Strange dreams last night. In the one from which I eventually woke, my father was still alive but had called me into his bedroom to tell me privately that he'd been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and had only four to six months to live. He had important information about his finances that he wanted me to know, so he handed me a Palm Pilot on which he had encrypted the information, and told me to input the pass phrase he was about to give me in order to make sure that I could access the information later. As he spoke the phrase, I mistakenly typed in a homonym for one of the words rather than the correct word, and a security program immediately began to erase all the data on the device. My father was furious with me for typing incorrectly, and it turned out that he didn't have a backup of the data anywhere else, so all the information was gone. There would now be no way to get at any of his savings or investments, leaving my mother with no support, and he blamed me. At that point in the dream, I fell to the floor, sobbing, in a fetal position, and couldn't even speak to my mother when she came to find out what was wrong.
My earlier dream of the night was disturbing in its own way, but at the same time less realistic, a fact of wh
