An apartment with an elevator

I had recently moved into a 1oth floor apartment, it became dirty quick. I was cleaning in preparation for my family coming over, rushing felt bad I wasn't separating recycling.

Exploring the building, I discovered a McDonald's on the 8th floor.

The elevator went horizontally like a train to the city. It was Sunday, no shops were open except a pharmacy with no one in it and all the products labled in Chinese.

On way back in the elevator/train I struck up a conversation with girl I overheard was gong to an Army stock car race. I told her my company did PR for the Army racing team. While making out with her on the floor of the vehicle, she told me she liked Sean Hannity.

When my guests came, they were supposed to be my family and acted like they were, but I didn't recognize them. One was sick and unconscious. I just wanted them to leave.

Back in the elevator, I showed my brother how the 7th floor was a golf course and when you looked up you couldn't see the building, just sky.

A fat girl on stilts and a unicycle, spelling my name in beans

I am at a days-long retreat walking around with three ackwardly long pieces of wood trying to remember if I drove to the site from where I was staying. On the top of a spillway, a leader tells me I had drove so I turn to begin looking for my car when I see a fast moving wave of fire rolling down the river towards me. Someone yells, “Take temporary cover” as sparks of red electricity - like sparkler embers - fall like rain. I don’t make it under something in time but the sparks didn’t seem to hurt me or anyone else.

I am visiting my birth family.

Two huge very religious families show up after I do. I am trying to find a bathroom to take a shower, but every bathroom is full of South Asian kids and/or adults. I leave through the garage. Directly outside there is a large gathering of people - a political or issue awareness event. Nobody could hear the speaker well. I leave the event in a flyinmg machine with an old friend who remembered me but I didn’t remember her. We fly under a bridge as she explains that there are so many advocacy groups that show up at these things it’s impossible to hear anyone.

I go back to my birth family’s home and find a room full of professors. I commiserate with them over the religious fanatics and explained that I arrived before they did. I overhear one of them say, “The equation was fine and the student blamed the result on the variable!” Others laugh loudly in derision towards the student in the story.

I'm among hundreds of primary-school aged kids lined up to watch a parade. An obese black girl who had won a contest to represent McDonald’s strolled down the road with someone behind her shouting through a microphone that, “She didn’t win because she's black, but because she’s Miss America and wrote ‘McDonald’s’ across the front of her shirt.” I follow the girl down the road as she gets on a unicycle which helps her balance as she walks on stilts. She say that some day she will be able to do it without the unicycle.

Three men, who I'm aquained with in the dream, run by. Each was having a separate confrontation with three separate groups of other men. One of the confrontations turned into a knife fight. The dream becomes narrated and replayed in slow motion the part where the men ran past me. It shows that the two who didn’t get in a knife fight either dropped their own knife on purpose or lodged it in a brick wall as they ran past me.

I knock over some plants. I have a few jars of dried beans of different colors and sizes and start to spell my name out in beans but when I run out of one kind I mess up what I've already done when I dumping out beans from the next jar.

At a small party

I was at a stranger's house at what I understood to be a party but there were only two or three other people there. I was petting and playing with a cat. Then I was sitting on a couch with a girl. A second girl sat on the other side of me and I joked that it might seem less crowded if we all laid down on the couch together.

Sumo dancers, spiraling Indian ghosts

I am in the Ohio garage. I become mixed up as to which wall I'm facing and believe a door has disappeared, but my mom and dad point out that it is on the other wall. Everything in the dream is in the style of the 1940s and 50s. I find book I'm fascinated with, it is an early work of an author who later became famous. This edition has footnotes constituting of text in the draft the author gave his editor.

I'm cooking a steak in the garage on an electric griddle. There's lots of smoke but the steak is not cooking. My mom calls me for dinner. At the table, my dad bites head off a live mouse, with blood on his lips he says, "That's what we used to call 'the head ender'." He saves the rest of the mouse to have one bite at each meal. My brother vomits.

My parents drive me to some sort of camp. On the way, we circle around a house. A narrator says this is where Dennis from the Shrimper record label lives. Hundreds of large electrical cables exit the house in all directions.

As we drive by a country field, I watch a traditional dance where a line of men roll a drum across their bodies. The last three men in the line are sumo wrestlers.

When I check into the camp, I'm told I "can't leave the cabin at night but whatever you bring into the cabin has to stay all night."

A thirsty boy by a toilet in middle of room asks if this is where we get water. There is a pump handle on the toilet, pumping it brings water up out of toilet. The water is dirty green then clear, mostly. The boy takes a drink, I can't tell if he likes it or not.

There is hole in floor with many white tubes leading down into it. Thinking it may be a gravity driven pump system, I lift one white tube coming through window to try to start water flowing. It doesn't work. I look up and notice whte tube doesn't go out the window, but hangs on a on a hook by it. There is a shattered porcelan pump by the hole.

It's a photography camp. I look out the window and see stream of Native American souls/ghosts spiraling into the air. I assume it was created as a subject for a photo.

A public execution and glass camel

I was in a sports arena with a collapsable high-tech weapon in my backpack. I assembled it - it had two modes, an energy beam mode and some sort of pellet mode that fired a stream of tiny bullets by magnetism. I aimed it at someone across the arena and it indicated it locked on by making a computer graphics style outline appear around the target's body. I realized it was a really powerful weapon.

There was to be a public execution and I was the executioner. The execution wasn't the main event, but entertainment during half time. This all seemed very normal to me.

I took my place at the top of a basketball free-throw line with the condemned man at the other end. The man said the evidence against him was wrong. A key piece if evidence was that the killer had a friend with the flu. The man showed me an old newspaper article about a friend of his while he was a child having the flu. As that was years ago, he couldn't have been the killer as the murder was recent, he explained. He then said he wasn't afraid to die.

His explanation of innocence made sense to me and it seemed normal and regular that I could decide to cancel the execution. A statue of a camel made of milky glass approached the condemned man. An oversized dental drill coming out of the camel's mouth moved towards the man - I assumed it was going to torture him. I shot off the head of the torture device with the energy beam.

On a basketball court

I was on a basketball court at halftime in front of a large crowd. To me, it was as though I had just appeared there, not having played basketball since junior high, but to everybody else I had been playing in the game.

There was one other player, also on my team, that hadn't gone to the locker room. We were passing around a ball. He was really good so I assumed I was good too and we were left on the court to entertain the crowd. Still, I was afraid to take a shot for fear I'd miss horribly so I tried to be funny and threw the ball up through the hoop.

Wandering through a stadium trying to remember if I have a job

I am in a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Wilmington. I order the same thing the man in front of me ordered, “2 piece crispy, all white” even though I wanted spicy. I pay for it with coupons I had in my wallet. The cashier jokingly greets me with a recent girlfriend’s name. Apparently, her name came up on the screen when he entered the coupons and I can’t remember where the coupons came from. As I wait for my meal, the workers throw French fries to placate the waiting customers much like one would feed a zoo animal. Nobody is picking up the fries. I eat one and leave without getting my meal.

I’m living with my brother who in the dream is divorced. I’ve moved back to Wilmington. Our apartment is on the 2nd and 3rd floors and I follow my brother into the third floor bathroom. "I haven’t taken a shower here since we moved here. I’ve been using the Y." It occurs to be that I’ve not yet even used the bathroom or even been in it despite having lived there two weeks. I follow him out of a door in the bathroom to a balcony I didn’t know was there. Neighbor kids are sitting on the railings and I’m a bit afraid of the height. I am anxious that I may have to be at work but have forgotten, and am unsure if I even have a job at all. I think I may have one at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I tell my brother I have to go.

I walk down the street to a sports arena. Inside there is an exhibition/trade show called "Video Games of the Future." As I walk around the crowd, someone calls me from up in the stands. It’s an old acquaintance from Wilmington who has called me over to congratulate me for being quite the ladies’ man. He is a bit drunk. I tell him I date a lot of girls but I don’t sleep with them all. I excuse myself, "Well I still play Defender and Galaga, so I’m off," and worry again if I’m supposed to be at work or even if I have a job.

I’m near a sort of dispatch desk when a call goes out for an "emergency substitute calculus teacher." A young man who shares my first name is supposed to do it but can’t so they ask me. I tell them I can’t do it if it involves imaginary numbers, which it does.

I walk up the stadium steps and stop at a section of old Italian men selling street food. I pause by a stand of pears and one of the men tells me I must have one because they’re very good. I pick one out and suddenly it is grotesquely huge, the size of my torso. I notice it has a soft spot and ask the man to cut it away with his knife. As he does a man behind him notices and remarks that it will be “rotten all the way through” which it is. The man remarks that one could make a nice steak out of part near the surface which wasn’t rotten. I reply I sure would grill some up if I was cooking steaks.

I continue walking up the steps. There are security guards dressed like medieval soldiers and carrying large wooden clubs. Here and there are chutes they can jump through to get around quickly.

I come upon what seems to be an administrative office high up and precariously perched. There are containers of small reptiles on the catwalk outside the office. Someone explains to me that, “He brings food to all the animals around all the offices.” Suddenly I’m carrying several jars of leeches, worms and small fish and realize that I’m that person. I wonder if this is my job. I don’t know what to do but decide to dump a jar of leeches into a container of tiny alligators. I am pleased when I see an alligator immediately go for one of the leeches.

I walk on and take one of the chutes that the security guards use. I’m then in a record store in the basement of the stadium representative of Oar Folkjokeopus with a friend who cuts my hair in waking life. I like the music that is playing and want to buy it but don’t know what it is. My friend picks up a Spiritualized CD which has a bottle of Scotch attached to it with the type of wax that seals a bottle of Maker’s Mark. It’s $18. The wax has been cut through so the cap to the bottle could be removed but all the liquor is still there. I tell her she can get a good deal on it. I continue looking for something to buy while she checks out. I notice she is given $8 off.

Leading a game I don't understand

I am watching an innocent male who has been arrested and condemned to death without trial. He will be executed by a small black bomb which will also kill two guilty criminals. They are on walkways around a swampy area littered with weapons. The innocent male attempts a daring dash for a powerful weapon on the far side of the swamp and fails, but escapes anyway.

In a shift, I become the male escaping on a bike riding on the shoulder of a busy rural road. I come to a city among dozens of people flying through the air on self-propelled bicycle-like machines. They seem to be led by an older male with a white beard. I am flying below them, following them, but flying by swinging a cluster of metal ribbons over my head.

We - the flying group and myself - are in an unfamiliar city, outside a building where we are expected, but the building is shuttered and looks abandoned. A door opens and inside are several men cleaning fish. There's a long, long row of planks out of which of which a swinging bridge could be made and I need to find a type of plank that would work for me, but each and every of them break when I try standing on them. Near the end of the row I find one I think will work, but it's actually not a plank, but a medical ankle support like I had to wear in waking life last Spring.

The leader of the group is now a middle aged gym teacher figure and we are walking through a wide underground hall. The gym teacher is picking leaders for 8 or 9 teams. I explain I've been losing weight as he picks me as a leader. He asks for my nickname by which the group will be known, I tell him something but immediately forget what I told him.

The wide and winding hall descends slightly deeper and becomes a huge co-op like grocery store, filled almost entirely with unfamiliar produce. I pick up an apple and begin eating it, no-one else is eating anything but no-one seems to mind or even notice. The underground hall/grocery store opens up into a park area and the teams gather around clusters of picnic tables.

The gym teacher is leading a word game, writing the teams' answers on a chalkboard. I believe the point of the game is to recall of the names of the exotic produce we just passed, and I return to the produce to try to refresh my memory. I see a visually stunning row of fruits - a spectrum of watermelon and nopolitos cactus hybrids, but I don't know what they're called. Searching for more produce I open a closet of ridiculous and extravagant coats I strongly dislike - they are owned by women on other teams.

As the game goes on, I realize the objective is to come up with food names made from a list of letters also written on the board. The game will decide the starting or judging order of some further game we'll be playing with the food. I misunderstand this game too, I believe I am to design a meal from anything in the store, but the object is to cook a meal with a fixed set of ingredients.

The game is to be judged at a particular time the next day and the teams disband. I am walking away with a girl I briefly dated in the late '90s. We are carrying garbage cans. She leaves to do some brief task in a greenhouse-like building. While she's gone, I have to extinguish smoldering campfires that seem to have been left by the group. I only have a small cup of water to use, but as my old girlfriend returns I've discovered I can gather all the smoldering firewood and cinders and place them in one of the garbage cans under a stream of water falling through a tree and off the roof of the greenhouse.

Bush 43 gives me a bag of dogs in the Zapruder film

I'd rented a house but was sleeping in a tent I'd set up in the back yard. It was morning and I was walking toward the house. The bathroom was in a garage-like structure in the back yard and when I touched the toilet it fell apart in pieces and water began flooding the room. Walking toward the house, I surveyed good plots for a garden at the same time as I stewed over the fact I didn't notice the bathroom wasn't in the house.

There was a ruckus, some sort of apparent criminal activity going on on the other side of the garage structure. I couldn't tell who the victims or perpetrators were. A man I suspected was my landlord met me, but I couldn't tell if he was a cop or criminal. He had a weapon which seemed to be a blow gun made of high-tech materials.

I was standing in a field on a mound which had a large ravine curving around it on three sides. A grotesquely large airplane flew by in the ravine around me, only partially visible through and above the trees. Suddenly, the plane was a VW bus and I was in the passenger seat. A dangerous amount of water suddenly began flowing across the windshield and into the van. A high school classmate climbed in through the sunroof and said he couldn't tell where the water was coming from.

I was traveling, or rather my body was being transported at a great speed towards a sandbar in Wilmington where I was to meet a girl I slept with a few times in the mid '90s. We were to go surf fishing. I was worried that my fresh water fishing poll wouldn't work and I remarked upon this to my friend. I then noticed and began following a squirrel in the water that had learned to rotate its feet at great speed and was hydrofoiling across the water.

I was standing in public among many strangers in an area that mimicked that shown in the Zapruder film. George W. Bush walked along the route and gave me a large cloth bag which appeared to have a few dogs in it. It was a gift. When I opened it, a dead dog's head fell out. Then came out a mean looking dog which growled at first but then licked my hand. There was another dog in the bag I could not yet see. "It's a Shar Pei!" I joked to those around me. Everybody laughed.

In the ruins of a soccer arena

I was on vacation in China or Central Asia. The dream began as if I was watching a documentary, a parchment map showing where I was. Looking at the map, I sensed I knew areas in which I could find gold.

I was on a rectangular plateau with short but browned grass. The drop-offs seemed very steep. The narrator said “Notice anything strange? If a ball goes out of bounds, one may have a bit of trouble getting it back.” I realized that this was a soccer field and further that it was the ruins of what was once an indoor soccer field. It looked like pictures of bombed out churches in Eurpose after WW II.

By and underneath a clump of building refuse and what had once been a large bush, frogs jumped around in the moisture. As I was looking at them, the soccer field became a bedroom from my childhood and the area with the frogs turned into my footlocker but without the top. It had been open for a long time and had water and rocks and sticks and sand in it. There were baby frogs in it. I thought some of my frogs must have escaped and began to thrive in the chest.

Still in Asia, I saw my mom vacuuming a shag rug in the hall. I asked her if she was distraught that she was having church circle that morning. She didn’t answer but turned towards me and bent her neck behind her back so it looked like she didn’t have a head. She was dressed like an Amish woman with a shawl and her shoulders were unnaturally square. It was terrifying.

"I think I’m asleep in my bed," I said out loud to myself in the dream. I was able to wake myself up by screaming.

A miniature golf course with alcoholic popsicles

I was driving around with an old girlfriend I used to live with in waking life. "That's the place where they have alcoholic popsicles," she told me, motioning toward a building with yellow shutters and green shingles. The building was the clubhouse of a miniature golf course. I watched a few players make what would have been amazing putts but the ball was going too fast and didn't sink in the hole.

We were on the highway and I wanted to stop and get some fast food. I missed the exit to her condo which had a McDonald's by it. There wouldn't be another exit with food for a long time.

Things I'd left at restaurants

I was at a restaurant which in the dream I had frequented in the past. The staff gave me a box of things I'd left there: records and cassettes, papers, and beer. Because I was on my bike I carried the things across the street to the apartment of an old waking life coworker who had lived on my couch for a few months, hoping he'd let me leave them there until I could pick them up in a car.

He wasn't home, but the door was open and I went in. I left an explanatory note which also invited him to have some of the beer. I left through the back door which exited into The Leaning Tower of Pizza, a restaurant which in waking life I've frequented in the past. I sat at the bar and the bartender gave me a free beer and glass of water. She came back with similar things I'd left at that restaurant.

It was closing time so I took my things and accidentally went into my coworker's neighbor's apartment. I wondered if I'd interrupted the occupants while they were having sex. Returning to the right apartment, I aroused a Great Dane that had been sleeping in the bed. Initially I was afraid it might attack me as an intruder but it came over and licked my hand. I also woke up a woman I assumed was my old coworker's girlfriend and had been there the first time I went through. She explained that he wasn't there and I explained I'd left some things there and needed to leave more.

An intruder falls out of my basement window and my phone falls apart

I had just moved into a basement apartment. I had a large aquarium with tropical fish in the rearmost room which had a cement floor. I had set the aquarium on top of layers of concrete slabs and flat rocks and was redoing it as it was a bit off-kilter. I heard a noise come from the back entryway.

On the landing were two teenage girls who had climbed in through the window, one was chubby and one was petite. They were reading a book out loud. When I confronted them they climbed out onto the window ledge which was five or six stories up. The chubby one slipped but grabbed a very long bed sheet that I was also holding. She was blowing in the wind over a swampy area and less than two stores from the ground when I began to pull her back up. She was very heavy. An old waking life classmate of mine - the slowest in the class - was helping me haul her up. Right when she could get her hands on the window sill, she lost her grip and fell onto cement directly below. She looked dead. I wondered if I should have dropped her on purpose when she was just a story or two above the soft swampy area.

I told her companion we had to cal 911. The companion didn't want to. I rushed into my apartment and found my cell on the cement floor - it was full of condensation and I noticed a shallow stream flowing across the floor near it. I was upset to discover this and was just barely able to make the 911 call on my wet phone. I was unsure of my new address.

I went outside through the back door intending to reach and help the girl, but the back door was indeed a basement door and I couldn't get to where the girl had fallen, several stories down. I ran around the building the other way but came upon ornate and steeply terraced landscaping in the front and couldn't get down. There was a cop there and I told him what happened. He went to assist the girl and I became concerned with getting in front of the building to flag down the ambulance.

I was able to get to the front by going through my apartment which was the full basement of a large brownstone. Going in through the back door, I noticed my new apartment was actually the basement of an old but functioning clothing mill. I also noticed that a small door inside my apartment I'd thought was a closet was actually the front door of a tiny apartment with low ceilings in which was home to elderly dwarf who worked in the mill. I noticed another stream flowing through the front room on the way through. The paramedics were on the way around the building when I reached the front.

They pronounced the girl dead very quickly and began packing up. They told me they were going to send me a "really big bill." "But she has next-of-kin!" I protested.

Back in my apartment, I found my phone which had almost completely fallen apart and broken into pieces. I gathered up the pieces and brought them into light coming through a front window and placed them on a curved tiled surface. Immediately, a decorative stream turned on and washed all but the largest pieces of my phone away. I was very upset about everything and wanted to call a recent girlfriend I had a stormy relationship with but am still friends with.

On the first attempt, I got a radio station request line. I had trouble finding and pressing the button to hang up as I tried to hold the phone together. I couldn't tell what buttons were what numbers, but I tried dialing anyway several times. I couldn't do it. I put the phone down on a counter near the fish tank and it fell apart even more as pieces of it rolled away.

I thought, "I am too emotionally exhausted to even cry."

Breathing under water

I was in what seemed to be my old junior high school. An unfamiliar male led me to a swimming pool in which we were going to swim laps. As I judged the water of the empty pool, he jumped right in and swam several laps under water perpendicular to the way the lanes were set up.

I jumped in intending to swim my first length under water as I tend to do in waking life. I discovered I could breathe under water, which didn't surprise me too much.

When I came up the first time, dozens of young kids and other slow swimmers were clogging up every lane and I couldn't enjoy swimming laps.

Flying around during a special church service

I was staying at my parents and was going to church with them the next morning. I woke up at 2:30 am and couldn't get back to sleep, so got dressed and went to the church. I tried to sleep on top of a dumpster.

When people started arriving for the service, I found my parents and a coworker greeted me from behind saying he would leave right after the collection because it was all just about superstition and prophesy. I replied that I just went with my parents about once a year and agreed with him.

The church was set up differently for a special service. The pews were facing the center of the sanctuary and tiled canals of varying depths sort of like a symmetrical miniature golf course led to a deeper fountain sort of thing in the middle. It was difficult to find a seat. As we walked around looking for seats, I discovered I could walk on water. I hoped others would notice.

I could also float a few inches off the ground and if I didn't think about it too much I could fly into the air and return to the ground with the buoyancy of a toy balloon.

We eventually found seats and I floated into mine. The service was a play with many actors, chorus lines and elaborate costumes. Part of the performance was passng around bowls of food as one would pass around offering plates. When slices on mangoes came around I remarked to my mom that everyone was going to give each other flu. I had difficulty picking out a slice and remarked, "I'm ham-handed." My coworker approvingly tapped me on the shoulder thinking it was ham on the plate and I had made a pun.

My mom got sick and had to go to the bathroom. I flew after her. I started showing off, trying to get really close to the ceiling and doing flips in the air. I suddenly realized I was naked, but wasn't embarrassed. Few people noticed I could fly and those that did weren't very impressed.

I introduced a band with a name like "Double C Two G's N X". It was a rock set up with a black gospel choir who didn't know the words or melodies of the songs they were trying to sing.

I began to get an erection as I was flying around and then wished I could find my clothes. I found a deep-sea diving-suit like costume that had been used in the performance and put it on. The fire department owned it and there was a $1000 charge each time someone's hand went through a cuff. A Deacon-like individual told me "the committee" wanted to talk to me and I hoped they wanted to ask me about my flying.

Feeding plants french fries before getting lost on vacation

I was napping during the day in our North Carolina house. I woke up and found some french fries on the floor. Some of my plants weren't doing well so I fertilized them with the fries and immediately thought it might have been a bad idea because of the salt.

It was Sunday and my parents had a bunch of people over, most of the men had beards. I thought maybe they were people they brought back from church. I left on a bus and was suddely on vacation in a big city near the Tennessee/Kentucky boarder.

A woman cop had me help her put up pylons, orange sawhorses and flashing lights to block off part of a street. I didn't know what part of the street I was supposed to block off so I put them where I thought they should be. A huge man in an overcoat walked right over the sawhorse I'd placed. I left to find the bus stop carrying a huge bundle of scrap metal ribbon I thought was valuable.

I couldn't find the bus stop and wandered into a hospital. I explained to a group of people that politically independent people were really people who didn't care or pay attention to things and sometimes they ended up voting for a Democrat and sometimes a Republican. I talked about abortion too. There was a girl in the group I was attracted to. I wrote a long word on her arm in magic marker and put in a bunch of extra O's while her date was holding her from behind.

I asked for directions but still couldn't find the bus stop. In the dream, there was a river separating Tennessee and Kentucky and I wandered on the river bluff by a high canoe rack with wasp nest-like mud huts where the canoes would usually go. A Native American man chanted inside each hut.

Then I remembered I had a car so stopped looking for the bus stop. I drove the wrong way down a one-way street.

Right wingers, Canadian frogs and a racy sitcom

I had brought some of my frogs to a cabin from my childhood on The Lake of The Woods. The frogs kept on getting out of the flimsy cardboard box I had them in and were hopping down among the dilapidated floorboards of the cabin. As I tried to recover them, I discovered there were many species of awesome native Canadian frogs below the cabin. I began to collect several of each species.

I became aware that a group of four or five right-wingers I didn't know were thoroughly cleaning the cabin as a favor for the elderly owner. I tried to help but was more interested in the frogs and unsuccessfully tried to get the right wingers excited about them. I showed the oldest of them a mass of pink frogs with curly pigtails mating in a choreographed kaleidoscope-like cluster and told him only a few humans had ever witnessed it but he didn't really care. I got a picture.

There would be a big party once the cabin was clean. I salted and peppered a raw 50 pound NY Strip steak sitting on the counter. Later, one of the right wingers started shoveling pounds and pounds of salt and pepper on the oversized steak. When I began to tell him I'd already seasoned it I realized what I thought was salt and pepper was actually a mixture of white and wild rice. He stretched and rolled the steak around the rice and chopped it into sections which were like rolled ice cream cake in form.

When the party started, the shores around the island were lined with carnival-like buildings. It was all right wingers, lots of them everywhere.

My family left in a houseboat to travel back to the U.S. through a system of canals. We passed a park. A lot of elderly people and attractive college girls were all playing volleyball together. I wanted to stop and ask the girls where a good place to stay was, but my dad drove the boat on.

At the hotel, the Canadian version of an American sitcom was being filmed before a live audience. The main character was gay and it was known the Canadian version was racier. I looked in on the filming to see the main character peeing on another guy's ass. The camera angle changed to reveal he was actually peeing into a urinal while staggeringly drunk. The studio audience laughed. I hoped my parents didn't see it as they would be offended.

I decided to play dumb by pretending I didn't know a permit was required to bring live frogs into the U.S. if they were discovered at customs.

Real-time movie tricks

It was snowing. Our family was on vacation. The roads were very poorly maintained - almost abandoned - with grass and weeds growing up in cracks in the pavement.

I was in a familiar and sparsely stocked convenience store speaking to the Middle Eastern owner who I knew personally. A male who was my friend in the dream interrupted our conversation with stupid questions he struggled to come up with while trying to appear at ease, “Do you have any grass-fed Kobe steaks?” I wandered off to the refrigerated section which was very small and flimsy and high up on a shelf. I looked at the ingredients of the few drinks available and bought a Sprite, the only drink without high fructose corn syrup. I also bought a pack of gum, the total was over $5. I asked if the gum was very expensive, which it was.

I walked out and came upon a film being shot about two characters in a car. One of the characters looked like Tiny Tim and had a grotesquely large head - about three feet high and proportionately wide, but overall, he was short and had a misshapen body. After I had followed the movie filming along for a while, I noticed the Tiny Tim character’s head was only very large when the cameras were rolling and realized it was a computer trick.

Cubby holes of psychedelic kittens

I was moving out of my parents' house to an apartment down the block. My dad said I had to get rid of my five kittens. He said I couldn’t just let them go because they’d just come back – I had to throw them in the garbage. I couldn’t do it so my mom did. Right after she threw the bag of kittens in the dumpster, I realized my dad had no say in the matter as I was getting my own place.

I yelled to my mom that I’d always love Dad but would never forgive him for making me get rid of my kittens.

I went to my new apartment and looked for my kittens in the other apartments in the building. Many of the kittens I found were black and white but I couldn’t tell if any were my black and white kittens or not. I began to stuff several kittens in a shoebox but after a mother cat let me know two I just picked up weren't mine, I decided none of them were likely my kittens.

Then I was in a room at the animal shelter with many shelves with cubby holes like bowling shoes are stored in going all the way up to 20 foot high ceilings. In each cubby hole was a kitten. Again there were many black and white kittens but I couldn’t tell if mine were there. Some of them had fluorescent patches of fur, some had zebra stripes, some had hair with light coming out of the ends like fiber optics.

I explained to a worker that my kittens were just black and white but by then I couldn’t even remember how old or big they were and wondered if I might be happier with some of the psychedelic kittens.

The sky becomes less beautiful in a roofless church

I was standing in a field with my uncle. We seemed to be camping. It was nearing sundown and the sky was spectacular. The sun illuminated a gigantic lone tree by the lake from behind. We walked toward the tree so I could get a photo but we had to go through a church without a ceiling to get there. As we got to the other end of the church, the sky had lost its beauty but the stars were coming out.

My camera was a SLR with a digital preview. I opened the aperture as wide as it would go and took a picture of the stars – the picture looked like an electron microscope photo of bone tissue. I was on picture 34 but couldn’t remember if I had 36 or more photos on the roll.

While walking back through the roofless church, I lit my first cigarette since quitting. A pastor in a robe gave me a dirty look but said nothing and the cherry fell off my cigarette onto the rug. The film started coming out of my camera and I was worried some pictures might be ruined.

The church was then a movie theater, but each person could stop and resume the movie without pausing it for anyone else. The screen was partially obscured by architectural columns and religious banners.

Strange opium

I had a dainty teapot of opium which looked like water. When poured it would either generate a dense wispy fog or quickly become covered with a thick crust of tempura flake-like crystals. I think the drug was administered just by pouring it out of the pot. It made me feel a little different for a few seconds but other people I was giving it to thought it was very strong and pleasant.

I got angry when some guy poured a whole bunch of it out just to watch it crust over.

We were on bicycles.

I woke up with a melody in 6/8 time, G# - F# G# - A - - - G# - - A - G# A - B - - - A - -.

At the top of the structure

My family and I were now on the top of the Empire State/Niagara structure. People were camping across a chasm. I was afraid I'd fall into the chasm.

Emipire State Building Niagara Falls tube structure

I was with my family at the base of a gigantic structure made of the Empire State Building embedded in the rock around Niagara Falls. Intending to lead my family to the top, I noticed a red metal staircase which I had walked before now stopped a few stories up as if a rock shelf had grown over it.

There was a silo-like shaft through the rock with an updraft - one could jump down it safely. I thought it would be cool to take a video on the way down. The only way to the top was the original elevator from the Empire State Building but we didn't take it for an unknown reason. We drove off in a convertible and a large wave washed across the car.

I missed a good photo of three kids riding bikes wearing identical overalls and hooded sweatshirts. Two were white, one was black.

Suspecting I'm a schizophrenic foreigner

I was living again with an old neighbor. One of my nieces was coming to stay with us, we had to clean the apartment quickly, most of the mess was my roommate's. My niece never showed up.

Our apartment was at the top of a huge bike ramp, I took off on a ride with a group of people I didn't know. I rode by myself into a house of a stranger hosting a family party. The woman, somewhat older than me was angered that I would show up at her party as there was bad blood between me and her family, but I had never met this woman before. She called her attractive daughter over to show her that I had the gall to come to the party. When I tried to explain I had no idea who they were, I discovered I was speaking in a British accent. I became confused and thought perhaps I wasn't the person I thought I was and maybe the lady was right - I did know them.

I left, again on the bike, and was then with my family. I found I was speaking in an East European accent. I unsuccessfully tried to explain what had happened. A single page of a newspaper blew into my hands. I told my family that this was a message to me that would perhaps explain everything, then realized and remarked that I was acting and perhaps was schizophrenic.

Our family went sledding in a parking ramp. I saw a group of people tethered together walking among the highest branches of a gigantic tree and thought of an invention that could grasp three branches at once which would make the activity easier and safer.

An unfair vote blocks contact with aliens

Something was wrong with the sky again. There were many people around me on the beach watching. Soon the spaceships came in great number. The occupants filed by along the water's edge, close enough to touch. There were some humans, their hairy forearms exposed through openings in their space suits.

As they were still arriving, lots of us were suddenly out in the water on sandbars trying to get back to the shore. When I arrived back, a man with a beard had assembled a group of ten to vote on whether the space people could stay. The vote was seven for and three against which according to the bearded man's rules meant they couldn't stay. Almost everyone wanted them to stay; one of the no votes was a young impressionable boy. Another man became angered and used a large polished wood board with an inlaid Christian cross to trap one of the adults who had voted "No" in an energy beam which sent him far up into the sky to be run over by one of the leaving space ships.

As the space people left, I heard one say as if through telepathy, "Let's give them a good one," meaning to leave with a spectacular aerial maneuver so people on Earth would know they had been visited.