Last night I had a fun dream.
I got home, and discovered that my landlord had visited with a plumber while I’d be out. (I assumed my roommate had called them in). My toilet had gleaming new stainless steel hardline piping to its cistern, none of that ugly flexible pipe.
I was curious to see if they’d fixed my leaking shower, and it appeared they had. Gleaming new fixtures all around.
Then I left the bathroom and walked to the lounge room, and it seemed they had also got a sparky in. An abundance of new lightswitches were on the wall, waiting for me to discover their purpose.
There were three clusters of four switches, and a lone single switch. The first cluster had a couple of switches to control neurodivergent-unfriendly Big Lights. The remainder of switches in the first cluster and all the switches in the second cluster controlled accent and feature lights, each highlighting a different one of my roommate’s plants around the room.
The third cluster was a bit stranger. The first switch made a broken piece of fence at the end of our yard (hey since when did we have a yard?) crackle and occasionally spark with electricity. Not sure if it’s meant to do that or if it’s a result of the landlord special. Best leave that off for now to avoid starting any fires, but in a zombie apocalypse that’d be great.
I don’t remember what the second switch did, it wasn’t terribly interesting.
The third switch was actually a momentary push button, and made the sky light up with sheet lightning. I remember puzzling for a while over how that could possibly work, and resolving to Google it later. I had some fun pushing that one, but it seemed it needed a little time to recharge between presses.
The fourth button… Idk how to describe this, but it summoned this absolutely beautiful giant orange and purple jellyfish outside the window. Probably 30m long, and with a colour that can’t be captured on a camera (if you’ve seen the neon & argon glow of a violet wand you’ll understand). It crackled with energy, it was comprised entirely of sparks, like the contents of a plasma globe but freed from the glass. I figured it was likely to disturb the neighbours.
That leaves the lonely switch. This was not so much a switch as a button that could be pressed and held. When I first pressed it, it seemed to have no effect.
But the dream shifted, and I realised I wasn’t in my apartment at all. I was in a luxury cabin on a yacht that I’d rented for a few days. (Nobody accused the dream of being realistic.) Holding the button down was doing something to the window, and I realised eventually that the button was polarising and depolarising the window, I guess to deal with the glare from the water.
Anyway I wish my landlord IRL would put in some cool features like this, might even justify the 10-25% rent increase each year.
