Dream: The Young Saboteur

Dream 20020806, 7:00 AM:

The Young Saboteur

This is one of those dreams where my perspective shifts back and forth between being involved, and observing the action from an outside perspective.

The main character (sometimes me) is a young blond man; I get the impression that he’s very young, like still in college. Everyone seems to react to him like he’s ahead of his age, because he’s bright. He’s very pale blond and thin.

He walks into a room and finds a man cracking a safe. At least, it looks like that’s what he’s doing – he is standing in front of a big white wall with a combination bolt lock in the center like a bank vault, and he’s got a smaller thing that looks like another combination lock, but it’s free-standing. He places it against various parts of the vault door, and turns it. I know that what he’s doing is sequentially retracting various bolts that go into the wall. After five or six different ones have been moved (magnetically?) he stops, steps back, and opens the door. Inside is another white safe. We both realize that he’s going to have to get a code to get into this one.

The code is in the office system of an organization that seems like a high-security bank, or a governmental department. I really don’t get a sense of what they do, other than that it’s very high security. I get a job there, and I am trying to break into the system and get the code. I make up a little paper label and place it on someone’s screen, covering part of the usual screen display; the idea is to make their computer capture the key strokes, so I can get the codes that way. I don’t remember what the paper labels say. It seems obvious to me that they would notice them taped over part of the screen, but it seems logical within the dream.

Someone is using the computer, and they get an error message – it starts setting off a security alarm. I am freaking out, because I know that they might figure out it’s me and catch me. I can see the lines of code popping up on their screen, and someone pulls off the paper labels.