Running into an ex-girlfriend

I'm walking slowly through a crowd of people, perhaps a street fair. Suddenly I come face to face with I girl I dated a long time ago and haven't seen in years. I have no bad feelings but nothing to say and feel awkward.

Riding my mom home from the hospital on the handles of my bicycle

I'm looking at my frog vivariums. There are a lot of other animals in there - a ball python I owned in college, baby birds, large and small insects. I realize I must have forgotten I owned the snake for decades and it must be very hungry. I go out to buy it some mice to eat.

The pet store doesn't have any mice. They have a lot of mushrooms to put into tanks but not much else. They are brightly colored and stacked symmetrically. I think about getting some bird seed for the baby birds, but the store doesn't have that either. I return home to find my mom lying on the kitchen table. She has a notebook over her face with large indecipherable letters on the cover. She says she's sick - I see sweat beading on her throat and feel she has a fever. I say we need to go to the emergency room.

At the hospital, there is a doctor assigned to us, but he stays behind a fast-food like counter. He is preoccupied with paperwork and other tasks as he says my mom's symptoms are too general for him to do anything. I'm angered and unsuccessfully suggest he could at least prescribe something to make her feel better.

We return home, my mom riding on the handles of my bicycle.

I'm going through a box of my old papers and find a folder I don't recognize. It has color photo copies of me in my football uniform and has many official looking certificates in it, with many signatures. It seems to be an honorary or gifted membership in an elite club. Many famous people are listed including President Reagan and retired governors. It seems to be a membership packet to some sort of beer tasting salon. It's dated two years after my high school graduation, but I just don't remember it at all. I show it to my dad, asking him if he knows what it is. He indicates he does, but doesn't tell me in detail, just says he knows who the people who signed the certificates are. I'm frustrated he won't explain the packet to me.

Christmas church service

I'm in church - at Christmas Day service with my mom. There are bleachers inside the church. I see an attractive very freckled redhead sitting in the last row with her mom, so I sit next to her. We chat throughout the service, she asks me how old I am, I tell her I think I'm 17-19. She says she's 39.

The minister asks, "Can I get three girls up here?" Three young women dressed in the same red polka-dot shirt come up. The minister asks, "Can I get seven girls up here?" Seven young women dressed in the same blue polka-dot shirt come up. The minister asks, "Can I get thirteen more girls up here?" Thirteen younger women dressed in the similar red polka-dot shirt come up. The polka-dots vary in size and density and the shirts of all 23 woman standing there make a striking display - almost like a fractal. It seems like they are going to sing, but they don't.

I continue chatting with my new friend. I am naked and have an erection. There are toothpicks, pins and rusty pieces of metal under the skin of my penis. I pull them all out and show the pile to the freckled woman.

The service is over, I find my mom in the aisle and ask her if she has a pen, I want to get the freckled girl's number. I walk up to her and she has already written her number down for me. I tell her I don't know her name and tell her mine. She's coy and flirty and gives me three guesses. I guess outlandish names, and she still doesn't tell me her name.

My mom says she's leaving and I ask the woman and her mom if they'll give me a ride home, they agree. There is a male giant, dozens of feet high. I wonder how he can get enough to eat. A woman is explaining that she will put her brain in her daughter's body and let the giant eat her body. My new friend and I go to a record store in the basement of the church. I can't find anything I want to buy.

I'm outside of the church near my junior high school in Ohio. I decide to run my old paper route. Some of the houses are the same, others have been knocked down. There are many huge trees which weren't there the last time I visited.

Buying fireworks

It's late afternoon on July 4th and I've driven to Wisconsin to buy fireworks to bring to a party at a friend's house. The store is sparsely stocked, I'm looking for one of the big fountain boxes, but don't see any. I ask a clerk for help, but she can't help me find one. I collect a variety of small stuff - bottle rockets, fire crackers, spinners.

I'm checking out - the total is $25. After my purchase has been rung up, the owner comes up from the basement with a piece that looks like a fabric daisy shaped bean bag. It has a dial on it that goes from "one block" to "two blocks." The owner says it's the biggest thing they have. It's $38, I decide not to get it.

When I return to my car, I see that I've left both front doors open and the motor running.

In an underground apartment facing a tidal wave

I'm in a large chambered underground warehouse part of which seems to be my apartment. The apartment manager tells me a maintenance worker has thrown away a Pepsi can that he removed the entire top from. For some reason, it's really important to me I find this can. I enter a room generally only used by maintenance workers and start scrounging through trash bags. I'm making a mess. I hear the manager coming and don't want her to see I'm looking for the can or making a mess. I can't get all the trash back in the bag, but she walks by without being concerned.

I'm back in the central and largest chamber in which the dream started. In the center is a sprawled out and sparsely stocked grocery store. I'm thirsty and looking for a drink. I think I may treat myself to a sugared beverage and figure the maintenance worker bought his Pepsi here, but I can't find any drinks. I'm in the check-out line and want to buy something, so buy a brick of chocolate covered over-sized Fruit Loops displayed right by the cashier.

I walk to another chamber of the complex. I see a tidal wave coming beyond a side of the complex opening onto the ocean. Realizing the chamber I'm in will completely fill up with water, I run towards a chamber that has no ceiling and no wall opposite the ocean. I make it there just in time and am swept up in the tidal wave.

Recording in a basement studio

I'm arriving at a basement studio with a girlfriend to record music with friends. My friends explain that we'll have to wait a bit because the owner is using the studio equipment to film a porno.

I have a guitar and am tinkering around on it, jamming a bit with the others. I can see in the back room there are people having sex below the sheets of a bed. I notice my guitar is strung up wrong in several places and the nut is cracked so the high E string doesn't work. I have some ideas for songs, but the bassist doesn't want to follow me.

We can use the studio now, we start recording. I notice my guitar is very low in the mix and can hardly hear it. I also notice my girlfriend isn't playing drums. When she notices I notice she walks up to me and tells me our friends have other friends coming at 10:30 to replace us and she's not playing in protest. I'm a bit hurt too as it's already 9:45, but I continue playing.

Making a Kim Jong Il slacker movie

I'm on vacation at a resort on the Mississippi in Georgia. It is early in the morning, before dawn. Everyone is sleeping on mattresses outside, there is snow but it's warm. I get up to move my mattress somewhere where I can see the stars better.

I'm wearing ice-skate-like shoes which allow me to glide across the snow, but the blades are huge and flexible and allow me to fly. I realize I'm dreaming and make a note to patent the flying shoes when I wake up. I'm carrying a gun in my pocket.

I'm walking on a porch overhanging the frozen river looking for somewhere out of the light to watch the stars. A naked toddler stops me and starts climbing all over me. She tells me that I'm "the one who named that cat moonshining" and that her uncle wanted to offer me a job because he thought it was creative and he wanted someone who could name things like that for him. She calls her cell and gives it to me. The uncle, who has a foreign accent, wants me to direct a movie for him. I leave the conversation knowing it's funded my Kim Jong Il but will be a slacker genre movie, will pay "12 stone" and I'll work in Hilltop. I'm unsure if he'd want me to quit my job to do it. I look up Hilltop on Google Maps and find there are three: one near where I'm vacationing, one near where I live and one on the western shore of Alaska.

I'm still on the same porch, but now I'm dragging a bundle of fire hoses across the porch, weaving them in and out of posts so it will leave places for people to walk. Suddenly, I come to a section where there is an unconnected joint in the hoses - there are cloth ribbons that seem to be meant to connect the joint, but I don't know how to do it. I hope the movie guy doesn't find out I don't know how to connect the joints.

By this time, dawn has broke and I realize I won't be looking at the stars. Somehow the dream shifts and I'm working with the movie making guy. He has a huge house, slate on the outside, wood on the inside which is both his home and production studio. He has just come back from the high school across the gully and has paid them to change their sports team's name to promote the movie. I realize he's eccentric and spends his wealth unwisely.

My job for that day is to doodle in the snow with extremely long colored pencils - several yards long. I'm by the side of the road, seeing how far out into the road I can doodle while remaining on the side. A vehicle approaches and I motion that it's OK to run over my drawing.

It's a bus covered in naked girls either taking one to have an abortion or taking her to a religious ritual to get her not to have an abortion. Either way, this is suddenly part of the movie and the characters one by one rip paper off the outside of the bus to which the girls are clinging, making them fall off the bus.

An elderly character launches himself head-first into the bus off a spring board. He falls into a steep ravine and seems seriously injured. I run to help him, he tells me to arrange a party at his place that night. I ask him if he's going to die because if he is, we could call it the "kick-off party." He says he won't die.

On the way to the party, I stop to watch the completed movie. Afterwords someone on the staff asks me what I think of it. I say that genre is fun to watch and I might pull out a quote from it a month from now, but I'm not a great fan of the genre.