Hydrogeology Dream: Paddling Upstream

This isn't quite a geology dream, perhaps it's a little more like a hydrogeology dream. The dream begins in a small town in the northerly part of a westerly state, downtown near a restuarant known for it's historical artifacts, semi-unusual food or style of serving said food, and dark, knotty wood inside and out. Possibly we walk around for awhile, MOH and I, and maybe others, like one or both of my parents, are there in the beginning.

MOH and I go up a road where one branch or side creek of a major local river comes down out of the northerly mountains, perhaps walking or driving at first. After a short while, we are going up the side branch in a boat, possibly a canoe. We paddle. This is uphill in real life and uphill in the dream, but we are not really paddling upstream. It's kind of a null current, or something undefined, the way things are in dreams sometimes. Possibly impossible in real life, our paddling is not at all impossible in the dream. The area is all golden colored., as though hydrothermally altered by nearby hot springs.

And so, after paddling uphill a ways, we come to the place where there is a little park or side creek in real life. In the dream, this area is covered with a large building. We go into the building, possibly still paddling our little boat. I'm not clear about paddling to go inside, but it is as though the river goes through the building (or under it?) and then contninues out on the other side.

Oh, did I forget to say that all this time we have been going almost due north? Well, not quite due north, just a hair east of north.

The building consists mostly of one large room with a high ceiling. Tables and chairs are set out like it's a large dining area. The place is brown; everything has a brown tone, although I suspect it's mostly that the walls are made of dark brown paneling, somewhat rough-cut wood, probably stained or painted dark brown. Dark brown like this: BROWN.

The woman there - possibly there is a man, also, but he is not as clear to me - is also kind of brown: brown hair, vaguely olive skin - and she reminds me of someone, someone friendly and helpful, possibly overly helpful. L! Well, not helpful IRL, but friendly, rather rough cut herself, and of Italian descent.

It seems that she wants us to stay, possibly she has set a meal out or has one ready to set out. But we are having none of that. We didn't come here to stay, we came becuase the river brought us here, we will now follow it onward.

So we move on, leaving out in our canoe through an opening like a broad door on the northeast side of the large room. The river goes downhill, and we go with it, still in a generally northerly direction, perhaps a bit more to the northeast than to begin with. The area is still golden colored, maybe even more so.

From the morning of 08Sep2010.

Geology Dream: Some Beers at a Meeting

This is a geology related dream from two nights ago (morning of 19Dec09). Looks like I've been affected by all the recent online talk of #AGU09 and Wired's beer-meeting article.

I'm at a GSA meeting, sitting near the back of a large room, my pack full of stuff. The room is raised like a small auditorium, with the central speaking area toward the southeast. As I stand there (and sometimes sit on the floor), with people occasionally crowding around, I'm thinking it's a pretty boring meeting - these meetings aren't as interesting as they used to be. At some point, I tell some people, including a younger woman, that they need to move because they've kind of piled themselves around my stuff, blocking what I think is my area. They move, but are a little rude about it, like I shouldn't have my own space, or shouldn't care about people crowding it.

Then I'm getting some stuff out of my pack, or am putting something like a notebook or wallet back in, and I have a hard time getting it all to fit. Several small personal electronic items fall out, including more than one cell phone and my digital camera. I get it all back in place, and then it's time to leave via indoor stairs exiting on the northeast side of the large room. The stairs go down and mostly to the east.

The meeting has beer at the end of the day, and I get in a fairly long line behind two guys who are geologists. The line goes past a lower bar tucked away in a corner on the north wall, where they have Pacific Rim beer. The line for that bar area comes up the stairs in front of us, the stairs we are going down. By the time we get to the Pacific Rim area, we've been in line for a long enough time that we don't want to switch lines; besides, we can't see the end of the Pacific Rim line below us. We descend the stairs on the right, while the people in the Pacific Rim line, mostly guys, ascend the stairs on the left. Their line is moving fairly quickly; ours is moving at an average pace. The entire stair well in front of us is at times taken up by people in the Pacific Rim line; they move aside as I step forward, and I think, in the dream, that it's because I'm a woman.

We get to the bottom of the stairs and arrive at a small counter where the beer for our line is awaiting us. It's draft, of an unrecognizable name or brand, in unusually shaped and fairly brightly colored containers (possibly only the labels are brightly colored, including a bright blue and bright yellow). The beer is marked 0.0 or 0.00 on the bottom, and we realize it's 100% free, unlike the Pacific Rim beer, which would have cost us money. Our beer is a deep golden brown. It tastes pretty good for a free draft beer, so although the Pacific Rim might have been better (maybe), the three of us agree it's good we stayed in our line and got the free beer. We then turn around and go back up the stairs.

At about this point, I realize that the guy in front of me looks like a geologist I know - someone who was mapping with me on a job I had a little more than a year ago. I don't remember if I really know him in the dream, or if he just looks like someone, the way people do at so many meetings. Starting back up the stairs, MOH is behind me; he also has one of the unusual-container, free draft beers. (He apparently just appears in the dream at this point, but it's not out-of-place in the dream, just one of those dream weirdities.)

The guy ahead of me, the one who looks like someone I know, now has a whole raft of draft beers that he's somehow holding in encircling, widespread arms (maybe there is a tray underneath the beers?). These beers are all dark, and they are in regular clear plastic beer glasses. He's taking them up the stairs to some friends of his that weren't in line. He says that the Pacific Rim line - which is now gone and not blocking the stairs, maybe because they ran out of beer* - was as long as it was because other people were also getting beer for their friends. (Maybe he said the line was gone because everyone in it was getting beer for a friend, and so the line was shorter by half than it would have been if everyone getting beer had been in line.) He goes up ahead with his raft of beers.

I follow and come to a place in the stairs where two to four stairsteps are made wider by a large, horizontal metal plate that one has to step across to get from a lower step to the next upper step. I manage this in the dream, something that wouldn't be possible IRL. I ask MOH behind me if he can make it, then say, "Well of course, if I can make it you can, too." [I have short legs compared to his long legs.] Then he starts coughing in a way that wakes me up.

*Pacific Rim Brewery closed in 2007; Big Al's opened in the same building in 2008. Pacific Rim Mining Corporation is alive and well - although some of it's opponents aren't.

A Geology Dream: Synclines

I had a dream last night, among a couple others that I don't remember too well, about synclines. In it a VIP-type boss, an old colleague and mentor of mine who has sometimes shown up in other dreams, was told about a recent report, in which I mentioned a syncline-type model for gold exploration. He exclaimed in a loud, booming voice, "Syncline! Surely you mean anticline!"

Anticlines are quite common exploration targets for Carlin-type disseminated low-grade gold deposits in Nevada. The anticlines, whether or not they have something genetic to do with the actual ore deposition, expose the lower plate of the Roberts Mountains Thrust, a late Devonian to Mississippian (mid-Paleozoic) thrust fault from the Antler Orogeny (about 340-380 million years in age), which generally places western-facies siliceous rocks like cherts and shales over eastern-facies carbonate rocks like silty limestones. It often places Ordovician Vinini or Valmy Formation cherts and shales over Silurian-Devonian Roberts Mountains Formation and Hanson Creek Formation limestones and silty, shaly limestones. The introduction of gold into these lower plate rocks is generally thought to have taken place during the early Tertiary (or Paleogene), maybe about 42 to 46 million years ago, long long after the above Paleozoic rocks (Ordovician, Silurian, and Devonian) were deposited in an ocean off the shore of a much smaller-than-now western America.

My dream, nevertheless, was about a gold model wherein the gold is deposited in synclines, in the upper plate of silicified, jasperoidal low-angle faults, which have commonly been thought to be thrust faults of Jurassic(?) age, but which nevertheless sometimes and in some areas, place younger rocks on top of older rocks, a red flag suggesting that the low-angle faults in question could be extensional in origin and possibly much, much younger, even Tertiary.

In the dream, after the VIP-geologist pronounced his shock about syncline-type gold, I came into the picture, saying that I would be glad to explain the model. Somehow, though, it was difficult to do, either because I couldn't find the report with the pertinent cross-sections and diagrams, or because the office area was too barren of papers, or because the other geologist was too dis-inclined to listen [dis-synclined? - he did diss the syncline!].

It was kind of annoying in the dream, the way not being listened to often is - but it was also annoying upon awakening, in that I had a difficult time telling the dream from reality, because the details of place and people were similar to everyday reality.