Astro_Ron Recurring
Sunday, January 23rd, 2011 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tourmalineHad a bizarre dream this morning featuring astronaut Ron Garan (@Astro_Ron on Twitter), who kept popping up at regular intervals within the dream. Other roles in the dream were played by various people from work, Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and astronaut Sunita Williams.
We were in a big room with a too-low roof, which was supposed to be new offices at work. There were high tables along one side, under the eaves (high like school science benches are) and some standard office desks around the rest of the building. We were on the first floor, but D, our morning receptionist, was doing her usual job from one of the standard office desks. On this day, this included arranging everyone's burger order (??) - mine was to be a vegetarian cheeseburger. Unfortunately these burgers took an age to prepare by the little burger bar down the street, so by the time ours arrived, we had to go to our usual Friday yoga class (this is from real-life) so we couldn't eat them. One person, sitting at the high tables, had managed to get a burger - this was Ron Garan's first appearance in my dream. It was a really huge burger, about the size of a breakfast plate, with all the usual burger accompaniments but also with an assortment of different coloured salad leaves in the burger. I don't think he managed to eat the whole thing.
Further down the high desks was an old Argos catalogue (remember when I posted this to my Tumblr a few weeks ago) and I looked through it, in the fitness equipment pages was a picture of some weights and a small picture of Ron Garan, and next to the weights was the wording "As used by Ron Garan aboard the International Space Station" - exactly like how Argos used to sell fitness equipment endorsed by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1970s, when ie was 7 times Mr Universe and Mr Olympia. This was rather odd given that Ron Garan's ISS residency doesn't start for a couple of months, or maybe the dream was set in the future. I mentioned it to my friend S, who Googled, and from her results showed me a biog which said he was a "former model". Other results shed more light, he was a real-person model (ie not a fashion model) while an undergraduate, but the only example of his work that we could find was a magazine advert for multivitamins, where he portrayed a hard-working, sport-loving clean-cut 1970s American teenager.
At this point, our burgers arrived, but both S and I got up and said we had to go. we didn't go to our aforementioned yoga class, but we went outside and wandered around the city. It was getting late in the afternoon, we walked down a side street which had a long queue of people outside a bank, the final person in the queue I recognised as astronaut Sunita Williams. Now, I'm not sure why she appeared, her ISS residency was before STS-124 so I wasn't following closely, but I remember her running the Boston Marathon in space and having her hair cut short in space, donating her long tresses to Locks Of Love. But it was her, I walked over and said "Are you Sunita Williams, the astronaut?" and she said yes, we shook hands (once I could free my hand from my coat pocket where it was inexplicably stuck). Ron Garan appeared again, joining the long queue, saying that it "had to be done". He was wearing some very odd-looking sunglasses, women's fashion sunglasses I think, like in the "Broken" ep of House where he puts on Lydia's shades when he steals her car.
We - myself and S, now joined by Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and David Mitchell, were walking round London (by now I'd decided we were in London) and it was getting dark, rush hour, we heard from various car radios to "Beware of aircraft suddenly landing". As we still hadn't eaten we looked round for somewhere agreeable to all, I didn't want anything too big or expensive, I'd be happy with a cheese toastie, so we decided we would go to Gloria's (a little cafe, from the location it looked like a truckstop cafe smartened up) and that while we were there we could help Gloria with moving the furniture round. This sounded good, so we went in and sat at the spaces around the big table in the conservatory extension. People already at this table, sitting on bench seating by the wall, included Ron Garan and Hugh Laurie, and Gloria joined us as well. We talked about plans for the evening, Hugh mentioned he had to kill a snake that his sons had acquired and could not otherwise dispose of. "It's quite simple" he told us, deadpan, "you just give them a Polo and that's it. They cannot cope." This had me in fits of laughter, imagining him holding a snake under the head, its jaws wide open, and dropping a Polo into its mouth, and wondering how this Polo fatality was actually discovered.
It was at this point I woke up. Once I'd got past the initial Polo hilarity, I was musing on why Ron Garan was so prominent in the dream. Ron Garan was one of the four crewmembers of STS-124 I met a few years ago, the commander of the mission, who I also met, was Mark Kelly, who I'm sure you've seen in the media a lot recently. Well naturally, as more news about Gabrielle Giffords' recovery is released, he's continued to be in the news, and last week was interviewed by ABC news about events, and through all of this he's been on my mind a lot too. Yesterday I was thinking about the day at Bradford College when I met the astronauts, and I think my subconscience interpreted this into a dream saying 'Don't forget Ron Garan'. Which I could never do, I could never forget that day or any of the astronauts I met. But I think it's rather pathetic of my subconscience to suddenly turn fangirl at this time. I will be thinking of him in late March, when his Soyuz launches, but for now I think my conscience is right to focus on Mark Kelly and the events of fifteen days ago.
So, I had to get all of that down before breakfast, so I am now rather hungry. And I must think about kettlebells some time today. I cannot let good intentions slide.
We were in a big room with a too-low roof, which was supposed to be new offices at work. There were high tables along one side, under the eaves (high like school science benches are) and some standard office desks around the rest of the building. We were on the first floor, but D, our morning receptionist, was doing her usual job from one of the standard office desks. On this day, this included arranging everyone's burger order (??) - mine was to be a vegetarian cheeseburger. Unfortunately these burgers took an age to prepare by the little burger bar down the street, so by the time ours arrived, we had to go to our usual Friday yoga class (this is from real-life) so we couldn't eat them. One person, sitting at the high tables, had managed to get a burger - this was Ron Garan's first appearance in my dream. It was a really huge burger, about the size of a breakfast plate, with all the usual burger accompaniments but also with an assortment of different coloured salad leaves in the burger. I don't think he managed to eat the whole thing.
Further down the high desks was an old Argos catalogue (remember when I posted this to my Tumblr a few weeks ago) and I looked through it, in the fitness equipment pages was a picture of some weights and a small picture of Ron Garan, and next to the weights was the wording "As used by Ron Garan aboard the International Space Station" - exactly like how Argos used to sell fitness equipment endorsed by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1970s, when ie was 7 times Mr Universe and Mr Olympia. This was rather odd given that Ron Garan's ISS residency doesn't start for a couple of months, or maybe the dream was set in the future. I mentioned it to my friend S, who Googled, and from her results showed me a biog which said he was a "former model". Other results shed more light, he was a real-person model (ie not a fashion model) while an undergraduate, but the only example of his work that we could find was a magazine advert for multivitamins, where he portrayed a hard-working, sport-loving clean-cut 1970s American teenager.
At this point, our burgers arrived, but both S and I got up and said we had to go. we didn't go to our aforementioned yoga class, but we went outside and wandered around the city. It was getting late in the afternoon, we walked down a side street which had a long queue of people outside a bank, the final person in the queue I recognised as astronaut Sunita Williams. Now, I'm not sure why she appeared, her ISS residency was before STS-124 so I wasn't following closely, but I remember her running the Boston Marathon in space and having her hair cut short in space, donating her long tresses to Locks Of Love. But it was her, I walked over and said "Are you Sunita Williams, the astronaut?" and she said yes, we shook hands (once I could free my hand from my coat pocket where it was inexplicably stuck). Ron Garan appeared again, joining the long queue, saying that it "had to be done". He was wearing some very odd-looking sunglasses, women's fashion sunglasses I think, like in the "Broken" ep of House where he puts on Lydia's shades when he steals her car.
We - myself and S, now joined by Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and David Mitchell, were walking round London (by now I'd decided we were in London) and it was getting dark, rush hour, we heard from various car radios to "Beware of aircraft suddenly landing". As we still hadn't eaten we looked round for somewhere agreeable to all, I didn't want anything too big or expensive, I'd be happy with a cheese toastie, so we decided we would go to Gloria's (a little cafe, from the location it looked like a truckstop cafe smartened up) and that while we were there we could help Gloria with moving the furniture round. This sounded good, so we went in and sat at the spaces around the big table in the conservatory extension. People already at this table, sitting on bench seating by the wall, included Ron Garan and Hugh Laurie, and Gloria joined us as well. We talked about plans for the evening, Hugh mentioned he had to kill a snake that his sons had acquired and could not otherwise dispose of. "It's quite simple" he told us, deadpan, "you just give them a Polo and that's it. They cannot cope." This had me in fits of laughter, imagining him holding a snake under the head, its jaws wide open, and dropping a Polo into its mouth, and wondering how this Polo fatality was actually discovered.
It was at this point I woke up. Once I'd got past the initial Polo hilarity, I was musing on why Ron Garan was so prominent in the dream. Ron Garan was one of the four crewmembers of STS-124 I met a few years ago, the commander of the mission, who I also met, was Mark Kelly, who I'm sure you've seen in the media a lot recently. Well naturally, as more news about Gabrielle Giffords' recovery is released, he's continued to be in the news, and last week was interviewed by ABC news about events, and through all of this he's been on my mind a lot too. Yesterday I was thinking about the day at Bradford College when I met the astronauts, and I think my subconscience interpreted this into a dream saying 'Don't forget Ron Garan'. Which I could never do, I could never forget that day or any of the astronauts I met. But I think it's rather pathetic of my subconscience to suddenly turn fangirl at this time. I will be thinking of him in late March, when his Soyuz launches, but for now I think my conscience is right to focus on Mark Kelly and the events of fifteen days ago.
So, I had to get all of that down before breakfast, so I am now rather hungry. And I must think about kettlebells some time today. I cannot let good intentions slide.
