beautiful, funny, sad & true

I just woke from a very long and vivid dream that I haven’t had before, although during a certain part of it, I felt sure that I had.  The dream was comprised of a few different stories, and I’m going to attempt to reproduce them all.  Be prepared for a journey.

* * * * *

I’m riding on a tiny motorized scooter on a rural highway past the suburbs of the suburbs of Portland.  I’m on my way home and I’m making good time, even though my scooter isn’t very powerful and not really meant to be driven on highways.  As soon as I get into the city, it morphs into a smaller version of itself and becomes a motorized bicycle.  I have to pedal, but the engine helps provide a boost.  I have a choice between riding on a fast-moving freeway or a tree-lined residential neighborhood, and I choose the neighborhood, thinking to myself, It’ll be much slower, but much safer, and also much prettier so I’ll enjoy it more.

I turn and start to ride through the neighborhood.  There is a steep hill in front of me, and I pedal mightily up it.  At the top, the road becomes a dead end.  I see a house with its side door open, and I ride my bike right into the house, past an older woman who is sitting mutely on a small chrome kitchen chair next to the window, watching a cooking show on television.  “Sorry for riding into your house,” I told her.  “Does [my adopted aunt] live here?  I could swear she used to.”

“No, she doesn’t live here,” the woman said.  “I remember you now.  You’ve been by before to ask about her.”

“Oh, okay.  Good thing I learned, huh?”  I look over at the TV, which is barely audible.

“I prefer the quiet life–” she starts, but I interrupt.

“That much is obvious.”

“–But I always watch TV.”

I tell her that I’d better get going, so that I won’t have to ride home in the dark.  We both say the usual pleasantries, and even ‘good to see you again’, and I go on my way.  I ride into a wide cul-de-sac and notice that someone driving an old green BMW is following me.  I decide to visit a house nearby in which my brother is staying and babysitting his friend’s young daughter.  I park my bike in the driveway and walk into the house, which is dark except for the kitchen, which has one bright recessed light in the ceiling above the counter.   I walk into the light and see a coffee maker with its pot full of fresh, steaming coffee.  I think about taking some, but decide against it, since it’s late at night, and I don’t know whether or not it’s caffeinated.

I walk into the living room to find my brother’s friend’s daughter (not anyone from real life) sitting on the floor, surrounded by dolls and toys of all types, as well as cameras, small medical instruments, microscopes, miniature electronics; an enormous range of things to keep her occupied.  My brother is nowhere to be seen.  I say hello to her and sit down on the floor next to her.  A bunch of cats appear in the room and walk over to us.  Being a cat lover, I try to pet each of them separately, but they all arrive at the same time, and I soon find myself covered in cats.

I reach up at one point to adjust my glasses, and I notice that an elaborate piece is missing from the left corner, and they won’t stay held together.  The piece disappears on the rug, and with all the other miscellaneous tiny electronics that are on the floor, it quickly becomes impossible to find.  The little girl thinks she finds it a couple of times, but after attempting to put the piece in my glasses, I find that they aren’t the right ones.  We spend a good deal of time getting really frustrated (I even drop a couple of F-bombs in the process, which amuses the little girl) looking for the piece.  Brother comes in, at last, and instantly kneels down to help us look, even though he doesn’t yet know what it is we’re looking for.

After the pulling back of rugs and scattering of toys and other junk, I crawl underneath the pool table and find a couple of things that seem to have been stashed there; my brother’s little black leather duffel bag, a box containing some computer software, and the piece from my glasses.  “Here it is,” I yell.  “I found it!”  I tuck the piece into my pocket for safekeeping, since it attaches with a screw but the screw is missing.   I’ll have to take it to an optical shop to get it fixed.

At this point the dream changes, and I’m walking in downtown Portland, although it looks more like certain sections of New York City, with very wide streets, busy angled intersections, and a train line running overhead, with dilapidated buildings built right next to the road.  The sidewalk on which I’m standing is extremely narrow and I need to get across the many lanes of Burnside Street.  I decide to make a dash for it, but just as I get to the middle of the street, the traffic on the angled cross street gets a green light and starts to come toward me.  There are lots of big trucks, and I have to feint left and right, in the hopes that they’ll see me and not run me down.  Finally I make it across, where the sidewalk is wide, and there’s a cash machine and a large bus stop area.  I walk over to the cash machine and see two African-American friends talking.  Having seen my maneuvers getting across the street, one is laughing and telling the other, “You ought to try some moves like that in North Portland.  They won’t be slowing down for the likes of you and me.  You’re better off paying your two-ninety-five and catching the bus!”  They both laugh.

The man who’s talking seems to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, and he decides to include me in their conversation.  He points at the cash machine and says that everything in our society is ruled by numbers now, and that’s how the government controls us.  “Did you know that in the Communist countries, they don’t have license plates on their cars?  Really.  They don’t even have license plates.“  His friend and I take a second to ponder that.  I don’t think he’s correct, but I don’t say anything.  He launches into another similarly far-fetched conspiracy and somehow manages to tie it to the Al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S.  It’s complete nonsense, and all three of us seem to know it, but he’s fired up and animated.  “Man, I never get tired of this shit!”  He comments on the fact that the bus schedule is in a multitude of languages, including Hindi, and the conversation takes an ugly turn.

He turns around, and we follow his gaze to see a group of Indian people, men and women, standing at the far end of the bus stop area.  They’re doing absolutely nothing but waiting for the bus, so our guy’s sudden outburst is completely unwarranted.  He yells very slurringly at them, “BRUTES!”  Without a moment’s hesitation, three or four of the Indian men run over to where we are, expecting and ready for a fight.  Our guy disappears, and the two of us remaining are trying to explain to the Indians that we don’t know where that outburst came from, and that we had nothing to do with it.  Luckily they believe us, and the last of the guys even tells us in his lilting accent, “You guys are okay; I can see that.”  By this time, the women of the group have come to join the men, and there are even a handful of lepers in the group, who are quite disfigured.  One of them somewhat unnaturally moves to shake my hand, since she’s learned that’s what Americans tend to do, but I tell her, “That’s okay, you don’t have to.”  I notice that the last two fingers on her hands are extremely withered and spindly.

The dream’s location changes again, and I find myself standing by myself on a grassy hilltop next to a rocky embankment next to the ocean.  The ocean is behind me, and I’m looking down the hill into a large park.  It looks a bit like Seattle’s Gasworks Park, minus the gas works, naturally.

There is a festival happening in the park, sort of a spiritual/Renaissance/humanistic kind of thing.  (It looks very much like this picture, actually.)  The people on my little hilltop are different from the rest of the festival patrons; they’re mostly aging hippies wearing things like long white robes and floppy tie-dyed pants.  A few of the people are chanting and singing.  The hillside is covered with two-foot tall plants, and the only way to the top of the hill is along a dirt path.  Somewhere in the plants, someone has set up an elaborate system of speakers, and they are piping music up to the hillside.  The strains of the Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows can be heard, and people start to sing along quietly.  I’m standing by myself near the edge of the plants, and one of the old hippies walks past me, mumbling something to me that I can’t understand.

I walk down the steep path to the main part of the park and meet up with a couple of friends (from real life this time).  Everyone is dressed rather nicely for the festival.  The women are all wearing longish dresses, and the men are all wearing ties; my friends and I have our top shirt buttons undone, but many of the men are wearing full three-piece suits.  The park is in the shape of a large square, divided into a number of different areas for this festival.  There’s a Kids area, to keep them occupied while the parents are exploring the festival.  There’s a Merchandise area where people are selling all types of handmade clothing and hats.   There’s a Barbecue area with three large fire pits with spits or rotisseries or whatever cooking various kinds of meat.  There’s a Garden area, with a flagstone path and dense reeds growing around a fountain.  There’s a grassy Meditation area for sitting and reflecting.  There’s a Temple area made of stone, with tiny ziggurats delineating the edges, and there is a flaming torch in each corner.  In the very center of the park, there’s a square section paved with cement, with a number of long, flat wooden benches with no backs, crisscrossing and facing in many directions so that people can sit and eat and interact with each other.

This part of the dream, in this strange square park, starts to feel familiar, as if I’ve experienced it at least twice before.

My two friends and I are there together, but we decide that we want to explore the festival separately.  One friend disappears almost immediately.  The second decides he wants some barbecue, so he walks in that direction.  As he gets there, he looks back toward me and points me in the direction of the garden path area.  I walk past the barbecue area and the meditation area, and take a right turn at the temple before arriving at the garden path.  There are two women walking together a short distance behind me.  One of them is quite tall and dressed in a blouse and knee-length skirt, and the other is rather short and wearing a sort of Romanesque costume, with a decorative helmet (no plume or anything, just an ornately carved helmet made of silver and gold) and a short white skirt that sort of billows as she walks.  She appears to be around my age, and I’m intrigued by her.  I think to myself, I don’t want to keep having this same dream over and over again; I’m going to do something different. In the other two dreams, apparently I hadn’t gone back and talked to the woman, but I vowed to meet her this time.  Having been lost in my thoughts for a few moments, I realize that I’ve left the Garden Path area and I’m now getting close to the center of the park, with the benches.  I turn around and walk back toward the Garden.

The two women pass me, and I smile a bit as they pass.  The one in costume is indeed about my age, possibly a year or two older.  She has shoulder-length blonde hair (visible from beneath the helmet), with the merest hint of grey; very flattering for her.  “You’re lovely,” I tell her.  She smiles widely and her friend gives her an encouraging smile and walks a little bit away so that the two of us can talk.  The woman I’m interested in gives me a smile and a come-on-with-me-but-let’s-not-leave-her-out look, and turns to catch up with her friend.  We are now in the center of the park, and we walk down the grass, past and just below the corner of the eating area.  I’m a few steps behind the two of them.  “Have you eaten anything yet?” I call out.

The woman’s friend laughs with surprise and says, “Wow, look at you.  You’re just coming right over.”

“Absolutely,” I say.  “Are you two hungry?  I know a great little place around the corner.”  I gesture toward the center of the park, and both women crack up laughing.  I walk toward the woman I’m interested in.

She removes her helmet and shakes out her hair, while giving me a slightly quizzical look, but she decides to trust me.  “Okay,”  she answers with a smile.  “I can’t believe I’m doing this, but. . .okay.”

I offer her my right arm, which she takes, and gesture with my left arm up the hill toward the middle of the park, so that the three of us can sit for a while and get acquainted with each other.

* * * * *

I should really have dreams like that every night.  It was so beautiful and strange; just the way I like ’em to be.  I should also be that effortlessly confident and easy-going in real life.  Who knows. . .maybe I already am.

Dream 1:

I was at a small coffee shop in the lobby of a large building.  I ordered a latte (the type I usually get in real life, even) and while I waited, I picked up a watch that was on the counter.  It was just like one I had, except it was in terrible condition, and it didn’t work.  I put it back in the box on the counter.  When my latte arrived, I looked at the receipt as I walked off, and I noticed that the barista had charged me for the watch, so my total was over ten dollars.  Great, I thought, I’ll have to come back again later to deal with this.

Dream 2:

I was co-hosting a radio show on a college station, and my friend the host got up and walked into the music library to search for more songs to play.  The song that was playing ended, and there was a long stretch of ‘dead air’ as I tried to figure out how to work the control board.  I decided that there was a computer there that I could use to find something to put on the air.  I set the internet browser to YouTube and played the first thing that came up, which was the them from “Jason and the Argonauts”, and it sounded like XTC, which luckily fit right in to the format of our show.  My friend still hadn’t come back by the time the song ended, so I just played it a second time.  After about thirty seconds, I decided I’d better track down my friend, so I walked out into the hall just as he was coming back into the studio.  “You’d better note that we played ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ twice,” I told him, and turned left down a hallway, past a bunch of dorm rooms, and into a bookstore area.

As I entered the bookstore, a police car drove in slowly through the front door and parked.  “Hey, you can’t drive in here!” I said, with a mock-serious tone in my voice and a smile on my face.  Naturally, the cop ignored me and parked the car nearby.  I turned to see another police car suspended from the ceiling.  It was part of a display, something to do with police awareness on campus.   There was a TV set up, playing a video about safety, and in the video the narrator used an obscure nonsense word like ‘helliatated.’  A student walking by at that moment laughed and mocked the cop.  “Helliatahted? What in the world does that even mean?”  He had slightly mis-pronounced the word when he attempted to use it.

The policeman sternly corrected his pronunciation.  “It’s ‘helliatated.’  And you should learn to say things to police in a nicer way.”  He placed his hand on the end of the night stick that was hanging from his belt.

I walked away to look at some books, and I found a couple that looked intriguing, so I kept them in my hands, like you would at any bookstore.  A few seconds later, a guy who was younger than I but looked older asked me, “Were you the person asking about Paper-Mate Ultra Ball pens?”

“Uhhh. . .” I stammered.  “Uhhh. . .sure.  I mean. . .yes, that was me.”  I looked on the counter and saw some pens of all types that were already opened and strewn around the counter.  I was thinking about taking one of them.

“Well, they’re right up here,” the guy said, and pointed to a small pack of blue pens that was hanging right above my head.

“Excellent,” I replied.  “Thanks very much.”  As soon as he left, I grabbed one of the loose pens off the counter and whisked it into the inside pocket of my jacket.  Just then, an old lady who was the bookstore’s cashier walked over and accosted me.

“You aren’t a member of this fraternity,” she said.  “You won’t be able to buy those books until the students have had a chance to buy them first.”  She took them from me and set them on a shelf right next to where the pens were.  They were completely out of place, but she didn’t seem to mind.  I told her that I worked at the radio station, and that I’d come in a couple minutes and buy them as soon as I could find my phone (with which I keep my bank card and driver’s license clipped).  I contemplated pocketing the books, but decided not to.  She walked away and I walked back down the hallway in the direction of the studio.

On the return trip, however, I was unable to find my way back to the studio.  I walked into two or three different dorm rooms, one of which belonged to a young girl.  I apologized and turned to walk back out, when her mom appeared in the door and got irate at both of us.  I pushed past her and continued down the hall, and into an empty dorm room.  I quickly walked back out.  The studio was further down the hall than I had remembered.

Dream 3:

I was walking down a busy street with a female friend.  Suddenly a very cute homeless girl in her early twenties walked toward me, and we hugged each other tightly for a really long period of time.  She told me how nice that was, and how she didn’t get hugged very often.  I said I was happy to oblige.  I asked her if she had a place to stay.  She started to tell me, and my friend interrupted us.  I made some sort of arcane joke to my friend that I can’t quite recall, but that involved the name of a homeless shelter and somehow implied that my friend was staying in it as well.  I struggled to regain composure in front of the new girl.  “Um, I meant that in a GOOD way. . .I wasn’t saying that YOU were staying there–”

The homeless girl laughed at my pathetic attempts to save face.  “Yeah, you kinda did, actually.  But that’s okay, at least to me.  Obviously.”  She smiled and walked toward a limousine that was parked nearby.  It was the limousine I had been riding in.  I stayed behind and talked to a really tall guy friend of hers who was there on the sidewalk.  We talked for a few minutes, and then I realized I had left my shoes in the limo, and was standing there in my socks.  I walked around the far side of the limo, and saw the homeless girl leaning against it, urinating onto the street.  She was standing up straight.  Apparently she was a trans-sexual, but I had no way of knowing that until I saw her urinating.  I said, quickly and a bit awkwardly,”Sorry!” and opened the back door of the limo.  I rummaged around on the floor to find some shoes.  I found a sandal and a running shoe, neither of which I remembered bringing with me.  I rummaged around again, and came up with a matched pair of black shoes, which I put on.

The girl’s friend was walking toward me, so I decided to feign sleep.  I curled up on my side in the back seat of the limo, and I overheard a sotto voce conversation between the girl and her friend.

“Do you think he knows about me?”

“He saw you pee; of course he knows.  He has to.”

“I don’t think he saw me.  Oh, I would just hate for anything bad to happen.  I’ve never known such a great guy before.”

My eyes were closed, and I was trying very hard to remain motionless.  I could hear the guy turn and walk to the door of the car, which was open.  He stood up onto the running board, and I could feel the car shake as he spoke to me.  “You’d better not do anything to hurt her,” he said menacingly.  “If you do, you’ll have to deal with me and a lot of other people who are looking out for her.”  He stood there for a long time after, but I could still feel the car shaking under his weight.  After a moment, he stepped back to the ground and walked away.  I thought, What does he think I’m gonna do to her?  Nothing will happen, because she’s a BOY.

* * * * *

After a week or two of colossally boring dreams, it would seem that my dream life is back to ‘normal’ again.  Although, as a friend likes to say, “Normal is just a setting on a washing machine.”

Last night I had a strange and funny dream.

I was working at a family-style restaurant (something I’ve never done in real life), and I’ve been told to hang up some flyers in the foyer by the door.  I started to hang them, when a grubby farmer walked into the restaurant, looking as if he had just stepped out of his field.  He had parked a pair of tiny tractors outside the building, next to the window of the foyer where I was hanging flyers.  Whenever I moved in the window, the fronts of the tractors would follow me.  I moved back and forth, testing them, and then turned to the farmer and said, “They’re like goats or something.”  He laughed and walked over to sit down, by which time the twin tiny tractors had driven themselves into the restaurant to park themselves near where the farmer was sitting.  A minute later, a herd of actual goats traipsed into the restaurant and filled up the entire lobby, where there were also people waiting in line to come inside the restaurant.

I finished hanging the flyers and squeezed my way through the myriad of goats to check the waiting list and start seating the people.  On my way past a woman wearing a sundress, one of the buttons of my suit jacket snagged a strap of her dress and made it fray.  “Oh my gosh,” I said, “I’m so sorry!  Wow, the only thing I could have snagged you with just happened to snag the only thing you’re wearing that could be snagged.  I wonder what the odds of that are.”  She didn’t seem concerned about it, and in fact seemed much more worried about the goat herd.

I decided it was time for my lunch break, so I made my way through the people and goats and went outside to the parking lot.  I walked to a convenience store that was at the far end of the lot.  My plan was to take a shortcut through the store to get to the main street, but once I was inside, it was extremely difficult to get out again.  Aisles turned into dead ends, and there were no other doors to speak of.  I found an enclosed seating area with a kids’ playroom, and I crawled over the wall of that to get to the street.

I was on the lookout for McFamousCrappyBurgerPlace, and there were actually two within easy walking distance.  The one to my left, across the busy street, was slightly closer, so I opted for that one.  I walked in and was greeted by a cute girl with dark blonde hair.  I ordered a chicken sandwich and some fries.  “Small.  No. . .medium.”  She told me the total would be ten dollars.

“What?  That seems a little high.”

“Well, you did order two of each.”

“No, no, it’s just me.  I only need one.  Thanks.”

She smiled and tapped some buttons on the cash register.  I handed her my debit card, which she swiped and then turned around to grab a bag of chicken nuggets, which she set on the counter in front of me as she returned my card.  “The rest will be out in just a second.”

Before long my food arrived, although not exactly as I had planned.  The girl grabbed two large, flat, clear plastic bags and filled one with an enormous amount of chicken nuggets and the other with an enormous amount of French fries.  “Um,” I said, “what am I supposed to do with all of this?  And I ordered a sandwich, anyway.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said sweetly.  “That’s all we have at the moment.”

“Well, I guess this’ll have to do,” I said, and then I smiled flirtatiously at her.  “I thought we had a relationship that was built on trust.”

“Uhh. . .we do. . .I guess,” she stammered, not wanting to play along with my little joke.

I was undeterred.  “I still trust you, for what it’s worth.”  She smiled, but didn’t say anything else.  “Well, I guess we have a relationship based on our mutual love of music, then.  Or maybe it’s just our animal attraction for each other?”  She smiled more widely, and I said, “Can I please have some ketchup and some sweet-and-sour sauce?  Maybe two?”  She retrieved them from under the counter, and dropped them into the bags I was holding open in front of her.  I gave her a smirk and walked outside with my bags of McFeces.  I reached into the chicken bag, opened the sweet-and-sour sauce, dipped a nugget, and popped it into my mouth as I walked back across the street toward work.

Last night I had an especially detailed, bizarre and beautiful dream.

* * * * *

I’m at my dad’s house (although he’s not my real-life dad) watching some television show about government secrets, everything from technology to covert special-ops agencies.  Just for fun, I decide to grab a piece of paper and write down some of the things that are mentioned on the show, so I can check them out on the internet some other time.  My dad comes home, and he has a couple of friends with him who I’ve not met before.  They walk into my dad’s home office room and close the door behind them.  I walk into the kitchen, and just as I do, I hear a snippet of their conversation, and they’re talking about these same secret agencies.  I compare the names to the ones I’ve written on the notepad, and they match up perfectly.  This is how I come to realize that my dad works for one of these agencies.

I leave and go home to my place, which is a small building of one-bedroom apartments that’s located on the edge of a bluff overlooking the ocean.  I live near the end of the row; there’s only one apartment behind mine, and then the hillside slopes down toward the parking lot, with another bluff behind that.  So our building is built on a jetty, of sorts, that sticks out into the ocean.  It’s a beautiful place, but very isolated, and the only other person who’s ever around is the guy who lives in the unit behind mine, at the back of the building.  His name is Raymond Hsu, a Chinese-American guy about my own age, who is very quiet and reclusive.  He’s a computer guy, and spends long hours programming.  His apartment is immaculate, and it’s obvious that he takes great pride in living there.  He has a little white cat who often comes over to visit me, but I never see Raymond and the cat together at the same time.  After a while, I begin to wonder about this non-coincidental coincidence, and finally reach the conclusion that Raymond is the cat. He can somehow morph from human form into cat form, and I am determined to find out how he does it.

The next time the cat comes over, I say, “Hello, Raymond.”  The cat looks surprised, turns away, and walks back into his own apartment.  A minute later, Raymond walks outside to where I’m standing against the railing, looking out to sea.  “So,” he says, “you’ve discovered my secret.”

“For a while now I’ve thought this was the case, but I didn’t exactly know how to bring it up.  I just had to test my theory.  Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret safe.”

“I’m too shy to interact much with people,” he says, “but I know you like cats, and I figured that would be a safe way for us to meet, even though you didn’t really know what was going on yet.  But you figured it out.  Well done.”

He invites me into his apartment, where he pours two glasses of white wine, hands one to me, and shows me around.  His comfortable living room has a view of the ocean on two sides, and there are long tables of computers and monitors and bookshelves that run the length of each wall, underneath the windows, so he can gaze out the window while he’s working.  I tell him this is by far the nicest home office I’ve ever seen.

“Thank you,” he replies.  “I decided at some point that if I was going to work from home, I ought to make my home as beautiful and enjoyable as I could.  I was very lucky to find this apartment.”

“I agree,” I say.  “I love living here.”

“You’re welcome to stop by any time.  Really.  No matter what form I’m taking.”  We both laugh a little.

A woman of undeterminable age suddenly appears on the sidewalk outside our apartment building to speak with Raymond.  Actually, that’s not entirely accurate; it’s as if her age is fluctuating between ten and fifty years, slowly but perceptibly.  Her face has a greenish tinge to it that is also fluctuating.  I see her a handful of times over the next few weeks, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend or two, and they seem to be interviewing Raymond.  Her two friends are also of fluctuating age, so I assume they are related somehow.

A few days later, while I’m out walking on the beach, I discover the nature of their interviews when I see the four of them (Raymond, the woman and two slightly younger men) in the surf, talking quietly.  The woman seems to have the ability to change herself into a frog, Raymond into a cat, and the two men have similar abilities that aren’t apparent.  I wave to Raymond and walk over to join their group.  He introduces me to Rachel and the two men.  They look a bit concerned about my presence there, but Raymond reassures them, “He’s okay.  He knows about me.”  His features become slightly more feline for a few seconds, but he retains his human form, to show me how he does it, and that he’s in control of it.  Rachel, who is the ten-year-old version of herself, starts to change to a frog, then reverses it in the same way that Raymond did.

These people are their own separate race of shape-shifters.  Rachel and the two men explain to me that they’ve been looking for others like them for quite some time, without success, so when they found out about Raymond, they wanted to be sure that he was one of The People, so they interviewed him at great length.  So far, I’m the only one outside of their race who knows of their existence.  I tell them I’m prepared to keep it that way, if that’s what they want.

The dream changes just then, and I’m back at my dad’s house watching that show again; this episode is about a series of factories in which aliens disassemble humans and rebuild them from the separate parts.  They create these humanoid creatures, and then they pull out human eyes and cut off human noses and ears, whereupon they attach them to the hideous creatures they’re creating.  This is apparently one of the secrets the government is keeping. The show continues, and talks about veterans of the armed forces who have lost body parts in various wars, and who have been restored using this kind of technology.  The process requires massive amounts of medication in order to keep the vets alive.  Most of these men are little more than deformed vegetables, whiling away their lives on beds in remote hospitals.  Some can be seen and heard crying loudly, some are merely lying prostrate and silent.  One complains into the camera about having seen people who could change into animals while he was in Iraq, and then he spirals off into stream-of-consciousness gibberish, but I decide that my new friends need to know about this.

I go back home.  Raymond sees me, comes out, and asks if I’d like to go for a walk.  “Sure,” I say, and shut the door behind me.  We walk along a narrow, curvy highway that runs along the edge of the cliff beyond the jetty on which our building is located.  He tells me he’s gay, and asks if we can hold hands.  I don’t see a problem with this, so I agree, and we hold hands the way children do, without the fingers interlocked.  He says, “That’s very nice of you.  Gay guys always want more, like kissing and all that, but sometimes it’s nice just to hold hands.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that with me,” I tell him.  “I’m not gay, so I don’t go for the kissing or anything, but holding hands seems like it’s harmless enough.  Besides, you’re a shape-shifter; it would never work between us.”   I laugh.

Suddenly there is lots of traffic on the highway, and we have to let go and walk single-file.  There’s been an oil spill of some sort on the road, and it’s very slick, so much so that we’re having difficulty walking, and we almost slide over the edge of the cliff a couple of times.  A truck barrels down on us, and I grab Raymond’s hand and jump into the air with him in tow behind me.  We are flying over the ocean and over various parks and places that look like they’d be safe – albeit uncomfortable – places to land.  I’m unable to land, however, so we just keep flying until we come to a place where a small river meets the ocean.  Rachel is sitting in the sand next to the river.  She sees us and waves, and I’m able to land near her.  Raymond and I land feet first and knee-deep in the mud alongside Rachel.  She claps and laughs, telling us that was an excellent landing.  Raymond and I are laughing too, and we extricate ourselves from the mud and trudge down into the river to wash the mud off ourselves.

We climb out of the river and start to walk along a path in the adjoining park.  I tell the two of them about the vet I saw on TV who seems to have seen more people like them.  We talk about how dangerous it would be to go over to Iraq, and Rachel asks, somewhat sarcastically, “Why couldn’t they be somewhere nice that’s NOT a war zone?  Why do they have to be there, of all places?”

Rachel leaves us then, and we walk home, not holding hands this time.  I decide it’s probably not the smartest idea to encourage that very often.  We arrive at home and walk down into the parking garage behind our building.  There are these huge wooden beams that support the roof over our cars, and beyond the parking lot is a small grassy area.  We walk through the wooden beams toward the grass, and as soon as we get to the grass, a very strange feeling comes over me.

“I’ve seen this before,” I tell Raymond.  “I’ve watched this discussion happen, but I’ve seen it from a different vantage point. . .from over there!”  I point to a spot in the distance, toward a group of houses nestled along the edge of the wooded hillside, trying to work out how and when this could have occurred.  Am I a time traveler, or am I merely hallucinating?  I don’t feel as though I’m hallucinating, so the answer seems to be that I’m a time traveler.

In my first dream of the evening, I was on a vacation with Brother, Dad and Stepmom, and somehow we spent a decent amount of time looking for a liquor store.  I ended up with a backpack full of bottles, including a gigantic bottle of whiskey.  This is not, however, the dream I’m going to focus on in this story.  I did need to reference that tidbit, though, because it showed up in the dream I AM going to tell you about.

It started on my bike.  I was riding down a long hilly road that got progressively steeper and steeper as I got closer to the stop sign at the end of the hill, where the road made a ‘T’ intersection with another.  (If you happen to be familiar with the town of Yakima, Washington, it was that bit of 66th from the top of the hill down to Summitview, although it was much steeper in the dream.)  I was riding at full speed, and there were two other people riding near me on their own, a young guy and a young woman.  The woman was riding fast too, but not quite as fast as I was, so I passed her and gave her a smile as I did.  She put on a bit of speed and kept right up, though, and we both watched the guy, who was attempting a stunt.  At forty miles per hour, he lifted his feet onto the seat, let go of the handlebars, stood up to his full height and jumped off toward the side of the road.  He landed perfectly, like a gymnast dismounting from a high bar, and landed near the stop sign.  His bike went skittering off to the ditch on the opposite side of the road.  It was amazing; a perfectly executed stunt.

“Oh, nice!” I yelled, as the woman and I pulled up and stopped at the sign.  “I’ve never seen anything like that before!”

The dream’s location changed, and the three of us (along with many others) were walking in the hallway of a college building.  I walked between them and said, “Isn’t that a great hill?  What were you guys out there for?  The high speed [to the woman], and that stunt [to the guy]?”  They each said something funny in response, and while I can’t remember the exact wording, each answer had something to do with waiting until the last minute to get to Professor [wordplay on the professor’s name, which had something to do with physics]’s class.  We went our own ways, and I told them I’d see them around.

Then the dream changed, and I was in the hotel room that Brother and I were sharing.  There were two beds in the room, and he was up earlier than I was, rummaging through my backpack (that was full of the liquor we’d bought in my previous dream).  He pulled out each of the bottles and inspected it carefuly, as if to check the ingredients for a recipe he was concocting in his head. He had set a glass of red wine on the bedside table.  I rolled over and looked at the clock.  It was 1:51 in the afternoon.   I groaned and rolled back.  “If that wine is meant for me, it’s too early,” I said.  “It’ll just be sitting there for hours.”  He disappeared into the other room for a minute, then reappeared with a second glass of wine that he placed nearer to me.  Clearly, he intended to drink the wine in addition to whatever he was about to create.  “What are you making?” I asked, rolling over to watch what he was doing.

“Blemmys.”

“What the heck is a ‘blemmy’?”

“See for yourself.”  He held out a bag and poured a small amount of light, airy candy that looked like unpopped popcorn and miniature lemon slices into my hand.  He made a comic gesture of raising his own hand to his mouth, to show that he expected me to do the same.  The candy crackled a bit in my hand, and exploded like Pop Rocks the second I put it in my mouth.  It was a delicious combination of blueberry and lemon; hence the name of the drink.  He mixed blueberry vodka with a slosh from the giant whiskey bottle, then added a bit of the lemony candy stuff.  It fizzed as if it was boiling over, but he took a sip and smiled.

I rolled over and attempted to go back to sleep, which is when Mom walked into the room (not Stepmom, with whom we were on vacation), saw the liquor and wine flowing, and was horrified.  She walked right past Brother to the bed in which I was turned away from the mixological chemistry experiments.  A long-time teetotaler, she saw the wine glass on my bedside table (which she had no way of knowing was untouched), and assumed I was drunkenly passing out.

“Will you look at yourself?” she scorned.  “It’s not even two o’clock in the afternoon!”

I still had the covers pulled over my head, and while remaining rolled over, I reached a hand out to point at Brother.  “His idea,” I groaned.  “I had nothing to do with this.”  She stormed out of the room, without a word to Brother.  I got myself vertical, climbed out of bed, and threw on a pair of jeans from my nearby suitcase.   My friend John walked in the room a couple of minutes later, and Brother offered him a drink, which he gladly accepted, but hesitated slightly before sipping, when he saw the fizz.

“That’s delicious,” John said.  “What is it?”

“Blemmy,” Brother and I said, in perfect unison.

“Do you have anything inimitable to say about it?” I asked John.

“Yes, actually,” John replied.  “I’ve learned that ‘inimitable’ and ‘imitable’ have the exact same meaning.”

“Now, see, there you go,” I said, laughing.  “That’s just the kind of thing I was hoping you’d say.”