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September 14, 2009

2009-09-14T09:24:00.002-10:00

I had a lot of dreams last night.

The main one I remember, though, was ... somehow my sister had gotten all wrapped up in this Alice in Wonderland kind of thing and had (of course) dragged me and some other people into it. This involved a seed that accidentally fell to the ground and immediately sprang up in a set of thick, snakelike trunks that whipped around like woody tentacles and caught us all up in hands of thick-spreading foliage.

The tentacles, having bound me and my sister and our companions securely, soon began to multiply and stand up on their own, growing first into upright triangular patterns that joined at their upper vertices in a circle, which then in turn began to grow upward into a bodice and arms and a head, and before long, we were all trapped in the skirt of a giant woman made out of a framework of living trees and we were all wrapped in petticoats of leaves.

I managed somehow to free myself, and my sister saw and said there was a pair of small pieces of bread (which looked like they'd been sliced out of a loaf and then toasted) in her pocket and asked me to get them out and feed one to her. Like Alice, one would make her grow large and one would make her grow small and either way she'd be freed to help the others. I finally got them out and fed one to her and suddenly found myself in my parents' house looking out the window of the office at the tree-woman, standing a hundred feet tall in a barren scrubland that had replaced the neighborhood and wearing a bonnet of thick, woody ferns, and could see the sky through the woman's face, and saw in my mind's eye my sister growing and growing, soon to completely occupy the hollow space inside the woman and burst it wide open, and ran outside, ready to receive our friends as they fell.

When the trunks began to strain under the weight, I got ready, then experienced a very brief flash of dream-knowledge that told me I had never gotten out of the tree, that the trunks had grown new roots into all of our skins and it was making us dream of freedom while slowly and constantly growing, and all of this was intermingled with my awakening at 3:30 a.m. all sweaty and wondering.

PS: I just checked my cell phone and found a note to myself about the dream, written immediately upon waking. Apparently the woman was a bride. Who knew?

July 9, 2009

2009-08-09T03:13:00.001-10:00

I've let this one fall by the wayside too long.

Two worth reporting from last night.

The first was a party at my apartment, which of course was larger, whiter, and different from my current one. The folks who were coming consisted mostly of coworkers, including people from my last job. I had been napping and overslept; the pounding on my door woke me up. I looked at the clock and gasped. It was the hour of the gathering, and I had done NOTHING to prepare my apartment for the onslaught.

I darted to and fro, gathering up papers and loose books and dumping them in my bedroom, out of sight of the living room. There was a small blue couch that folded out into a bed, but which lacked cushions and looked rather altogether too dingy for propriety. I yanked the bed out and despaired of ever moving the couch on my own, but accomplished it nevertheless, ending up grunting and panting and staring in the eyes of the Jack Russell terrier that was living with me. Once that was safely stashed away with the dog, I looked around at the carpet and realized how filthy it was, but the people outside had managed to get the door partly open, so I had no time to vacuum and let them in.

The dream at this point skipped to the end of the party, after most of the people had left. I was sitting on my nicer couch, flopped to the point of exhaustion, when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye to the left. A bright-orange Bic cigarette lighter was moving. Upon closer inspection, the lighter was moving on the back of a large black cockroach, which was in turn attended by a slightly-smaller golden cockroach.

I understood that they had been disgruntled by the relocation of the old couch and were therefore taking what they could (which included the cigarette lighter) and searching for friendlier climes. This required several trips across my living room floor so they could collect various of my odds and ends. On the last trip, I killed them with my foot.

A little while later, I was dreaming that I was in some sort of a workshop led by one of my coworkers, who was teaching a group of college-age kids the basics of painting. I started talking to the student next to me, explaining the mechanics of various significant gatherings in aesthetic history, conferences and conclaves and shows and biennales.

She encouraged me to get up in front of the class as I spoke, which I did without realizing it, and when I wound up a disquisition on the obstinacy of Chuck Close and how it had led to the collapse of what would have been a particularly significant show, I realized I was speaking to the class, my coworker was sitting among the students with a strange look on his face, and there were three hands up.

The first one asked a question, which I don't remember, although I remember the answer: a flat "No." The second question was something about God. I had to leave the room and look at something and come back and give her an answer, which sounded deep and meaningful at the time, but which I have, unfortunately, forgotten. The third question was about why artists seem to enjoy working in palettes of yellow so much. That was easy, I said. Natural light, but it goes deeper than that. It's one thing to include hints of yellow everywhere in order to say, this is during the daytime, but quite another to use a yellow wash to convey sunlight. I then had to explain what a wash was (a dilution of the paint with some kind of thinning medium, like water, in order to make it more transparent, like watercolors).

At this point, I noticed that several faculty had wandered in and were listening raptly, and I realized I had somehow ended up teaching a class on the history of aesthetics. Or something like that.

April 18, 2009

2009-04-18T08:35:00.000-10:00

I just took a nap, which started off both at my parents' house and in a city somewhere. I was staying in a room with a beautiful black woman and her mouthy daughter. They were both wearing yellow. There wasn't an involvement there, just platonic, although I would have wished otherwise and thought she felt the same way too.

It was morning and one of my sister's old roommates was preparing a big, fancy dinner for my family and a bunch of other people. We had a grandmother of some kind wandering about, she the girl encouraged me to try some of her antipasti, which consisted of a very light-tasting green olive coated in sesame seeds, fried, and then soaked in olive oil. It was really rather delicious, and I told her so, and she looked pleased. I noticed a stain on the carpet, which looked like some kind of orange-colored oil sprinkled with seeds and nuts of various types, as well as pretzels. The grandmother looked at me apologetically.

I went to my room/apartment and found out the black woman in yellow was leaving with her daughter for an unspecified amount of time. I accompanied them to the corner and said good bye, and then waited as they started down the street before following them for a little while until they reached the bus stop. I knew they'd find it rather odd that I followed them, so turned back just before they reached the stop. Still, I paused when I hit the corner and looked back down the hill. They had seen me, and the woman in yellow raised her hand and so did I.

I had a large, thick book by Stephen King in my hand from the library where I work, and I realized I should be getting along to work -- I'd only taken a couple hours off and they were expecting me.

The shuttle stopped right in front of my apartment, which was on the first floor and part of a bank of open storefronts covered by brightly-colored awnings. The street in front was very narrow, only one lane, and ran along the lip of a sharp-edged cliff, with a declivity that plunged to the foothills below, protected only by a concrete bank. It was a beautiful spring day and the sun dappled the awnings in shades of bright yellow, red, purple, green, and blue.

I got onto the shuttle with my book and found a seat facing the back and sat down, prepared to read until I noticed that I was actually facing forward -- because the road was so narrow, the shuttle could only back down it while retracing its route. People squeezed back, nearly scraping the fronts of their bodies on the shuttle and I thought, How do they do it?

The street split off from mine and continued slightly downward off the cliff, made of concrete and suspended in space. It was only then that I realized that the cliff was actually a very, very tall building, and that there were a few, all connected by these extremely high and narrow streets. People were fishing off the concrete sides or watching the clouds go by underneath while basking in the sun, which was split up by the shadows of these thin buildings which vanished into blueness both above and below. We reached another building, and the street went past another bus station with several benches along the street, all of which were filled with different elementary-school classes of deaf children. There was almost no clearance between them and the shuttle, and each bench looked terrified en masse. As the bus passed each bench, the teacher for that class would stand on the opposite side of the street, against the concrete railing, scraping his front against the shuttle, cut off from his children, and encourage them to ignore it in different ways. One told his students to recite the twelve-times table. Another told his students to sing, and listened for their voices above the roar of the shuttle.

The shuttle continued to back down the narrow streets in the sky, until we reached the ground, and we were on campus. The driver could finally put the shuttle in Drive and move through the fresh rolling green hills that Gallaudet had become with relative impunity. At one point, I noticed that we had reached the lip of a vast basin, shell-shaped, a gentle, circular decline leading to an abrupt steep rise along one side, and that side looked peculiar, many-colored in thin horizontal bands. Then my stomach growled, and I decided I'd go to lunch first -- my supervisor couldn't fault me for that.

I stayed on the shuttle. It took me to a gleaming hotel on the water which looked like it was made of many cubes, cantilevered out into the sunshine, the tall, thin buildings mere outlines in the blue haze that had settled all around the horizon. I debarked the shuttle and looked for the way in. There were dozens of escalators, all leading to different places, and I knew the cafeteria I was going to was underground. However, the sign for it was actually an enormous banner that took up the entire first-floor bank of escalators and gave no indication whatsoever as to which escalator was the right one. However, I have a policy in these cases: Follow the kids. I noticed a little knot of children heading for one down escalator in particular, followed them, and found myself where I had wanted to be -- but realized I'd forgotten the book on the bus.

I gnashed my teeth, but told myself I'd only stay long enough for that same shuttle to come around again so I could get the book back. If it wasn't there, at least it had our barcode on it, and it was a campus shuttle, so anyone who found it would probably return it to the library. In the meantime, I found myself a Coke and only had enough time to drink it before I saw the shuttle coming around again.

I ran for it, and barely made it. Searching for the shuttle, I found many abandoned things, most identifiable as books of one kind or another, but none of them were mine. Then I saw it on the floor between two seats, and grabbed it, only to notice that we had returned to the basin I'd seen before, so rushed to the front of the shuttle and disembarked there. As it rumbled away, I stood among the vast green hills and looked at the bowl stretching away before me to that strange steepness. I began to walk across the basin, noticing that a jogging path ran all along the rim, splitting into two levels when it hit that sharp end -- and then realized I didn't have my book with me. Cursing, I turned around and looked at the crossroads, hoping I'd dropped it there. I saw something that could have been the book, but instead turned out to be a crossed pair of palm fronds. I threw my hands up in the air, and noticed a student jogging down a gravel path along a distant hill, and thought, I could do that. Curious to investigate the basin, and why Gallaudet might have built it there, I started off jogging until I reached the far end.

I looked up. The incline was rough, made of round, horizontal striations of varying sizes, colors and materials, running in unbroken cylinders from one end to the other. I noticed a small sign, and found out it was actually a mountain-climbing practice area. It warned that only climbers of at least +2.75 proficiency should try this, but I thought it was so neat, I just began to pull myself up.

It was easier than I thought it would be, and I was nearly to the top when I noticed there were other people climbing with me. They all wore dark blue workout tops and black shorts and were climbing in straight lines, very close together. When I reached the end of my climb, I realized the last level of the training consisted of the striations leveling off into a flat, horizontal layer -- the object was to pull yourself up by hooking your fingers over, progressively, a bar of granite round enough to give your fingers plenty of purchase to pull up a little while pushing off with your feet, then a smaller bar of brick, with slightly less purchase but more traction, and so on until you finally had to somehow find a way to hook your fingers around a very smooth, very low, very small layer of marble. There was a beautiful blonde woman standing over me, and she began to encourage me, grabbing my hands and guiding them to their holds.

However, as I pulled myself up higher, she finally saw my clothing and started pulling my hands off altogether, attempting to make me fall.

"What are you doing?!" I asked.

"Sorry," she said. "But I only help those who are with us. You're not wearing the uniform."

Bullshit! I thought to myself, and only tried to scrabble my way up even harder. I kept kicking the uniformed people waiting in line below me and to my left, and the woman only kept kicking my hands off, until I lost my temper, grabbed her ankle, and pulled her over my head. She tumbled through the air, screaming all the way down, but the lowest striation was extremely large and made of some kind of foam-stuffed toy material, so I knew she would be all right, barring a few bone-jarring bounces.

I finally made it all the way up to the top, and noticed the uniformed people rapidly climbing down, trying to get away from me, the attempted murderer. I could hear her voice screeching thinly far below, but ignored it, casting my eye over the scene. Somehow, the hills had turned into a large room, red-painted, and I failed to notice this, running down the steep rim and exulting in what a cool room this was, and that it was too bad my father hadn't built one in his house. Along the opposite wall was a large window running almost its entire length, and on the wall adjoining it to my left, there was a thin row of windows admitting a late-afternoon sun. However, the large window directly opposite me was showing night, and I found if I blocked out the light of the afternoon window, I could see thousands, millions of stars and bright, beautiful nebulae in the night window, all rotating slowly and stately. Fascinated, I climbed down and crept up closer to the window.

Through it, I could see faint glimmerings of an enormous silvery construction, nearly wholly vertical, constructed of thousands of towers. It shimmered through my reflection, making me appear as though I were wearing a crown, and reality began to shiver inside my head. Something odd had changed, and I opened the window. A scene lit up inside it -- a mechanical diorama showing a train moving through a city, chased by little barbarian paper cutouts clustered together, so their spears stuck up, thousands of tall, skinny, vertical sticks, and I reached up to my head and realized I was wearing a crown with strange little vertical stick-like things coming out of it. I pulled the crown off and looked at it, but realized it was only a simple metal circle, so reached my hand back up to my head and felt the sticks, and saw my hand in the process. There were tentacles on it. Reality kept shivering in that odd way, and I slammed the window shut and looked at myself in the glass. I was covered in small, inch-long tentacles, covering my eyes, nose, mouth, along the line of my cheekbones, along my jawline, down from my ears, and out from my hair. They were all the same flesh color and were smooth, moving and twitching, and I realized the odd quivering of reality in my head was actually my mind learning how to manipulate these tentacles.

Then I remembered the woman I had thrown off the odd cliff and how she had screamed at me from the bottom of that vast room and realized she had bespelled me in revenge for what I had done. I looked at my watch and it was four o'clock, far too late to make it back to work on time and still explain it away as lunch, and dinner was about to start -- but I couldn't go, because I had tentacles.

I leaned back against a thick layer of some padded blue and decided I would probably be in this room for a very long time.

April 15, 2009

2009-04-15T03:41:00.001-10:00

I was in a city in broad daylight, talking with friends outside the window of a shop that sold TVs. I Love Lucy was playing. We had a clear view of the skyline, although we were right in the heart of downtown; this explains why I was able to notice the odd building sidling its way in.

It was slightly yellowish, rectangular, and covered from bottom to top in horizontal rows of three enormous, black, square-headed spikes on all four sides of the building. It was moving in with alarming speed, sliding behind some buildings and taking a definite place in the skyline. Now that I noticed it, I realized that several more identical buildings were moving into other points in the city, and I drew my friends' attention to them. The buildings were hostile and alien-looking. The shop was at a streetcorner, so I moved closer to the cross-street and looked at the rest of the city, and saw even more of those buildings sliding into place.

Then I noticed that the sky was turning gray, and funnel shapes were forming in it. Two of them to be precise, and they roared into the city, destroying only the alien ones, which tore apart in a very odd way, as though they had been constructed of large, loosely-linked particles. We seemed to be safe where we were, and I watched the tornadoes' progress, until I realized two things.

First, the tornadoes had definite termini at their tops, rather than disappearing into the clouds. Those termini were heads, the heads of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, gray-black and flickering, grinning maniacally as they shredded the alien buildings.

Second, the alien buildings were made of people. Thousands and thousands of people somehow unwillingly forced into rigidity and linked together by their arms and legs. They were being torn apart, to a one, by the tornadoes. It didn't take long for the streets to be filled with broken bodies, and I realized that Earth was under attack.

When it was all over and the sky had turned blue once again, the survivors filtered out of the city and down a garden pathway to a Wal-Mart. The merchandise had been emptied out and piled into pyramids surrounding the store, protecting it from direct attack. In the meantime, the employees had opened the Wal-Mart as a shelter for the survivors. We filtered in among a gigantic crowd and were diverted to various tables to get our tent assignment (a tent city had been established in the Home & Garden section), food rations, spare clothes, and toiletries.

I got my assignment and went to the tent city to get myself set up. I was bunking down with a few other people, but noticed that a little living area had been set up near our tent, as sort of a communal living room, complete with a couple of sofas, plenty of patio chairs, and a few small tables. A sofa was open, so I slid into it, lying down and just trying to pull things together and figure out what was going on. I felt someone perch on the back of the sofa and looked up to recognize an old friend from high school. She looked very upset and mentioned that a few good friends of ours had been killed in the attack on the city.

This was very upsetting, but not as much as what happened an hour or so after that. I got drafted for sentry duty, out along the stock-pyramids, and at one point, I stood on the apex of one of those pyramids and I turned around to look back at the store, only to see it exhaling what looked like a thick black liquid -- people, running for their lives, pouring out the doors. Behind them, I could see over the roof and saw enormous machines at the back of the store, crushing their way to the front, leading a giant rolling cloud that extended all the way across the world from horizon to horizon. I turned and ran down the pyramid and joined the crushing crowd.

I looked back in time to watch the giant machines rip their way through the front of the Wal-Mart, their undersides painted by the blood of people bursting underneath them like overripe grapes, and come slowly to a halt. Others noticed, and slowly the crowd began to slow and look back, afraid of what was coming next. Suddenly, each machine disgorged a giant beagle puppy the size of a very large house. When each puppy landed, it crushed even more people, and then it would stand up and start running indiscriminately through the crowd, scooping people up into its mouth and biting down once or twice before disgorging the ground-up remains and scooping up another mouthful. One of the cutest terrors I'd ever seen, and I turned and ran and kept running until I reached a line of suburban houses and filtered into the neighborhood.

I found a partially-constructed house and hid there, joined by a couple of other people. We could hear the rumbling of a puppy's passage and knew they could sniff us out if we allowed the wind to catch our scent, so huddled in a corner with the windows shut. We heard human footsteps, and a guy appeared, sliding between the bare studs of a framed-in wall -- just as a puppy walked past a window and we heard it sniff, a noise like a wind tunnel, and reality stuttered -- and we heard human footsteps and the guy slid between the bare studs of a framed-in wall, just as a puppy walked past a window and we heard it -- human footsteps and the guy slid between the bare studs of a framed-in wall, just as a puppy walked past a window -- and we heard human footsteps and the guy slid between the bare studs of a framed-in wall -- and we heard human footsteps ...

And I woke up.

April 1, 2009

2009-04-01T02:03:00.001-10:00

I dreamed I was in a large city with a group of people and a professor, studying urban design and planning. It was an odd city, in twilight, all the glass lit up in purples and blues and brilliant oranges and crisscrossed by massive cables on which were strung what appeared to be Metro train cars.

After a while, I realized that a good friend from college, let's call her Emma, was in the crowd with me, and we hadn't seen each other for years, so we split off from the class and made our own way.

We flagged down a city bus, got on, and headed to the restaurant in back, where we just started talking and catching up. The candles were very nice, flickering as the scenery went past outside the windows, and we'd been eating and talking a while when she mentioned that she didn't really have a place to stay in town and was wondering if she could crash at my place. "Sure," I said. "How long will you be staying for?" "I'll be here until Tuesday," almost a week away.

"Sounds good. What happens on Tuesday, though?"

"Oh, I have to go home on Tuesday -- my brother's going to die, so I need to go to the funeral."

"Wait, what?"

She nodded and explained that her littlest brother had a condition which required a weekly supply of vitamins and other undisclosed ministrations, but the nurse who was usually responsible for this was on vacation. He needed the vitamins by Tuesday and would not be getting them.

"But, wait. Your brother's going to die just because this woman decided to go on vacation and you guys aren't doing anything about it?"

She spread her hands. "We can't. We have no choice."

That struck me as being particularly awful and she pleaded with me not to cry, she couldn't take it, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Finally, we arrived at an enormous grocery store, and made a beeline for the deli section, which was known locally for having a bunch of deaf people working there. When we arrived, I had to laugh -- the deli workers were these people I had known in college who had been sort of a joke among the campus deaf people because of their incredible snobbery. And now they were making sandwiches, which was actually pretty fun to watch.

Emma suddenly said she needed to go to the bathroom, and she'd find me later. "Okay," I said, and went back to watching the snobs assemble a particularly complicated sub. Several minutes later, I realized there was no sign of Emma anywhere, so I began searching through the store. Nothing. At this point, I figured I'd probably set her off by my reaction on the bus and she was probably busy sniffling in a bathroom stall somewhere, so I went outside for a cigarette.

Someone walked up to me who looked very vaguely familiar but had the kind of face where you can just tell that some weight was lost at some point along the way. He grinned a big gap-toothed smile and said, "Ya remember me?"

I scoffed. "Yes."

He put me in a headlock and then let up, "Bullshit. What would your mother say if she heard you say such things?"

"She'd say you need to lay off the drugs, Matt." He laughed.

"So," he said. "It's almost April 12." Belatedly, I suddenly remembered that we had the same birthday. I stopped without warning and nearly pitched him forward, grabbed him by the shoulders, and gave him a big, long kiss that ended with us rolling on the ground and laughing at the people who stared at us, their shock writ large. His lips were very dry.

We stood up and brushed ourselves off, and he mentioned he needed to grab a sandwich, wished me a happy birthday -- and I did the same to him -- and left. I turned around only to see another group of people I had worked with once coming along the arbor on the side of the store. I found a wall and hid behind it and -- no more of these stupid encounters! -- woke up.

March 25, 2009

2009-03-25T06:22:00.000-10:00

I dreamed it was my 10-year class reunion last night.

I was in a hotel lobby, just kind of putzing around. I was different in a way that matters, although not inside, and wondering who I'd see and whether it was worth all the money I'd spent to come. Nervously, I scanned the faces of the new arrivals, looking for someone friendly, when one showed up.

Let's call her Megan. I had thought of her only once in the decade that had passed since graduation -- and that one time had been this dream where I bumped into her in a hotel lobby at our 10-year class reunion.

She was wearing a white dress with a pearl choker that draped down her decolletage like an Arizona sunburst. She smiled and said hello, and I thought to myself I haven't thought of this bitch but once in 10 years. I meant "bitch" in kind of a good way -- although she had been unswerving in her contempt of certain people and modes of thought, she was still an effervescent personality, and we had competed for good grades in all the AP courses we'd coincidentally taken together. Sometimes I got the better grade and lorded it over her ass, sometimes she did the lording. Overall, it was a good time.

She was extremely attractive, but was one of those geek girls who approach their academics with the bloodthirst of a Tatar. She ran with the other geek-girls who were in band and chorus and the Humanities & Etymology Society and the National Honor Society and all that, and they clustered around her even here, two of them, fading into the background as faces barely recognizable but wholly unmemorable.

And here she was, linking her arm with mine and we went into the ballroom, which looked like the typically crappy Event hosted by your run-of-the-mill chain hotel with four-star aspirations. We sat down at a table together and drank champagne, and I told her all about living and working in DC and doing my thing. She told me all about how she'd found out there'd been all these girls in high school who knew her, knew her name, knew all the stuff she'd done academically, but whom she had neither known or even met.

The bubbliness overflowed as she mused on how she'd actually been popular but hadn't realized it, and so was attending this reunion to showcase her newfound confidence as a non-mainstream popular girl. It was true; she looked fantastic next to the girls who had enjoyed name recognition in conventionality, who looked vaguely haggard, as though they'd worked long hours as lawyers or brokers or ad executives. One in particular, whom I'd known since I was a wee one, kept knocking back gin and tonics as she discussed various esoteric points of copyright law with a bored bank vice president who'd been her best friend in high school.

Against this background, she looked even livelier as she took various supplicants for her attention, all the outcasts who'd become writers and artists and librarians, but about her own occupation, she remained silent. We spent most of the evening this way, and then ... well, suffice it to say the rest of the night doesn't need description.

This was an incredibly random dream -- she was one name I'd utterly forgotten until this dream dredged it up against all reason. Not to mention the recursive nature of the dream, given the way that I'd remembered the dream itself while I was dreaming it, as though I were actually seeing the future and remembering that I'd seen it. It's not the first time it's happened, but it's certainly the strongest instance.

February 15, 2009

2009-02-14T22:03:00.001-10:00

Well, I survived a nuclear bomb.

Or at least, I remember having survived one, although I certainly can't place where or when it might actually have happened because it seems to be happening right now. I'm hauling a nuke along with two other guys. We're in an isolated residential school in the woods on the outskirts of a city. We're struggling like hell, though, because that sucker is heavy. We wanted to get it into the large atrium of the school, but we're stuck in the hallway just outside the cafeteria, one of our compatriots screaming and cussing up a storm because he just doesn't wanna do it anymore. The other guy sighs and says, "Fine, we'll just blow the device right here."

I'm a little nervous about being in the same room with the nuke when it goes off. The other two don't seem to mind so much, although that's not a very good indication of its safety. Suddenly the calmer fella says to me, "Go down the hall, and take the third door on the left. It's a classroom with a window in the far corner. Get there and watch for smoke. If you see any, that means the others went off. Should happen a little after six o'clock, just like this one."

"Okay," I say, and toddle off. I find the classroom, but there's a pair of nervous students in there, having a late-night study session. I nod and move past carefully, wondering if they know what the hell's going on. They go back to what they're doing as I reach the window, part the blinds, and put my back to corner next to it, sliding down to rest on the floor. I scoff to myself a little -- the guy said to watch for smoke, but it's pitch outside, no real way to see much smoke. Then my eyes adjust, and the night becomes brighter, lit by a million stars over the woods, and I catch my breath, it's beautiful.

It's almost six now. I wonder if I should curl up, try to protect my spine or something. I examine my memories. I seem to be remembering the present as though it were already past, or maybe it's the future I'm remembering, and maybe I'll forget it when it becomes now, because I remember watching the (a?) bomb go off. It's all this crazy light and it gets hot, and there's a concussion, but for some reason it's not so bad for me, I can stand my ground and squint through the light and when it's all over, I'm still there, maybe with a decent suntan.

So I sit there, remembering what's about to happen and wondering if I should try to have a cigarette before the thing goes off when I check my watch and realize it's almost six-thirty, so I look outside through the window and see smoke far off in the distance, blowing away -- I almost missed it, and, convinced that my bomb was a dud, I stand up and sit down again in a cab that's coming to a stop in a parking garage, the cabbie just throwing the thing into park and opening the door and running off, and I can see almost everyone else doing the same thing, so that eventually the only things I can see moving are emergency response vehicles, coming into the garage and sluing off into different directions on different ramps.

"Jesus," I say to myself, wondering what's going on. I'm wearing what I remember as a "Hakuto" jacket, whatever that is, and wonder if I'm in Tokyo or somewhere where there's a major disaster going on, maybe an earthquake. Then I see a white cop's face in a car as he goes past and remember the bomb, so I try to flag someone down. I'm ultimately unsuccessful, until I turn around and see a pair of grim-faced cops parked just behind me, discussing the bomb that just vaporized half the city and one of them says "They got most of our emergency infrastructure," and I realize I'm in Jericho, experiencing the show from the perspectives of both the folks who set off the bomb in Denver and the surviving city folks who experienced its aftermath.

Once I realize that this whole experience is fake on a fundamental level, I wake up and have the spooky feeling I'm being watched.

December 26, 2008

2008-12-26T01:12:00.001-10:00

I was in a suburban copse, watching a giant grasshopper rub its wings together and orchestrating an orchestra of giant insects.

A black cat arrived on the scene and the orchestra broke up, while the grasshopper managed to somehow acquire a large metal hook which he then used to try to capture the cat. The cat was black, a curiously spindly, attenuated figure, and thus it always escaped.

Bored, I went to the store, where in the parking lot they were having an event; avoid getting shot and you would be allowed to take shelter while the nuke went off. A besuited man was among us and behaving oddly (odder, at least, than the rest of the people, who were busy dodging bullets), looking skyward as though he were seeing something I were missing. The sky was this magnificent cerulean, a terrific dark blue never observed in nature, peopled with gargantuan clouds and I got the impression there was much more going on here than first appearances would allow, the sense of vast forces moving beyond the sky.

He pulled out a protective suit and gave it to me and said I was welcome to take shelter with the two winners, and I ran into the alcove that would serve, putting the suit on on the way. The alcove was just a gap between two protruding walls off the grocery store; it drained into the sewer and was full of dead leaves. I shoved myself in there first, and waited for the other two, who showed up without protective suits. Fat Latina women, they gobbled as we waited for the flash and boom and when it was all over they cackled, "We were right, no need for suits" and they died of radiation poisoning.

I left the alcove and walked back to the suburb. Everything had died, and I looked into the sky down the road and there was a structure there, like a mountain many miles tall, the base actually past the curve of the horizon but so large it was visible, but curved and pointing off to the left with a hollow peak, and it looked patently artificial, like a missile silo for giants. The sheer scale of it was monstrous, galactic, mind-boggling -- and a rocket erupted out of its peak and sailed halfway around the sky and things clouded over and beyond that point, I could see only half-glimpsed hints of enormous machinery behind the sky, above the clouds. A ship here, a missile there, an enormous white strut miles long, sliding behind the clouds and I knew there was war in the heavens.

December 6, 2008

2008-12-06T03:22:00.001-10:00

I guess it all started with a family thing involving my youngest cousin, who my mother was trying to convince to aspire to a life that went beyond simple settling down with children. She used me as an example, saying that I had recently gotten a job as a librarian in Washington, DC.

That reminded me. I drove up to the building where the job was, which looked like a large, red version of the OEOB in the middle of a complicated Victorian-style neighborhood. I finally managed to find parking and went inside the building to check out my new digs. I wasn't to start working until the next day, but managed to get in and find my desk number on a card on the manager's desk. Locating it, I left a book and the framed photo of myself in France standing next to the wall with Sharpie'd graffiti saying "nowhere to go but far ... "

I left it in a drawer and left the building. On coming outside, I was picked up by my grandfather in his old truck, in which were also riding the rest of my family. It was a worrying experience because he kept talking rather than watching where he was going, which grew dangerous as we approached a tunnel topped by a large concrete walls with a pair of pointed arches cut into it, and I had him drop me off in the same place. I looked up, and the sky was full of stars. Giant, bright silvery clusters of them from horizon to horizon and there were multiple meteors going off at once. It was beautiful, but after a while, there were no more meteors and the stars dimmed and the sky looked like a giant television with a dirty screen.

After this, I went back inside the large, old building and decided that I had probably been wrong about where I was to sit -- there was no telling whether the card on which I had found my desk number was outdated. As I entered the annex to the large room where I was to be working, I noticed a small candy dish full of mini-fun-packs of Skittles and some sort of sweet made of peppermint creme covered in chocolate, and stole a few. As I retrieved my book and photo, I noticed a few people already in the room, and asked them where I was to sit. They pointed me at a small vertical desk, where the screen was higher than my head and the keyboard at my lap, and I sat down to noodle around for a few minutes. I checked Google Reader, found nothing new there, and left the building, intending to store my things in my truck until it was actually time to work.

Something else caught my eye: an old-fashioned horseless carriage parked on the side of the cobblestoned street. I went over to check it out and found out it was available to rent or park using free tokens that could be gotten from any number of kiosks or one of the drivers of the local horse-drawn carriages. As it happened, one of those carriages was parked behind the automobile, so I asked the driver if I could have enough tokens to last me through the workday. Instead of responding, he showed me the pipe he was smoking out of and said, "Guess what I'm smoking."

"Tobacco?"

"Nope. Coke."

"Coke as in -- ?"

He nodded. "Historical accuracy, you know, so it's legal for me to smoke it. Go ahead, smell the bowl."

I smelled it, dipped my finger into its crackling blackness, and rubbed the soot across the palm of my right hand and smelled that. Yes, indeed. It was cocaine.

"As for those tokens ... " the carriage-driver said. He smiled nastily and tossed a fistful of golden coins behind me, onto a young boy who was sitting in the backseat of the auto. I had to pick them out of his red shirt, and there were more, many more, than I had thought there were at first, so it took some time. I finally managed to get enough, more than enough, and fed a few through the slot and started it up. It came with a humming rumble, and as I wheeled it out of its spot and into the road over the cobblestones, it began to shake and hum and rumble all at once and it was a strangely pleasant feeling. Once I had circled the block, I began to pull it back into its old spot.

Only to discover a number of small boats cordoning it off. There was a small-boat bazaar happening next to my parking spot and it had taken over the space. The little boats on the road were connected by lengths of monofilament fishing line and were sailing on the road.

November 7, 2008

2008-11-07T02:23:00.001-10:00

Last night, I dreamed that I had had a lot to drink.

I went to Tara's townhouse, where a large group of people were congregating. To escape the crowd, I found a room in which there was a large TV and Guitar Hero. Never having played it before, I gave it a shot in private, curling my hand over the bottom edge of the body in order to reach the buttons, a highly ineffective arrangement. Just after I realized you were supposed to drape your hand over the thing, not come up from underneath, a young black guy came in, and I offered the fake guitar to him. He promptly broke off a white, rectangular button and grew rapidly distraught.

I attempted to comfort him by showing him that the thing could be snapped back on--while finding out that it couldn't--only to be interrupted by Tara's sister, Molly. The floor morphed into a well-landscaped pond surrounded by several large boulders, on which we all perched. Everyone else entered the room and began chattering about going to a bar named "Hotrods," and I was invited along. Already drunk, I was leery, but decided that I probably could not get any more intoxicated, so it ought to be safe. Molly offered to drive everyone, but ended up dropping her keys into the pond, at which point I finally realized that she was fantastically drunk. I thought to myself, She certainly holds her drink pretty well for a thirty-nine-year-old.

Somehow, improbably, she skittered across the boulders and, perching rather precariously in heels on a particularly loose rock, she stuck her hand in the water at random and immediately retrieved an absurdly large keyring, with dozens of brass keys, and we set off.

The dream skipped over the bar and into the next morning, when Tara and I arrived at her townhouse and discovered Molly dozing in the driver's seat of her little green car. I began dancing, sort of a little soft-shoe routine, around the front of the car, and went into Tara's place, while Molly, waking up and wiping the running mascara off her face, followed. We settled down on a large group of beanbags in the living room, looking out through the large glass windows, while I filled both of them in on the details of what had happened last night.

That ... really was pretty much it.

October 26, 2008

2008-10-26T00:58:00.002-10:00

It started with my cat. I was petting her, and found a small glass disk underneath her chest, about two and a half inches wide. It was a very curious object--transparent from only a few angles and milkily opaque the rest of the time. Then I was driving along a shoreline a while before a hurricane was supposed to hit. I was on the east coast of the state, and there were numerous small island nations a mile or so offshore who were evacuating ahead of the storm. I turned the radio on, and it said, "Don't hang around the area. Get out or find some shelter."

I pulled out a map, which was animated and showed the path of the hurricane along the shore, and pulled into a library, where there was a crowd of poeple. It had two stories, but the lobby was full of people waiting their turn to go up to the second story because of fire regulations. I made my way through the stacks on the first floor, pulling out a large sea-green buckram book and hauling it open. Inside, there were two windows on each page, through which text and maps scrolled, and I thought, how useful.

I went home. Home was a large brown stone house with a small courtyard in the back with a garden, in which I came across a tall black man and a couple of Latinos, performing yoga to the music of a television visible inside the house through a pair of French doors. When I arrived, the tall guy kicked the other two out, and sat down with me at the patio table, on which was sitting the remote for the TV, and we talked a little bit. I knew he wasn't exactly from this planet.

"He's dying, isn't he?" I asked, referring to one of the pair of guys that had been yoga-ing with him just previously.

He nodded, then looked at me, and I knew the truth. " ... And so are you."

He nodded again.

I was in the desert with him. He looked regretful. "What the hell?" And I realized I was trapped there, and he didn't say a word. Suddenly the air around me erupted in a loud, pedantic voice, and I realized I still had the book from the library with me. It seemed to have gotten broken, and was skipping like a broken record. Flashing fragments of black and white exploded around me: leaking ink.

Irritated, I shut it and shoved it into a bag, and started walking, pulling the glass disk out of my pocket and experimenting with it. It was resolutely vertical, perpendicular to the ground, and refused to orient itself any other way. It was only with some struggle that I managed to turn it horizontal, and the world skewed, and I twisted it, and it turned into a three-dimensional sphere, and the world spun again, and I realized this object could be used to determine my position and orientation in space independent of local conditions, and also realized that I was in front of Brian Austin Green, who had also arrived in the desert and looked like he had just stepped out of the Sarah Connor Chronicles and was accompanying the tall black man from another world.

He was playing the role of my gardener, and I greeted him gladly and expressed regrets that he had wound up stuck here. Just then, the book spoke up and a dim black-and-white woman walked past, and he jumped. I showed him the book, and he nodded sympathetically: "Ink, huh?"

Just then, I noticed a far-off glint. Curious, the three of us walked over to it, to discover that it was a sheet of glasslike material rotating in a wireframe box, looking for all the world like a piece of unsmoothed computer-generated terrain. It came to me then and there that the glass disk was meant to be a tool, given to me by someone utterly unknown, and that it was meant to be used. I pulled it out and spun it into a sphere again as I strode toward the floating glass hill, in anticipation of something ...

Then I woke up. A few minutes before my alarm. On my day off. Go figure ...

October 17, 2008

2008-10-17T00:44:00.001-10:00

The dream started on a city park beach in the heart of the city where I live. People were gallivanting about in swimwear.

I was walking with someone, and we passed my old supervisor. I wanted to take the chance to let her know that I only missed her wedding because of an unavoidable circumstance, but she was gone before I could say much. She was being held up as she walked by a pair of younger men. I kept walking, and ended up in a little barbershop/salon adjacent to the beach. I asked for a job, and immediately got it, no questions asked. After I turned out a young woman and proved my styling skills were, well, stylin', I hung around and talked with the other barbers, one of whom was my sole male coworker.

A large, older man came in, carrying a pair of clippers, and jokingly, he managed to shave off all the hair in a two-and-a-half-inch wide band on my right wrist, the same size as the one worn into my left wrist by my watch. "Sweet," I said. "I've always wanted to know how to use one of those," and I grabbed it and kept it, turning around to sit in my barber's chair, and the shop changed into someone's living room, full of deaf people who were sitting around on couches up against all the walls and smoking marijuana. The walls had gone gray from all the smoke, and the carpet was a scrubby tan.

They were all very interesting personalities, especially this dreadlocked young woman whose name sign resembled both someone flicking a lighter and the letters G and A. Suddenly, a young black man came in and sat down in the couch next to the recliner where I was sitting, dead center in the living room, and he began telling me that he thought he was being followed. "By who?" I asked. He jerked his chin to another guy sitting on the couch across from me and a girl just behind me to the left. I marveled inwardly at the fact that this young man had no problem with discussing this so blatantly, but realized there were so many conversations in the room that the one occurring in the exact middle of the hubbub, the only one easily visible to everyone else in the room, was being utterly ignored. GA jumped in, and we began to talk as I lit up a small glass pipe. As the drug took effect, the room grew hazy, and I realized there was a cat on the floor. I reached out my hand so the cat could sniff it, which attracted several others, all of whom were orbiting my hand and purring, rubbing against each other and my arm.

Suddenly, I was at the front door of my parents' house, letting myself in. As I walked in, I looked under the piano bench to the right, and saw a pair of eyes. It was my old cat, Punkin, who had died a couple years before. Still, it seemed utterly normal as she emitted one of her typically rusty meows (the only kind of meow I'm capable of hearing) and began twining her fat self around my legs. In the dream, I wondered if this was a sign; I only ever saw her or her brother Mac in a dream before something significant was about to happen, and there was no sign of my current cat anywhere, and I knew she just wasn't there.

I jerked myself awake at 5:39 a.m., thought I had overslept my alarm for some reason (it's set at 5:43), and came out of the shower later, only to find it going off. A wonderful start.

2008-09-06T01:12:00.001-10:00

A lot happened before this point, but up until I wade into the river, there's nothing to be remembered.

The river itself is alternately clear and murky. I can see large turtles and fish swim past and through my legs. I turn around and there's a small crowd on the river bank, exhorting me to go on--the village is just around the bend. The ringleader has already warned me that things are strange there, and though modern in every respect, many things are still accessible only by river.

Still, I wade on, the water alternately reaching to my knees or chest. There are massive swirling currents rippling through the river from time to time, but they're oddly gentle, and I wade on around the bend.

Only to be confronted with a fork. To the left, the river goes on through the jungle. To the right, the same, except there are little twinkly lights shining through the trees on the small island that's forking the river. I elect to go right; "Always let the lights guide you," comes unbidden into my mind.

Sure enough, as I continue to wade--and now alternately swim--I'm passing small houses at water level, their back walls utterly flat and featureless except for, always, a single door opening onto the water. Some have docks, but most just have walls, and the darkness of the jungle and the forbidding aspect of the houses give me a distinct impression: don't go around knocking on doors. Better to find a public place.

Suddenly, everything goes dark, and as my eyes adjust, it turns out the darkness is actually illuminated with wall sconces, and I'm in what appears to be a hallway--whose floor is the river. There are multiple doors, and I understand that I'm in something like a shopping center or plaza, and sure enough, I see besuited waiters crossing the river from door to door.

Doubtful that anything useful can be found there, I turn around and continue down the river. I come to a house that looks much friendlier, built much more traditionally, with a deck, so I climb up out of the water and run across Elizabeth, who's sitting there.

"Oh, there you are," she says, and hands me her notebook from class. "You might as well keep this, you scribbled all over it." I take it and open it and she's right--I've filled most of the pages with doodles and strange, jagged scrawlings telling unknown stories.

Finally, we settle down and smoke some weed before I plunge back into the river as night falls, and I swim away in the darkness.

August 17, 2008

2008-08-17T05:53:00.001-10:00

It started, I guess, when I was about to start squatting in an apartment closer to work.

I had a key, so it was ok. Apartment 633. I walked up into the courtyard of the U-shaped apartment building and saw one open door on my left, but something told me to check the right bank. Sure enough, 633 was there, and I looked across the courtyard at the open door--158, the number said. Not my problem.

I walked into 633 and looked around. Tiny. Two rooms; a living room, and a bedroom/kitchen, with a small, three-foot-long bed next to a five-footer tucked away into an alcove opposite the stove to the left of the door. The bathroom was nowhere to be seen. The entire place was decorated in a garish pink, green, and white floral scheme, and I shuddered. "Quite a steal," the real estate agent said. "Not much can be done about the decor, though."

It was time to hold a party in the living room. I was in a group of people that included my dad, an uncle, and a pastor friend of my dad's Bruce. We were talking when my father suddenly winked at me and said, "Remember how you used to get made fun of a lot when you were a kid?" He pointed at my uncle. "Especially from his kid."

"Whoa," I said. "Tad made fun of me?" The uncle had the grace to look embarrassed as I shrugged it off and looked at my dad and found him staring at me, disappointed at my underwhelming response.

A few minutes later, he went wall-eyed, started staggering around as if drunk, and we all laughed. My father, the sot. It wasn't until he collapsed that we all realized there was something wrong, and I sat down in my recliner and rode it back to my real apartment, realizing along the way that my father might have just died, it was the way things went. It was the second floor of a townhouse unit, and the recliner came to a full stop at the foot of the sidewalk leading up to the front door. I sighed, knowing I'd have to trundle the chair back up the stairs and into the living room, and its bottom struts all covered in mud. Still, I persevered, and got the chair back into its proper place before collapsing into bed, tired as hell. Suddenly, a couple opened the screen door on my right, walked through my bedroom, and walked into the large industrial kitchen on my left. There was a bank of windowscreens set into that wall, through which I could see the cooks busily working, and the dream told me that it was a communal kitchen for the residents of the apartment complex.

What kind of complex is this? I asked, and the TV switched on, showing a group of edgy, urban kiddies playing basketball among graffiti-stained buildings. It looked very economically depressed as the voiceover detailed the communal kitchens and other amenities, and the commercial ended with a focus on a wall on which "WESTLAKE APARTMENTS" was spray-painted. Something in the back of my mind took particular note of this, as though I knew, somehow, that I was dreaming and was thereby seeing my future and needed to remember this.

Another pair of people walked through my bedroom. Frustrated, I got up and decided to lock the screen door, but it locked by a very curious mechanism; a chain on the door led to a small white metal stick that melded into an oddly-scrolled end, and next to it was a large brass scrolled vase on a long, black skinny stand. This lock worked very simply: just insert the small white scroll into the large brass scroll, and twist until you feel both pieces interlock.

Once that was done, I decided to look around my apartment. It had the feel of a place where I'd lived for some time, but I somehow had failed to notice the closet door set in the wall behind my bed (this is a common theme in dreams; often large portions of my living space go unexplored), so I slid it open and walked into another room. This one was long and narrow, and in the wall in front of me was a large bank of still more folding closet doors. I had the feeling that there were infinite closets contained within the one in my bedroom--another common theme.

I picked the one on the far right, and entered a large walk-in closet, this one with a white door on the left-hand wall. There were shelves and cabinets on the right-hand wall, full of forgotten shoes and clothing, things the previous tenant had left behind. I opened the new door, and entered still another closet, this one with a shelf and pole on the right-hand wall, and boxes everywhere, topped by various kinds of shoes. There was a small, gloss-painted black wood door on the wall opposite and a dark brown wood one on the left. I opened the little black one first, and a black kid's face stared at me.

I yelped in surprise and leapt back as the kid extricated himself from the enormous amount of junk in his closet, and I looked in there. The closet was tiny, maybe three feet wide by eight feet long, and the floor was occupied by a five-foot tall pile of old blankets and mattresses, while the walls were thickly-covered in shelves full of tiny figurines. One shelf was occupied by a very, very small working TV. This kid was living in my closet!

I wondered aloud how he came and went without my noticing, and he grinned, reached into his home, and pulled out a very large semi-automatic gun. He proudly brandished it at me and showed me a little switch on its side, topped by a small red LED, and told me that it beeped whenever I left the apartment. It was at this moment that I noticed a wall plaque that seemed to detail various principles of life in a humorous manner, and one of them ended in the word "shid": a nickname for a former roommate. Odd. Then I noticed that the closet that served as the entrance to the kid's tiny home was suddenly covered in more figurines of the type found in the next room, mostly small plastic soldiers with an interpretive mien. I wanted to ask the kid about them, but he was busy talking into a small plastic gas mask, in which appeared to be built a walkie-talkie of some sort.

It was then that I noticed, with a requisite amount of horror, that the ceiling was covered in crawling insects of various types. Centipedes, large spiders, what appeared to be bright-yellow wasps a couple of inches long, a veritable army of ants. Spooked, I pulled open the brown wood door, and--

Nothing. The shock from what I saw in that room woke me up. Can't remember what it was. Tsk.

August 2, 2008

2008-08-02T00:57:00.001-10:00

It started off in a laundry room the size of a warehouse, full of gurgling, clunking machines. Someone had left their laundry all over the place, with a very passive-aggressive note that first noted what a shame it was that this individual had to occupy all the machines in order to avoid having someone from the neighborhood wander in and monopolize our ability to do laundry, unlike those of us who had no problem waking up the entire complex with the noise of laundry at 5:00 a.m. This last was a dig at me, because that's what I do on Tuesday mornings, so I scoffed and shrugged it off.

Then I texted Toronto Kim and suggested that we could probably do one more visit with each other before her big one in September. She texted back and said, Sure! Suddenly, I was in an elevator lobby with several other deaf people, some of whom I remembered and others of whom slightly resembled six-foot-tall hydrocephalic children. We piled into an elevator, which went up several floors and disgorged us into a large, lovely rustic cabin, where Kim was living. All the others had vanished, and I examined the view of a tall, lumpy conical mountain, and told her we had time to go to Seattle if she wished. "Really?" Oh, absolutely--I've always wanted to see the mountains there.

What with one thing and another, we joined a group of people who were visiting someone else, and one of them was Courteney Cox. We were chatting for a while and wound up on a lookout tower on top of someone else's cabin, the lumpy mountani barely visible in the twilight, and I asked what had happened to Kim. "Oh, she went off with the Duke," Courteney said. "Who's the Duke?" "Oh, just this guy, you know..."

Typical. This marked the third time I'd visited and been abandoned in favor of some other guy. Fine. I went back downstairs and bumped into an old childhood friend from Brooksville and picked her up shamelessly. She mentioned the Duke's name! What the hell? I told her what the deal with Kim was, and she got mad, saying she was supposed to be with him. It was Thanksgiving, after all.

That was news to me. Thanksgiving? She grabbed my truck and me and took off, roaring down narrow country roads between large grassy fields, turn-offs and doglegs and forks whizzing on by, until we reached a steep Y-Junction and she tore the truck around and went down the other way. I feared for my life, fully expecting the truck to start rolling, but it never quite happened. The road opened out into a farm--the home of the Duke, she said. I began to have second thoughts--wouldn't it be weird to join a family Thanksgiving? She barely took note of my question, and as we rolled into the yard, I noticed row after row after row of cars and school buses parked on the field in front of the house, and saw children milling about the barns, following teachers around in a tour. I realized the "family Thanksgiving" wasn't quite so stringent here, and relaxed.

So my friend parked and we got out and she walked over to a very nice little Lexus and grabbed a purse out of the front seat. "Yours?" I asked. She nodded. "Nice!" Suddenly, the car started up and pulled away and I could see her mother materializing in the driver's seat, barely acknowledging us, looking somewhat discontented.

We turned and began to walk along a sandy shore leading up to the farmhouse, the fine sugar frustrating my feet until I found a sidewalk buried in the sand, and I said, "So I guess your mom's still trying to get your dad to leave her, huh?" She nodded and rolled her eyes. "Why doesn't she just cheat on him then?" "You're kidding me, right?" "Ah...so if she were the one who cheated, she'd get nothing in the divorce?" "Yup."

July 26, 2008

2008-07-26T00:50:00.001-10:00

First, I dreamed my hearing aids were in a baking pan full of water. I swished them around.

Then I woke up at 4:50 a.m. and fell back asleep again.

I was with an old deaf classmate from many years ago, and we were sitting on a minivan's tailgate and making out. It was nice. But I was with my nephew (as yet unborn), and had to feed him this soup that seemed to consist of warm milk, part of which was blocked off by a melted-on layer of pasta (like the cheese on french-onion soup), with more milk poured over it and a bunch of little cavatelli pasta over it like cereal. She and I talked while watching the kid studiously break through the pasta layer with a spoon, and cheered when he finally broke through.

He then proceeded to eat his soup, but had abandoned the spoon in favor of picking the cavatelli out with his fingers, which was decidedly inefficient, so I picked up the spoon and began showing him how to use it. "Spoon," I said. "'Pooooon," he said, and began using it. We then proceeded to carry on a conversation with him.

A short while later, I stood up and said, "I'm going to head to the restaurant. We're meeting my mom and sister there. Wanna meet up down that way?" She said, "Sure, which place?"

I found myself walking among the sidewalk tables and entering an Italian restaurant near my parents' place called Ercolano's, and somehow was simultaneously with her and telling her where else I was at that moment, then dithered for a while over whether or not I should get a table for everyone when they arrived. The place was crowded.

She showed up a few minutes later, and she had become my ex-wife, come to collect the last of her things. Her hair had grown. My perspective shifted outside myself, and I looked back at where I had once been, and it was an older man with a bushy beard, bushy hair, wrinkled face and clear, intense green eyes. He stared at her fanatically and launched into this fantastic speech about her face and stew, and just as he intoned, "In your time among the onions..." I thought of Daniel Day-Lewis, and began questioning whether or not I was in There Will Be Blood. That, at least, woke me up for the day.

July 24, 2008

2008-07-24T04:46:00.001-10:00

There were coyotes in my pool shed last evening. I came across a small pack of them--4 altogether, very diminutive, couldn't have been more than 3 feet high at the shoulder--accompanied by a mastiff pup. They were ripping apart a brown chicken. I thought of the mess and roared at them. They filed out the door but milled about on my pool deck, so I threw a barbecue rib at the far screen door, hoping to lure them to the door and then out. It succeeded beyond my wildest dreams; the door was already ajar, which had probably been what allowed them ingress in the first place. They fell upon the rib in a ravening mass, which slowly migrated out the door. However, as I hurried over to shut and lock the door before any of them got the idea to come back in, the mastiff pup slipped back through, eliciting curses at the stupidity of domesticated mammals.

I woke up, realized I had a half-hour still to sleep before getting up for work, and fell back asleep again.

I had to babysit three brothers, the oldest at 13, youngest at 3. The oldest was fine, and so was the youngest, but the middle child was trouble. He vanished at some point, and I realized he had stolen my cell phone, my favorite magazines (sciency stuff-like), and his parents' old Toyota 4Runner, and had left for a joyride. I got in my truck and tracked him down, cornering him in a driveway, where he had had to remove two flat tires as a result of his terrible, terrible driving. I got out of the truck and ran over to him, seeing that he had my cell phone in my hand and was reading my e-mails.

"That's not yours," I shouted, and he looked at me defiantly, stuck out his tongue, and threw it down on the concrete. It broke apart into three pieces, the screen and the small pane of glass covering it snapping off and scattering. Muttering imprecations against all little boys, I knelt down and began piecing it back together. It seemed to work well. Now to deal with the legal implications of my charge's deeds; at just the right moment, a jeep appeared over the tall-pine-strewn hill on the other side of the driveway, carrying a District Attorney who vaguely resembled Kevin Nealon. Drunk, he staggered over and slurred that I had nothing to worry about, he wouldn't prosecute, this was just a kid, don't worry, no prosecution, it's all good, just a kid, no worries. I knelt back down to the kid, took him by the shoulders, and shook him slightly and explained to him the nature of his misdeeds and how he had done wrong. Great big tears appeared as he began to blubber and promise he'd never do it again and that he'd be good from now on, and I hugged him. Now it was time to head home; I collected all the kids and asked the oldest if he had a ride. He nodded and explained he was going home with a friend, and I figured that the middle child was in no condition to drive his parents' 4Runner back home, especially lacking two tires, so I elected to bring him and the youngest with me; the parents would just have to deal with the car situation when they got home.

As I rounded the kids up and loaded them into the SUV, I felt grateful; the whole situation was just like a sitcom. Twenty-five minutes of crazy and five minutes of resolution, plus a moral to the story.

July 3, 2008

2008-07-03T06:46:00.001-10:00

So this should probably serve as a cautionary tale about eating Grape-Nuts before bedtime...

I'm in the woods in New Hampshire, hanging around outside Wal-Mart, when I notice a body lying in a pool of blood not too far away. We don't really worry about it, until the news comes on: the town sheriff has vanished. So a Wal-Mart employee and I walk over and check out the body, and it turns out it's the sheriff, based on the uniform--he's been decapitated. Another employee finds his head not too far away, and it's still alive, and tells us that it's a harbinger. Of what, we don't know--it dies before we find out anything more.

So I hop into the truck and drive to California, where apparently my parents live now. I run into my dad, and we realize that some people just do not look right. They've gone all gray and have long, sharp teeth and their mouths are gaping wide, and we realize--they're zombies! Oh shit. So we run through the city and wind up in this high school/parking garage, where people are holed up, waiting out the Zombiepocalypse. There are high school students walking around doing their high-school-student things, and we run into the gym, where a group of very pretty and very tall gym teachers and coaches are hiding. We shoot the shit, really friendly-like, until the word comes up: the zombies have invaded. My dad and I run up an interminable staircase, passing student after student, until finally we've reached the way out, a pair of glass double doors--only to see zombies on their way in. We duck quickly into a bathroom next to the doors and wait a few moments. Soon enough, we hear a growling pass by, and my dad pokes his head out--it's clear.

We run out the door and down a big ramp into a forest of enormous, giant trees. We can see zombies shambling in the distance, so we stick to the foliage, only to be interrupted--my dad has seen a giant nest on the ground enclosed in a gigantic curving banyan root. There are two large eggs in there, and one busted-up eggshell with a large baby bird next to it. "Ooo," he says, and climbs down to grab it. "Dad!" I say, "That's an ostrich chick. It's a pretty bad idea--an angry ostrich is not what we need to deal with right now, you know."

He shrugs and stuffs the chick down the front of my jacket. It's little and brown and real cute and looks like a cartoon/robot version of an actual bird. My dad then tells me he's got somewhere to be, so just follow the trees until I come to a large pointy boulder. It'll be shiny black and covered with parallel vertical ridges. There'll be a very narrow crack in it--go through there and I'll reach the village where my family is, and we can hole up and most likely survive the Z-pocalypse in there. He takes off.

I follow his instructions, and sure enough, on the other side of the crack is magically a small little old-world village, and I go to the biggest house, and meet my mom there. I tour the new house, only to find a lot of dirty crap everywhere, and my mom explains that their maid, Josephine, isn't too good at cleaning--she's got a personality disorder that causes her to watch TV all the time, so don't worry too much about it. Uh--ok. Just then, a call goes up: the zombies have made it through the big rock and are on their way.

We run up to the top floor of the house, where I look through a window onto what appears to be an LA city back-alley. There's a group of young guys and a zombie. The guys' head honcho is taunting the zombie, making fun of it, kicking it, and they're both wearing yellow t-shirts. Suddenly, the zombie lunges and bites the guy's arm, and his friends lose interest and filter away, leaving him and the zombie alone. The guy drops his arm back to his side, and just sort of sways there, staring at the zombie, then stumbles off.

In the meantime, Josephine's watching the news. Apparently this is an item of national interest, and it turns out that there have been two outbreaks of zombiism: one in California (where I am now) and one in New York (where I was in the dream that inspired this blog). The New York outbreak has been contained, but California's been abandoned to the zombies--the remaining living people are just going to have to tough it out.

Later, I realize both my mom and Josephine have vanished, so I leave the house and walk to my truck. There, in the driver's seat, I realize that they're both probably dead, just as I notice a zombie shambling its way through the parking lot towards me. I climb into the back of the cab and hide, hoping it doesn't notice me, but too late I realize the passenger-side window is open. I scramble to get it shut, but it's too late--it walks past just as I'm beginning to wind it up, and before I know it, my arm's been torn off.

I woke up at 1 a.m. in a cold sweat.

June 6, 2008

2008-06-06T03:00:00.000-10:00

It all started, I guess, when Melissa needed something. I willingly let
her into my apartment while I searched for it in my living room closet.

Obviously, the layout was different, although the walls were still the
same glossy plaster-coated drywall and the floor the same pseudo-Italian
tile. The front door opened into the living room, as now, but the room
was oriented differently, and the way to the kitchen and bedroom were
both along the same wall, rather than the opposite corners as they are
now.

The living room was empty, totally bare of anything, and I explained
that I had stored the TV, DVD cabinet, couch, recliner, and bookcases in
the closet, which was approximately 27 cubic feet in volume. An
interesting perversion of physics, but she thought nothing of it while I
rummaged for her unidentified requirement. The sole piece of furniture
in the room, my cheap-assed floor lamp from Wal-Mart, glowed orangily.

I emerged from the closet empty-handed, ready to apologize, only to
notice that my friends' children had arrived and were frolicking about.
I had no idea where they came from or who let them in, but was unworried
about it all save one thing: the lack of space. My home is not large.

Nevertheless, I decided to bring in some Coke from the kitchen fridge,
and headed out that doorway--into daylight. There was an extra room here
that hadn't existed before, stocked full of my things, including a
comfortable-looking tan leather chair (which didn't recline, alas, but
nevertheless looked like a fine place to park it while reading) and a
very large CRT television sitting on top of a dresser I hadn't seen in
years. In front of it, amid the jumble, were still more kids, playing on
an XBox and complaining about the image quality. I pointed out to them
that I had a 50-inch plasma TV in the other room (heretofore
un-actually-seen), whereupon they instantly scrambled over the mountains
of stuff.

I turned around and faced the daylight, the source of which was a large
bank of windows behind a fair-sized dining room table, where Chris was
busily soldering something or other. He seemed sufficiently occupied, so
I kept going, in search of the kitchen. After passing through the next
doorway, I instead found myself in my bedroom, which had somehow
transformed into a large master suite with an enormous bed, a very nice
bathroom, and sliding glass doors leading to a patio and--I presumed--a
pool. It was all-white--white walls, white ceiling, white floors and
white furniture; it was an altogether very comforting effect, and I
found myself rather pleased that I had managed to collapse so much space
into such a small apartment.

I re-emerged from my bedroom to let Chris know that there was now a pool
that could be used by the children for their entertainment, informed him
that the kitchen was now accessible via the living room and the alcove
(provided that he cleared a path through my junk), and left strict
instructions not to disturb me; I was taking a nap.

As I sank into my pure-white down comforter atop a down mattress pad, I
sighed happily and fell asleep--only to wake up to the real world.

Alas!

May 29, 2008

2008-05-29T14:21:00.002-10:00

It was an alien invasion, of the xenomorphic, Sigourney-Weaver kind.

I was one of the last three survivors. It was me, my little sister, and another woman, holed up in a large old house in the woods. It was generally acknowledged among the three of us that this would be our last night; the invading aliens had adapted to Earth's ecosystem and instead of face-huggers, they now came in the form of hundreds of small bugs that looked like a cross between ants, ticks, and beetles, maybe two millimeters long. They could strip a corpse of its flesh in a matter of minutes, completely painlessly--except, of course, for the horror of being consumed alive if you were conscious.

We all agreed it was best for us to go to bed. We all knew we wouldn't wake up in the morning. For my sister and I, it was a kindness.

I put her to bed, swaddled her in blankets, kissed her good night. Then I trudged up the stairs to a small loft, where I had laid out a thick comforter folded three times to serve as a mattress, a flannel blanket, and a pillow. I got into bed and prepared to sleep.

And couldn't. I lay awake there, in the dark, thinking about my life, and how it had come to this. It felt real, as though I were truly preparing to die. I thought about the darkness around me and how it would be a part of me by morning and felt a sick certainty that this was it, once and for all. I felt like I was on death row, knowing the precise moment of my death as an ineluctable, inevitable fact.

An hour or two later, I heard a scrabbling. Something moved in the darkness at my feet. The loft was cantilevered out over the staircase, serving as the ceiling. There was a clicking and a thudding, and whatever the thing it was slowly pulled itself into view.

It was enormous, brown, and shiny, but looked sick. Parts of its carapace were a dull rusty red, and its head looked like a grossly distorted caricature of a human skull. It wheezed. There were enormous, graceful, backswept structures on its back that looked like mistaken wings. It growled as it circled the foot of my makeshift bed, before suddenly, improbably collapsing and dissolving into the dark.

I lay back and waited for sleep, taking comfort in the fact that whatever happened, I'd never wake up again.

I woke up.

Dawn was shining through the windows next to me. Baffled, I looked down on the flannel blanket covering me, and saw numerous tiny black bodies. They had all died.

I woke up, and thought to myself, Jeez, quit this nightmare shit. No more pizza rolls before bed. Fell back asleep again.

I was in the woods, among enormously tall pine trees, sitting on top of a modified military Hummer. In front of me was a chain-link fence, and on the other side was a road. Some cars went past from time to time, and information filtered into my memory from the dream. It turned out that for some reason, humans were the one species that the xenomorphs couldn't crossbreed with successfully. Any attempts to create a hybrid resulted in death for the offspring.

I had been wrong. The three of us hadn't been the only survivors. The human race was in such good shape the news channels were still up, the military had split up into private militias, and our compound was guarded by one such. Still, nobody could be trusted; there were sensors on the fence that picked up certain frequencies, including those created by the xenomorphs' carapaces rubbing together.

I needed to have a private discussion with my little sister, who by this point had become a very fine paramilitary fighter in her own right. We masked our talks by shaking the rear whip antenna on the Hummer back and forth; the vibrations of the antenna interfered with the sensors in a blaze of dancing electric-blue lines. We talked about how it was probably time that we left the compound, what we could take with us, how we could take it, who would prevent us from taking it, how we could prevent them from doing so, and whether or not the aliens had been completely wiped out.

Just then, a xenomorph dropped out of the trees and made for the primary building in the enclave.

I shrieked, "ALIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEN!" and we ran after it.

May 5, 2008

2008-05-05T11:11:00.003-10:00

Not a lot of detail, but I was high up in a palm tree with a friend, hiding. Not sure from what, but everything except the tree and us was gray. It was a veritable rainforest, teeming with life.

It only took on color when a group of helicopters flew over us and released a large volley of small red objects.

Everything suddenly went green, and I knew the red things were dropped by the government in a misguided attempt to "improve" the jungle. They puffed into clouds of red dust that slowly settled down over everything. All the living things that came into contact with the dust crackled with red and changed.

I scuttled down the palm tree, which was beginning to crawl with its own skin, abandoning my unidentified friend to her fate. The grass I landed on hissed in fury and began piercing my shoes, burrowing towards my skin. A shrub developed reeds topped by toothy cylinders that snapped constantly as they reached for me. A vine slithered across my arm, scraping my skin raw with ultra-fine needle hairs, creaking as it tightened.

I tore it off before it could grow into my flesh and made a run for it, dodging hungry plants and aggressive birds. There was a clear demarcation in the vegetation between the carnivorous life and the safe zone, but before I could reach it, something sharp thwacked into my head, digging out what felt like a sizable divot of meat. Blood erupted down my side, and I somehow managed to find a cricket bat.

I dealt the bird (which looked like a cream-and-chocolate-colored jay with white eyes and which could maneuver unnaturally well) several good, strong blows, but it continued its attack undaunted. Only when it managed to dig a particularly large gobbet out of my upper arm did it let up momentarily to land on the ground and dig in.

That was when the other three attacked.

April 30, 2008

2008-04-30T01:48:00.003-10:00

I'm at Kim's parents' house in London, trying to make coffee for Kim as her nerves settle down. We've just had a harrowing experience, but have lived to make inappropriate jokes about it. As I adjust the filter and start looking for the coffee, Kim's dad Al walks in, and right off I can tell he's not pleased to see me there.

"Uh, hey, Al," I say. "Uh, where's the coffee?"

He looks surprised for a second, then nods and opens up a large pantry I hadn't noticed before. There it is, several canisters of different varieties (unsurprising: Kim's family are tea/coffee fanatics, just like mine), and I grab a package of freeze-dried stuff. Al stops and talks to Kim for a second, then leaves, while I cut the package open and pour the grounds into the filter and set the package aside, next to some candles.

Kim's sister Amy walks in and the three of us start chatting about various stuff, but particularly the fact that Amy has just started a "Mexican-language program" to keep her in school. She asks me how it was for me, and I say it was pretty cool, there was a field trip to Teotihuacan and everything, plus I'm the TA for a few courses in the program, so I'm sure I'll be seeing Amy more than a few times.

Al walks in again and we talk about the jacaranda tree he's improbably planted in the backyard. I'm impressed he's managed to get it so big in a northern climate and suggest that a lot of gardeners might benefit from his advice on how to go about doing the same thing. He laughs, shrugs, nods, doesn't say anything and walks out again, and I'm a little puzzled--what's the deal here?

I look at Amy and Kim and they shrug and act like they know what the deal is but won't say anything. I figure it's time I headed back home, Kim's calmed down a little, so I get Amy's cell and e-mail so we can keep in touch, and leave.

---

I'm a girl.

There's a pool of water in my hand. I'm in someone's backyard during a party. I'm playing with the water when a crackling passes over my skin and my hair stands on end. The water suddenly increases its refractive index and the surface tension ratchets up while friction decreases and the water suddenly begins to flow out of my hand of its own accord, separating into little balls of mercury, bright silvery pebbles that float away, glittering in the sunlight.

I look up at the guy I'm talking to and say, "It's becoming polar." We both know that it's a sign that lightning is about to strike, and immediately we turn and run, while I shake my hand, trying to get the last few globules of water off my hand before the lightning hits and cooks me.

We get a few feet before an invisible power splinters the air.

April 25, 2006

2008-04-25T00:34:00.002-10:00

I dreamed that I spent the day on the bicycle.

First was several hours at a gas station, where a childhood friend was to meet another childhood friend. I had known both girls since we were all about the same age in preschool, but we'd fallen out of sync when I skipped a grade, then they were held back, then we went to different schools, then we went to the same school, but by then we were total strangers.

Which makes it odd that I was there. Her father owned a huge tree farm in Brooksville, so he had a pickup truck that was unnaturally roomy. He was also a smoker, and throughout this part of the dream, I struggled with the urge to forcibly remove his body from his pack of cigarettes.

In the beginning, it was just the three of us, loitering in the gas station. The friend was supposed to meet us, but time dragged on. We played with candies, with cheap splintery Chinese toys (including this plastic finger trap that turned into a puttylike thing that wouldn't let go), with condoms and pornographic magazines, and finally she showed up, just in time to accompany a gushing downpour of rain.

The covered area of the gas station parking lot had grown tremendously by then, becoming the size of a warehouse and enclosing several other buildings. The girls reunited joyously, hugging and swaying back and forth, then signing excitedly to each other as they walked off to the pickup truck. In the meantime, another person I remembered from childhood, a guy, rode up on his bike, and we discussed the possibility of my buying drugs from this individual. It didn't work out too well, as he couldn't promise me that he'd show up with the goods at all, and he left.

Then I noticed the pickup backing up and preparing to leave. I rode my bike into the truck as though it weren't quite real, and demanded my Blockbuster movie rentals back. The father looked at me, looked down at the center console of the truck, and looked back at me. The console contained quite a few Blockbuster movies, and I couldn't remember which ones I'd rented, so I took a few at random and saw them off.

While they left, I went back into the store and looked at the magazines for a while. I came across the father's blog, bound in glossy paper, and it was a chronicle of how his daughter had "made great strides" since starting an unspecified program that involved memorization, and mentioned how proud he was that she was now actively trying to include him in her life, including watching soap operas together, and I was offended at the patronizing tone, as though she were an animal that had learned a new trick.

I jumped onto the bike and rode away into a road lined by houses. I recognized the neighborhood; there were people to avoid here. The houses were painted in different colors, some strangely bright, others covered in viny growths. There was an open garage, and I wheeled my way in there.

Yet another childhood friend and her mother were arguing. The friend had a bike out, and was about to leave on it on an errand for her mother, who looked uber-stressed and especially frantic.
"What's wrong, Alice?" I asked, and she looked at me, distressed.

"I just opened a cheesecake bakery," she said, "And Oprah has just called me for 10 big ones in an hour!"

"Well, do you need any help?"

"Yes," she said, "I just sent her to the store to get some things." We walked inside, and I watched the garage behind me begin to contract into a tiny pore that snapped shut with a pop.

April 24, 2008

2008-04-24T15:34:00.004-10:00

My parents bought a new house.

It had two stories, four bedrooms, and multiplying corners.

My bedroom was just a bed and a dresser at first, with a large window over the bed. It was nice. Then I turned around and saw a new alcove that suddenly opened off onto a new hallway that had a bathroom just off of it. It was really pretty cool--the bathroom had those tiny little octagonal tiles on the floor and the tub was claw-footed and the walls were white, and so were the fixtures and the ceiling and the windows, it was all white. Lovely.

When I came back out of the bathroom, the hallway had become a small living room with a couch and loveseat with a kind of interesting hooked rug on the floor that was red and green checks, and the walls were this nice-looking stained-cherry wood, ditto the floor, and there was a new little library just off to the left. Entering my bedroom from the hallway-cum-living room, the bed had shuffled off into another little alcove and the window had followed it, shut off into its own tiny little room while the rest of the bedroom had lifted itself up onto a landing and grown a guest bedroom, which had a really interesting four-poster bed, blue walls, and a TV.

There was a pinkish-white quilt on the bed that had a kind of scary rose pattern on it, but it looked pretty comfortable, so I decided to take a nap on it.

When I woke up, I decided to wander downstairs to the kitchen and grab something to eat. On the way down, I ran into my mother, who told me we had a visitor who would be using the guest bedroom. "But I was just sleeping in there," I said, confused, and she pointed: the guest bedroom off the landing, to the right of my bedroom door. Oh; not the one that had sprouted within my room, but the one that had been there all along.

Just as well. I was feeling tired again, so I climbed back up to my room, which had developed a split level and a third bed up against the far wall between the partition closing off the alcove with my usual bed and the door leading to my guest bedroom.

Really, that's it. My room kept multiplying, growing larger and reconfiguring within itself like a puzzle box, and I kept sleeping on all the beds I found. It was comfortable yet roomy, wonderful yet slightly discombobulating, fuzzy yet with extraordinary clarity.