Amit Maskara

Recently in the past few months, I have had few dreams that if I told you, you will say it sounds like a series from a Global Warming paranoid TV production. I will let you imagine and come to conclusion once you have heard all four of them from me.

I was taught in my psychology class that dreams are a way by which our Brain de-fragments information and sorts them out to store them in appropriate places. i.e short term memory or long term memory. [Just like a computer hard drive de-fragments data] This is by the new standards and researches that are done on Dreams. Earlier researchers like Sigmund Freud suggested that dreams are fragments of our subconscious mind. While even earlier philosophy from the Hindu literary scripts and Vedas, dreams can be a communication channel for spirits, and different super natural energies to communicate with living on this world.

So in the past two months I have had these 4 dreams, which may be just fragments from my subconscious mind; may be my brain doing it’s routine defragmentation from all the discovery channel that I have watched or something else.

The first dream -

In the first dream, I saw brick size hail stones falling from the sky, right in the middle of the day. They were as big as brick and they fall from the sky with great force, destroying all things moving on ground. Especially cars- all cars that were on the road, in open car lots, and other open places are rendered useless. The force of the hail stone, or lets say hail brick more appropriately, was so high, that they sink into hood of the cars and shatter the engines, break wind shields and deploy air bags. It was like all cards on the road were exploding. I woke up anxiously thinking how was I supposed to get to work without my car?

Second Dream -

The second dream I saw was about tornadoes. In this dream, I see tornadoes everywhere. Multiple tornadoes come and wipe out cities at a time. They bring intense wind, rain and come like large wide, dark pillars; wiping out every civilization signs on their way. Only concrete buildings, especially the small ones are able to survive. I did see survivors as I was one of them. But the weird thing about them was they come without warning. The similarity of this dream with the previous hail stone dream is that they both come without warning. I see no sign of bad weather in the dream prior to the incidents.

Third Dream -

This was a little weird one. They are all weird I guess, so let’s say this was more weird. In this I see that there is a sudden flood. Water just keeps rising. The weird thing was that I did not see rain in the dream. The flood just came without any heavy rain or anything like that. The water kept rising and people stated to climb this very high chain link fence. It was like a high security area fence or a soccer ball retaining fence. Like the one I used to have when I was a kid in my boarding school, up in the Himalayas. There we had soccer field cut out of the mountain. So we had to have high fence on the slope side of the field to prevent the ball from rolling down the hill, coz if it did, then we would have to go for a little excursion on ball hunt, and may take us hours before we could find the ball. anyways.. so I see hundreds of people clinging to the poles of this long, high fence. It was attached to some wall on one side, so people improvised some temporary shelter up there. Some part of the fence had standing planks attached to it, like the one you would find on under construction buildings. workers use it to stand on while welding, painting or what not. It was something like that. I could see that only the physically fit people had made it to the top. Fit, athletic black people mostly. May be this dream had something to do with the images of Hurricane Kathrina that I might have seen on TV. But Ihave never been there myself.

The Forth Dream -

This is last dream I have seen that seems to connect to the other three somehow. In this dream I was in my hometown flying kites; as I used to when I was a kid. Up on the concrete roof of my parents house. Unlike the homes here in the USA, the homes in India are made of bricks, cement blocks and concrete roofs. The stair cases go right up to the roof. Some people use the roof for gardening, drying clothes and other food item, and even sleeping in the open on some pleasant summer nights. I have childhood memories of doing such things in that house. Anyways.. so I was up on the roof flying kites or doing something, when I see a satellite kind of object fly by really fast. At first we thought that it was some kind of UFO flying by, but then we began to see more of these flying satellites. They were of different shapes and material. Some looked like inflated balloons of weird shapes, some were like giant disk antenna and some were almost like UFOs, flashing with fancy lights. They were flying across the sky straight but did not have a particular direction. It was unusual since no had seen satellites fly down in atmosphere where we could see them. So everyone was looking up at the sky. We realized that they were actually falling down on Earth after one giant disk came crashing down with a laud rumble. It created a vibration in the ground that shook the entire town. Everyone heard the rumble and the tremor that followed. Soon after that others began to fall down as well. We were all wondering why the satellites had lost the Geo synchronous orbit and came back to fall down on Earth?

How safe are AOL users? this is a good question which is mostly ignored. I will try and throw some light on it and may be some people will come to light as to what this big company is doing..

Recently I was called for an onsite service call at a residence. The issue was that they had just purchased a wireless router [Linksys G series] and they were not able to make it work with their laptop. And another issue was that their desktop would not connect to AOL if they wired it to the router. So they wanted me to configure it right.

I have never been a fan of AOL, as they put craf on your PC. Being a tech I know that and there are tools that you can download for free to see how infected your computer software is.

Anyways, I go there and refresh the power on the cable modem and the router and it seems to work. So I wire it up to the PC to see if Internet works. Yes it did. So why did his AOL did not connect? well, after examining his computer I realized that he already had bunch of spyware, trojens and or worms on his computer. So I try to decrapify his PC by scanning it with Spybot Search and destroy and AdAware SE Personal ed. Most of the things are cleaned, but of course it took off some functionality of AOL. You will wonder why? Wait I know, coz some software that AOL installs on your PC need back door entry to be clear. I have known this for sometime now and for this very reason, I recommend to my customers not to use AOL in any form. But this giant company has acquired its market by mailing free CDs to people even in Mars.

So in order to fix the AOL software and AOL messenger, I had to reinstall the software from their web site and let it run. After it was all downloaded and installed, I try to start it up, but the same thing happened. The softweare would start, but during the connecting phase, it would simple disconnect. So I go into the router settings to see if there is some kind of built in firewall or port forwarding rule that I could use for AOL. But could not find any. Did AOL mention this during the installation phase - NO. So I think to myself that since they do not mention anything about port forwarding or relaxing firewall rules, it should work as it is. But no it did not. So finally I gave the PC a static IP and put that IP in the DMZ area of the router. [DMZ is an acronym for demilitarized zone. which means that the device under that IP is set with all ports open. which means no firewall and no immunity form hackers or broadcasted melicious softwares.] Guess what happens next - Yes, AOL works! But at the cost of exposing that PC to the demiliterized zone. I explained the customer of the risks, but he said he is trapped. All his business contacts have his AOL email ID and he has to have AOL for his business.

So much for giving your trust to a big company like America Online. What a bunch of liars and two faced people are running that company. They tell you that AOL gives you free spyware protection and protection from viruses. It actually has a software module to do that. But itn’t it an irony that the same software needs to be in a DMZ zone in order to function on a simple home networking router?? It needs you to open up back doors on your computer in oder or work? huh! I wonder how safe they really make your PC.