Here is last night’s dreaming sequence.

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“If you want my future, forget my past
If you wanna get with me, better make it fast”

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The dream opens in a splendid mansion and grounds of Italianate design situated somewhere like Lake Como or Lake Maggiore. It is upper class, rich and very swanky. It is an investor event for high net worth individuals and venture capital (VC) funds of diverse type and scale. It is late evening drawing into night. There is a string quartet and finger food. Presentations will be given in an outdoors setting once it has become fully dark. There is a stage and seating. Seating is round “ten” seater tables. In the meantime a pre-event wine tasting is going on. It feels European.

I am working incognito as one of the wine waiters. I am in black and whites with a white wine apron. I am opening a bottle of vintage red wine and offering to taste before decanting. I then fill a decanter with the rest of the wine. The idea being that they also taste after half an hour. I pour a taster around the table. Each in turns swirls the bright red wine and tastes. I move onto the next table who are trying an ice cold New Zealand white. In general the interaction is professional but I can tell that I am “staff” and not one of them. I am of no significance. I am not the main event.

Heading back to the kitchen an American woman who is a VC accidentally bangs in to me, she is partially drunk and is very rude to me. I apologise even though it is her fault. She is brash and convinced of her own importance. The event suggests to me that these are not the kind of people I seek.

The scene changes and I am at a booth in a trade show and technology event. On the table in front of me is a quantum module. It is a slot in for a 19 inch electronics frame wider unit. I have the side panel off the module. In it I can see a photonic circuit processor which is air-cooled by fan. Connected to it are several tight circle bundles of fibreoptic cable. These are cable tied and attached to the motherboard. A number of them lead to optical-optical low loss interconnects on the rear of the module. To the top of the board is a diode pumped fibre laser which I know to be single mode. The whole unit is a modular quantum logic gate, a plug and play module for an in-principle demonstrator. With me in the booth are Geri Horner and her husband. As a hobby he has led the engineering team and has managed to attract some not standard funding from Red Bull. I replace the side panel to the module and screw it in using a jeweller’s screw driver. I slot the module into the wider 19 inch parent rack. I then mount the whole unit into an electronics rack and attach the computer interface. Geri is excited and waiting for people to visit our booth. There is a Red Bull logo. The module is a large-scale building block prototype for a room temperature quantum computer. I have had to seek non-standard funding, hence Geri and Red Bull.

The scene changes and I am in my workshop / shed on top of a low rise several storey building. To my surprise a text message arrives on my ‘phone. The message asks “why, why am I packing it in?” I am very surprised that there is both a ‘phone and a text message in the dream. {A very rare thing} As I am dealing with this surprise a man appears at the door of my shed. He is older than me, very English and of the UK science hierarchy. I let him in. He wants to know why I am dropping this line of research / investigation. I explain to him that the establishment does not accept me and has difficulty interacting with me because I am not usual. I do not belong to any famous company / institution. He does not believe me. I explain to him in more depth and he starts to get offended imagining that I am attacking the entire science hierarchy. I ask him if he is personally offended. He says, yes.

“Now do you see the sort of thing I am up against. How resistant to me people are?”

“Yes, OK , I get the idea.”

He then asks me to hang fire for a while. He wants to know who I am working with. I explain that it is just me. On my bookshelf he see texts on superconducting and quantum circuits. He says that he might be able to get someone to work with me. I doubt it. There is no money.

I say to him that there is little which can be done. It is as it is. He does not like this.

The dream ends and I have the Spice Girls “Wannabe” to mind.