Now I'm sitting in the driver's seat in the parking lot of a convenience store. I know the guy who works there and he has just exchanged a small stack of bills for one of my hundreds. I'm counting the money and it starts with four singles. What's this? Why do I have four singles? Whatever, I count the rest of the money and it comes to a hundred bucks, so I hand him back the four ones. Now I count the money again and I notice that a couple of what I thought were tens are now $7 bills. What? Since when did they start printing $7 bills? Who knows? The government is far away. This is just one more thing to mess with people. Okay, so that's what the extra $4 was for. (Yes, I know it doesn't add up, but it did in the dream.)  Now I go through the stack of bills again and this time I find a couple of four dollar bills. Oh boy, this is getting messy. And that is all.

Dream

I am walking across town and I come to a park or a college campus, lots of green grass not too many buildings. It looks like it occupies an entire city block. I am at one corner and I want to get to the opposite corner. I could walk down either of the streets but they do not appeal, lack of sidewalks maybe, so I decide to go cross country. This works for maybe fifty yards but then I am confronted with a large stream or a small river. It's about 20 feet wide and looks to be maybe five feet deep. Not crossing that without getting wet, or a bridge, but look! there is a building that crosses the stream. I go inside and it seems to be some kind of water park. Several people lounging around a wading pool that occupies the center. There are several objects in the water, so it might be possible to use them as stepping stones and get to the other side. The first couple of steps are easy, but now we have a guy sitting in a leather recliner watching TV. Yes, the TV is sitting on a table sitting in the water as well. I go to step on the top back of the chair and he tells me not to rock the chair. I say something to the effect that I'll only be a moment, step from the top to an arm of the chair and then off to a small table. Now I have to make big leap to a pile of colorful concrete and ceramic blocks. It's a big leap, but it's a dream, so I make it. I have crossed the water, but now I am confronted with the far wall. It is solid concrete up to about head high. On top of the concrete wall is floor that protrudes over the wall by a foot or two. Sitting on the edge of the floor is a steel framed wall filled with industrial safety glass. About eight to ten feet to my left are a couple of doors in this glass wall. They open into the water park and there is no handle on this side. I see a couple on the other side of doors. I gesture for them to open the door and they push it open a little bit, enough to see that it isn't locked. Now all I have to do is get there. There appears to be some grill work attached to the concrete wall underneath the door, but it only goes about half way up. It should be possible to get to the grill work, but then it's going to be a near impossible stretch to reach the door and it would depend on someone opening the door and then holding it open so it doesn't close on my fingers. Then I woke up.

Mechanicing Dream

GEARWRENCH Bolt Biter Impact Extraction Socket
Weirdest looking socket I could find
Still nothing like the one in my dream

I had a longish dream this morning, but I had some places to go and didn't have a chance to write it down until this afternoon and much of it has faded away. Here are a couple of bits I do remember.

I am trying to break something down. I'm using a largish socket wrench, maybe an inch in diameter, maybe two. It slips when I apply some force, so I turn it over and look at the socket end. It's some oddball shape, not like a standard 6 or 8 point socket. Doesn't appear to be anything wrong, so I check the size. It has a black oxide finish and it is marked 7.1 - 6 8/16 so it's apparently marked with metric and American sizes. There is a small mechanical slide switch in the side as well. It has a small steel button that barely projects over the surrounding surface. One position marked 'East Coast'. I flip the switch, but I cannot discern any difference. I pick up another socket of similar size. This one has a worn chrome finish.

Later on I am stripping the covering from a stainless steel control cable. The wire is maybe an eighth of inch in diameter, which is much larger than the typical control cables you find on a bicycle or a motorcycle. The rubber covering is old, hard and brittle and breaks apart easily.

Note that the business about the 'metric and American sizes' is nonsense. If we take 7.1 to be millimeters, that is approximately 5/16 of an inch, and the fractional part of 6 & 8/16 is the same as one half. No surprise, it was a dream. It could just as easily have been marked in hieroglyphics. In either case, neither is anywhere near the size of the socket wrench I was holding.

Mechanicing may not be in a conventional dictionary, but it is in the Urban Dictionary.

Jet Fighter Dream

F-86D

This dream may have come in two parts. The second part I remember fairly clearly. The first part is kind of vague. Did I dream earlier last night, or did I just dream that I dreamt it during the second part?

The essence of the dream is that I bought an old jet fighter, probably for the price of a car. It had some problems so I took it to my automobile mechanic to get one simple thing fixed, like a small pump or latch or something, but he couldn't find the parts, no surprise there. So now it's sitting on his lot clearly visible from the street, subject to visits from riff-raff, so I need to move it somewhere more secure.

Swimming Dream

I dreamt I was in some kind of swimming club. The group was organized to perform synchronized swimming, but it was pretty casual. The group was small, maybe six people, mostly girls, we met once and then there were supposed to be a couple of practice sessions which I missed. I showed up for the 'performance'. The leader was not upset, I think she was glad that I showed up. I asked what we were going to do. She wanted a pencil and paper, but we're by the pool in our swimsuits and there's no paper or pencils at hand. I ask her to just show me by drawing on my hand with her fingers and she does. Four of us are to form a square in one corner of the pool and then swim along all four sides of the pool, maintaining our square. Then we would form two lines, one across each end of the pool and swim towards each other where we would form one line across the middle. Somewhere in here her fingers turned into colored dots and the lines she had traced became visible. After that it became very convoluted. We never actually got in the water before I woke up.

Once upon a time I used to go swimming fairly often, but I haven't been in years.

Machine Dream

Karman Ghia

I am standing on the front stoop of a normal suburban house and a Karman Ghia pulls into the driveway. It's a dark color, maybe black, and dirty like it's a daily driver, not some showpiece. I know it's not my current house because the driveway slopes down from the street. The driver gets out and asks for one of my kids. I tell him they are not here. For some reason he reminds me of Phil Hathaway, a guy I knew back in high school in Ohio. He gets back in his car and drives away.

Electric Karman Ghia

A few minutes later another Karman Ghia pulls into the driveway. This one is a lighter color and little scruffier and it's electric. I walk over to talk to the driver and I notice there is a large block like the size of a dining room table attached to the right front corner. There is a big industrial looking chest sitting on top of this block and the whole thing, chest and block and covered with some kind of green fuzz. I look again and I realize the chest is actually the headstock of a giant industrial lathe.

Big Lathe

Yeah, time to wake up.

Belinda Dream

I started writing this a couple of weeks ago, probably right around the time I got the second surgery on my hip.

I've been having some vivid dreams this week, probably due to the drugs I've been given. Those dreams haven't been very coherent until this morning. 

I am staying at a low-rent motel just outside of town. The buildings are white, the parking lot is asphalt, there aren't too many cars there but there isn't any trash either. It's like all business. It's situated by the side of a four lane asphalt highway and has its own traffic light. The bulk of the property is about a quarter mile long and is separated from the highway by a field of grass about a hundred yards wide. There is a road with an office that connects the main area with the highway at the traffic light. I need to go into town which means turning left onto the highway, but evidently I don't want to wait for the light or maybe I got a wild hair to do a little exploring, so I drive my pickup truck across the field of grass. The grass is like straw and about a foot or two tall, so it's tall enough to cover any small bumps or holes. I drive slowly and it is a little bumpy, but not too bad. I pull up at the highway and there isn't much traffic, so I pull out and head into town.

A little while later I do it again, or maybe my recorder just replayed the earlier sequence. Then some things happen and I interact with some people and now I need to head into town again but this time I'm driving a little dark colored car. As I am driving across the parking lot I see a woman riding a bicycle. It's an old fashioned girls bike. She's wearing black and white clothes with white tennis shoes. There's some pink in there as well, maybe a scarf or maybe the bike.

I take the same route across the field, only it's not bumpy, but maybe this car has magic suspension - it rides like a dream, man. It's later in the day and traffic is much heavier, so it might take a while before there is an opening in the traffic that will allow me to pull out. Long before that happens a couple of cars have come to a stop with their left turn signals on. They are halfway off of the road. I'm thinking they want to pull in to where I am sitting, which is kind of weird because it's not like I am sitting any place special, they could turn in anywhere. At least I don't think it's anyplace special, maybe it is the only place where you can turn off the highway, so I turn right onto the shoulder so I will be out of their way. This doesn't improve the situation. The other two cars don't turn in and they don't pull off the road, rather they keep pace with me. I'm on the shoulder and they are still halfway on the highway.

I don't recall this situation being resolved. The next thing I know I'm driving down the highway into town and what do you know? I pass the woman on the bicycle.

In town, presumably, I am inside an old shopping mall. The first place I see is like an intersection between three or so wings. Most of the places look closed up, lots of blue walls, but its well kept, no trash to speak of, the floors are reasonably clean and the lights all work. I go into a section where there are a series of booths, like you might see in other countries, nothing like the fortress of commerce that fill our malls here. I go to a donut shop and buy a couple giant chocolate bars. They're big, twice as long, wide and thick as the ones you get at 7-11.

On my way out I go through the same intersection I came through on the way in. This time I stopped at a shelf that held a pile of mail. I picked up a handful of the mail and looked though it and found a letter addressed to Belinda. I put the pile of mail back down. Obviously Belinda is the name of the girl on the bicycle.

Cougar Dream

Ashland Cougar

I have just arrived at an old house. There are two or three other people there already. The place is a little scruffy, but habitable, kind of like a house rented out to students near a college campus. It's getting late so I go to bed. I sleep for a couple of hours but now I need to use the bathroom. (That much is realistic.) One of the other people is wearing a bathrobe and is slumped across a desk. Seems everyone is asleep. All the lights are on in the kitchen so I set about turning them off. If I turn them all off, it will be completely dark, but there is one that is blocked from shining directly into the other rooms, so I turn it on. It's like a candle lamp with a vertical glass tube about a foot tall and two inches in diameter. But it's not a candle. There are two pull chains hanging from the side of the tube, one near the bottom and another about halfway up. I pull the first one and something in the tube starts rising from the bottom. When it gets about halfway up I pull the second chain and it continues stopping a couple inches short of the top. The light is now on.

I head to the bathroom. I have to go through another room to get there. When I get there, there is what looks like a body wrapped up in a blanket propped up on the toilet. It's not a body, it's a dude who is feeling poorly. He offers to move, but I tell him not to bother. He looks miserable and I am not going to contribute to his misery. Back in the previous room I notice there is a young woman wrapped in a blanket and curled up in an overstuffed armchair. I realize this must be the couple that we were expecting. She too offers to make the toilet available, but I decline, I tell her I'll go water the shrubbery in the backyard.

I head out the backdoor. It's light enough to see, it's either a full moon or street lights, in any case nothing like my real pitch-black backyard. There isn't as much shrubbery as I expected, and the neighboring houses are maybe a couple dozen yards away, so I start walking across the yard. The house in back of ours is adjacent to an empty lot. I start walking across the lot. The lot fronts on a road and there is a slight embankment there. There is a tree by the road. I walk up to the tree and look across the road and that's when I see three cougars (mountain lions) prowling the hillside on the other side of the road. One of them notices me and starts walking in my direction. He's about as far from me as I am from my back door. I look for something I could use as a weapon and find a couple of rocks about the size of a billiard ball. Do I scream? Call 911? Throw a rock? Run? Instead of making a decision I wake up.

Note about the picture. In my dream, the cougars were in black and white. Ask Google for photos of cougars at night' and all the pics are either in full color or have glowing devil eyes.

Tracy

I had a dream last night and Tracy was in it. Is Tracy an odd name? It kind of feels like it is, but I don't know if it is that unusual. Maybe it's because I didn't know anybody named Tracy when I was a kid. Well, except for Dick Tracy, and his name wasn't Tracy, it was Dick. Anyway, thinking about it, I could only think of three Tracys in my life.

Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy was a staple of the newspaper funnies when I was a kid. It was never funny, and I don't recall any of the stories, if there even were any. There were a whole bunch of oddball characters.

Tracy the Runner

I knew a woman named Tracy when I lived in Austin. She was tall and thin as you might expect a runner to be. She came this close to being famous - she was supposed to go to the Olympics but then Jimmy Carter had a snit fit and canceled our participation in the Olympics which kind of pissed her off.  She was there for the night of the mushrooms. There were four of us and each of us was one of principle elements - Earth, Air, Fire and Water. She was Fire, I was Water. She eventually married a good friend of mine in Austin. 

Tracy the Computer Scientist

Intel SatisFAXtion Faxmodem

I met Tracy when I was working at Intel on the SatisFAXtion. After that he worked on a database project that crashed and burned. Not sure what happened there. I remember him telling me that they were trying to do something that the underlying database software didn't support and their attempt to work around its shortcomings made the whole project so complex that it collapsed under its own weight. Later on he went to England (Oxford, maybe?) and got a doctorate in Computer Science. Last I heard he was working on using Deep Learning software to identify cancer in X-ray images. He gave us a very coherent explanation of what he was doing at one of our Thursday lunch bunches. 

Dream

Last night I had a dream. I was riding in a Volvo and Tracy the Computer Scientist was driving. I was talking about how things had changed in the automotive world in the last 60 years. I should have said 50. I'm 71, so 60 years ago I would have been eleven and was barely aware that cars had engines. Whatever, it was a dream. I was talking about how when you turned the key to start your car 60 years ago, it was always a crap shoot as to whether it would start the first time. Sometimes the switch would glitch and just nothing would happen. Sometimes the starter would just start to turn the engine, but then hang. Sometimes it would start but only run for a few seconds. In those cases you would get to try it again. Sometimes you would have to crank the engine for a long time before it would catch. Nowadays if you turn the key and the engine doesn't start immediately you may just as well throw the car away. 

We're driving in the country and we come to little town. There is a small park and on the far side is a group of people, a wedding party perhaps. There is a lawn between us and them. It's a little brown. There are people right up against the edge on the far side, but there is nobody on it. It's like it's a prohibited area, but there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. We drive by a building with a porch recessed into one wall. The floor of the porch is concrete and looks to have a slope of about a foot in six feet, which means it's too steep for tables and chairs and so there is nothing there.

Modern Cars

With the computer diagnostics needed to diagnose the problem and with the exorbitant price of fancy little do-dads that are custom to that particular make and model, the repair bill on a car that won't start is liable to be a thousand dollars even if there is nothing mechanically wrong with it. And you know that once one thing fails, it is just the first of an endless cascade. Better just get rid of it now and save yourself the headache.

Bathroom Art Dream

I am at someplace like an old school. The floors are terrazzo and the wall are made of glazed ceramic bricks. It's got a very institutional feel. I'm heading to the bathroom and because this place is a little rough around the edges, I'm bringing my own roll of toilet paper. The bathroom is weirdly large, like the way bathrooms are in institutions. There are a couple of doors and the toilet is in the middle of one wall. The handle on the single lever faucet is a little groady, so I start wiping it down with toilet paper. Now it has morphed into something larger like a stainless steel toilet seat. I'm making some progress with cleaning it, but portions of the polished surface have been damaged. I keep after it and then suddenly three faces are revealed. Someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to etch these faces onto this piece of steel. They are very good, detailed pictures too, not just some cartoon images.

Now I'm talking to a student and I am trying to explain the meaning of the word 'grok' to him. I tell him he should read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and then I have to explain who Heinlein was. Not surprising. Does anyone in the current generation know who Heinlein was?