maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was out in front of my great grandmother's house in the daytime. I stood looking in through her front window, which IWL was too high for me to look right into.

My great grandma appeared in the window. I probably knew that she was dead. I think I had the feeling that this was either a dream or some kind of paranormal experience allowing me to see my grandma. So I just told myself to keep calm and let things happen.

My grandma slid up the window, as if this were a double-paned window, which it was not IWL. I believe I asked my grandma how she was doing. I didn't believe she would give me an answer, as my "imagination" wouldn't be good enough to "create" a spontaneous answer from her.

But my grandma did answer. She very gently said she was doing fine, but that she was here more to get an idea of how I personally was doing. She told me I should be more concerned about that as well.

My grandma said she had to go take care of something in the house. She may have directed me to come into the house.

I was now in the house, alone my grandma's "guest room," which I spent a lot of time in as a kid. The lights may have been off, but there was natural light coming into the room.

Suddenly I was aware that my mom and my oldest nephew were under the bed. I could hear them talking. I must have felt that they weren't actually quite my mom and my oldest nephew. I felt like they were supposed to scare me somehow.

The lights now went out in the room. I could hear a switch click -- like the daylight coming in through the windows was controlled by a light switch. The room was now dark as night, with just a bit of light coming from the hallway.

My nephew's voice began laughing insidiously, like he was really trying to scare me. I got the feeling that he wasn't really my nephew, but a demon.

I yelled at the voice, "I'm not afraid of you! You can't scare me!"

I got the feeling that the body for the voice had actually transformed into a monster like a Chinese dragon, with something of a human body, and that the monster would soon jump out from under the bed to attack me.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in my family's living room. Someone, probably my brother, had just finished watching something on TV.

I was led to believe that I could now watch whatever show I wanted. But I knew this wasn't really true. My brother and probably my mom just wanted me to think I could watch a show that I liked so I'd stay in the living room. But as soon as they knew I'd stay, they's switch my show on me.

I had chosen some old Saturday Night Live episode. But as soon as I saw that my brother and mom were playing a trick on me, I got up and left the living room.

I went down into the basement, into a room that was apparently mine. I could hear the Saturday Night Live episode from upstairs. I knew my brother and mom were now playing the episode really loud, and that they were going to play the whole episode, just to taunt me for not having stayed upstairs.

The room in the basement was pretty empty. It was lit by greyish-white natural light coming in from a window high up on a wall in front of me. My sight was mostly focused on something right in front of me, either a book or a paycheck.

I was now in some busy place in a really busy part of town. I don't know whether I was inside or outside. The place seemed like a fancy kind of bar. But it also seemed to be outside, out on a street like a small town's main street, only as packed with people as a street like Times Square.

My vision was still very focused on one small thing, probably an envelope. I was surprised to have found this envelope. It contained my paycheck. I hadn't expected to receive my paycheck so soon.

I pulled the paycheck out of the envelope. There were a few problems with the writing on the check. The amount for the check was something like $814 or $810 (I wish!). But the way it was written in the side box was all messed up, so that instead of a number, there was something more like a nonsensical word.

I looked over to the line where the amount of the check was written out. This line seemed to be done correctly. But there was one more place on the check where the amount was written out incorrectly. In this spot, the check gave a horribly small number, like $30 or $40.

I knew I was supposed to be getting the amount that had been written out. But I doubted any bank would take such a messed up check. I also worried that if a bank took the check at all, they'd only give me the lower amount. I was sure no bank would give me the benefit of the doubt, since people in places like banks always seem to hate me.

But this was either my first or my last paycheck. It was very important that I have this money. So I needed to get things fixed. I determined to fix things. I thought of going "back" to my job, which may have been some kind of parks job.

But I was now walking away from the main street kind of area with my mother, sister, and niece. I really needed to go talk about my check. But I couldn't let my mom and sister know what I was doing. And my mom and sister wanted to get back home.

My mom and sister were using my niece as an excuse to go home. But my niece didn't want to go home. So, as an excuse to go take care of my check, I told my mom and sister that I'd take my niece back to the main street area of town.

But I got the feeling that my mom and sister now had the idea that I only wanted to take my niece with me so I could do something bad to her. So I didn't push the idea.

We had been walking through a kind of residential area. But now we had turned a corner and were back in a small town main street kind of area. I decided I should be honest. I told my mom and sister that I needed to go see about fixing my check. I also said I needed to get a haircut.

But we were now headed down some red-carpeted steps, down into some fancy restaurant. We were being led by a tall, very pale, blonde man with a little bit of a goatee and stubbled cheeks.

My mom and sister and I had been to this restaurant before for lunch. Either my mom or the young man thought it would be impressive to take us all back to this place for dinner.

But I knew this wouldn't work. During lunch this place was cheap and relatively empty. But at night (it still looked like midday outside) this place became packed with people because of some crazy comedy show. The price of the food also skyrocketed.

But I didn't say anything. We went down through some glass doors and into a nice lobby area. There was another set of glass doors showing a packed dining area -- people almost shoved against the glass doors, and everybody beautiful and in nice attire.

The name of the place was written on the door in gold capital letters. But it was written on the inside of the door, so that from our side of the door, it looked backwards. The name of the place was "EVERYTHING WARHOL." I knew this place served really good Indian food.

A bald man in a tuxedo came out and made a reservation for us for dinner. It was written on a page from a restaurant order's notebook, like you see in diners and so forth. There were a lot of scribbled numbers all over the page.

The man gave the reservation to either my mom or the young man. Nobody even looked at the reservation, just assuming we were going in soon. But I knew we'd have a long wait. Finally I snuck a look at the paper. Amid all the scribbles, I saw our reservation for something like 8:37 PM. It was now around 5:30 PM.

We were all heading back out, with the others in my group thinking we'd be back very soon. But the young man, the last person to go through the first set of doors before I would, stopped in the doorway, the door half-closed on him, and turned to the waiter to ask how long we'd have to wait for a table.

Apparently this restaurant, or at least the staff, was Belgian, or maybe Swedish. The young man asked the waiter, either in English or French, how long our wait would be.

The waiter replied in French (I thought of it as Belgian-French) that the wait would be a little long. He spoke in French because he was sure that the young man wouldn't understand it.

But the young man was either Belgian or had been in Belgium for some time. In fact, he was only striking up a conversation with the waiter because he wanted to impress my mom and sister by showing off his knowledge of French.

The young man had a short conversation with the waiter. The waiter kept saying "peut-etre," or "maybe," which I kept seeing in my head as "petait." I knew the word meant "maybe," but I kept mixing it up with "petite," and thinking the waiter was saying "little," like, "It will be a little wait."

Eventually the young man got the understanding that we'd be waiting three hours for a table. He rubbed the goateed corners of his mouth and walked out the door. I must have followed.

I was now walking out with my mom and my sister in what was supposed to be my great grandma's old neighborhood. We passed my great grandma's house, which had been sold after my great grandma had died. The place was now being remodeled and expanded by the new owners. I could even see sillhouettes of the new owners working inside.

We passed the next house, in which one of my cousins lives with his wife and kids. For some reason, I looked on that house with scorn. I didn't want to have anything to do with those family members.

We kept walking on. My view was more like the sideways tracking of a movie camera. My mom was saying how she'd always liked this neighborhood because it was much safer compared to some other neighborhoods.

I agreed. But something about the sight of my cousin's house made me angry and greedy. All I could think about was buying out every single house on this block, and maybe a few other blocks.

I wanted this area to be completely empty. I could even envision it being empty. This way, I thought, my immediate family could live in happiness, being safe from violence and free from irksome family members.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I may have been flying through a neighborhood like the neighborhood I lived in as a teenager. It was a partly sunny, partly grey day. I landed in a backyard like my great grandmother's backyard.

I started walking along the side yard, toward the front of the house. My old landlady, Ms. U, was walking up from the front of the house, on my right side.

Ms. U still looked old, maybe in her late sixties. But she seemed to be in better shape, and to have a slightly smaller frame. She wore dark jeans and a dark green shirt, as if she were out gardening.

I waved to Ms. U. She reluctantly waved at me. It was like she didn't really want to talk to me. I knew why. It was obvious to her, like it was to me, that I wasn't going to be able to pay my rent soon. She didn't want to talk to me because she was disappointed in me.

Ms. U was now behind me. She met up with one of her friends. They were both going to walk down to the supermarket together. They were walking behind me. I turned right, as they did, and walked down the sidewalk, to the corner of the block.

As I walked, I thought that maybe I would be able to pay my rent, after all. Maybe I would get a job. Then Ms. U wouldn't be so disappointed in me. So, if all that was going to happen, and I could believe it, why could't Ms. U? Why did Ms. U have to not talk to me?

At the same time, I got the feeling that maybe Ms. U wasn't very disappointed in me. Maybe she would talk to me, if I'd just slow down and walk with Ms. U and her friend.

The sidewalk was gone. But we weren't walking on the lawns of the front yards. We were walking on grass like grass that edges vacant lots. The grass was dry, tan, rough, and clumpy. There was a wooden fence to my right at one point. At another point there was at least one orange traffic cone. I kept feeling like I was going to lose my balance and fall into the road.

Dream #2

I was sitting in a restaurant. My table was basically all by itself, in a space that looked like the hallway of a house. It was dark, lit by a dim, blue light, like candlelight in a blue, glass holder. My table was in a little, doorway like niche in the wall. I sat so I faced the restaurant's front door, which was barely visible to me from where I sat.

I knew that there were a lot more tables in another room. The room was somewhere off to my right, i.e. down the hall, and around to the right through another hall.

People kept coming by, apparently angry or jealous of me for having this table all to myself. Some of them started trying to do things like leave their stuff on my table.

One person had a huge, black, wire-cart, like for laundry or groceries. She tried to slide it in between the unused chair of my table and the wall. I stood up and said, "Don't put your stuff in that space!" I moved the cart right out of the way. I may have stuck it in some dark corner just off from the niche I sat in.

I decided that people were jealous of me because they thought I had this space all to myself. So I tried to make it look like I wasn't alone. I laid my bookbag and my jacket on the opposite seat, like somebody else was sitting there. I then pushed the seat far back, so that nobody would try to sit anything behind it. I also figured I'd act like I was waiting for someone to come back.

Time passed. I was now being sternly lectured by a Meryl Streep-like business woman in a white blouse and long, beige skirt. The woman demanded to know why I had been away from my seat for so long.

I vaguely remembered that I had had to go out the front door of the restaurant to help people who were loading something out of a semi-truck's trailer. It had, I remembered, seemed really important for me to have done this. If I had sat here instead of gone out to help, I suspected that this woman would have been yelling at me for that, instead.

The woman told me, "Don't you know we have an important client coming to visit us today? How long were you runnning around outside? Do you even know? Even if it was just a few minutes, the client could have come inside while you were missing. He could be wandering around lost in the restaurant right now. And we wouldn't even know it!"

Dream #3

I woke up. I pulled my blanket off of myself and looked at the upper right corner of my bed. My bedroom light was off, but my hall light was on, and it lit my room a bit. My blankets and sheets were brown.

There was a fly crawling across the corner of my bed. This kind of disgusted me, as if it were a far worse insect than a fly. I brushed the fly off and started worrying about bugs.

I stood up and walked down the hallway -- possibly (I'm not sure), because I heard a strange noise coming from my bathroom.

I got to the bathroom. The lights were on and were really bright. The shower was running, which was odd in itself. But after a moment of focusing, I realized that the shower itself was acting weird. The water was rushing way stronger than usual, and the nozzle seemed to be spraying out in a few different, weird directions.

I looked closer at the shower pipe. I now saw that it didn't even have a head! No wonder it was spraying all weird. I decided to shut off the shower water and figure out how to solve this problem.

I turned off the water. But now there was a strange rumbling in the bathroom. The walls seemed to shake. Suddenly the portion of the wall just beside and below the shower pipe began spouting out water through little holes! The force of the water I'd shut off was so strong that it had burst through the wall in little, fountain-like holes!

I stood back from this and watched it all. I knew that this kind of plumbing problem was much more than I by myself could handle. I'd have to call in my landlord.

I really didn't want to have to call in my landlord. I knew he was already against me for a number of reasons. I didn't want him wandering through my house, peering aroud like he thought he'd find some sort of incriminating evidence about me. But I knew, regardless of the inconvenience to me, that I'd have to call the landlord.

But now, suddenly, the wall over the side of my bathub also burst open with little fountains of water! These fountains of water were either bright pink or else left bright pink stains on the wall. The fountains of water were also more like jets -- they blasted in a flat, sideways pattern, along the wall, almost like sheets of water pouring down a sidewalk on a rainy day.

And then all new things came out of the wall! I thought of these things as leaks and water. But they weren't water: they were steel. They were like surgery or dentistry implements, stainless steel devices, attached to steel cords, like the ringed cords on receivers for payphones.

Some of these cord may have had robotic, or even white-gloved, hands attached to them, holding the implements. The number of cords, hands, and implements springing out of the wall seemed to be increasing and increasing, cluttering up the whole top of the wall.

Dream #4

I was with a couple of men, one of whom may have been my brother. The other man was something like an ex-Marine. He was tall and muscular, slightly tanned, with blue eyes and pale-blonde hair in a buzz cut.

We were in some kind of suburban area. It was possibly early morning, just before sunrise. We may have started out at a house or a small shop. We were loading things into a truck. These things were either items for security systems on houses, or else they were nuclear bombs.

We drove in a pickup truck to some place. As we did, I thought about what we were doing. The man may have been talking to me about it as well. I knew we were definitely installing security systems on houses. But we also had nuclear missiles in our truck, and we were definitely concerned, in some way or another, with a slightly touchy situation regarding nuclear deterrence.

We drove into and through a big parking lot, to a small, one-story building, possibly with white walls and a flat, steel-siding-like, blue roof.

Somehow I now saw as if I were now twenty or thirty meters behind the truck. Missiles were being pulled out of the back of the truck. There were probably two missiles. I only saw their tail ends. They looked like the tail-end of an X-15 manned rocket, not a missile.

I now stood just inside the building with the man. There were a few other people about, including a few little, Latino children, apparently. The inside of the building felt completely unused. There were no lights on, though there may have been some dusty office equipment. The front window may also not have had a glass pane in it.

The man and I were talking (somehow -- telepathically?) about some woman who had had some sort of difficulty in her professional life.

As we were talking about this, I kept hoping I'd just say the right thing. I felt like the military and government had me under suspicion. My appearance alone, I knew, marked me as suspicious. If I said the wrong thing, I'd be detained for sure.

I wandered down a front deck and onto the parking lot, toward the Latino children. I was still "speaking" with the military man. The kids were looking at a hole in the parking lot. It was a rectangular hole, about three meters long and two meters wide. It seemed to go down a long way.

As I looked into the hole, it began to appear as if it held something inside, like a gigantic birthday cake. The cake was covered in frosting that was colored with brilliant swirls of blue, turquoise, green, and white. Tropical fish, either plastic or sugar, also adorned the cake.

I was now "speaking" to the military man about how the woman we had been discussing was probably suffering from an animus possession. She was letting the male side of herself dominate her personality. It was making her overly aggressive, so that nobody could work with her.

As I "spoke" of this, it now became my task to scrape frosting off the cake. I was scraping huge, huge globs of solid green, solid blue, and solid white frosting off the cake. Occasionally I'd also scrape off a few fish.

The scraped-off frosting all went into some deeper part of the pit. It was now like the cake was L-shaped, so that the upper left quadrant (as I faced it) of the rectangle was left free for this deep pit, this extra space for the frosting.

But I noticed that as I scraped off the frosting, it became kind of mushy and unappealing. It still looked very sweet. But on the cake it had been firm, which would, I assumed, add to the pleasure of the taste. Off the cake it was just sickly sweet and mushy.

I wondered why the frosting had to be scraped off the cake, anyway. Someone apparently thought there was excess frosting on the cake. But I didn't. I thought the frosting was good, and that there was just enough.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was at my great grandmother's house. My great grandma (who IWL passed away about two years ago) was sitting in an armchair near her front door. My sister sat at a footstool near the chair. There were other family members in the house, as if we were having a gathering or party of some kind.

My great grandma was showing us photos from a big photo album she had. The photo album had black covers, and the pages were letter-size, clear plastic page sleeves, probably with a black "backing" set into each sleeve. Each page had one photograph, which was as big as a letter-size piece of paper.

The photos were from my great grandfather's time of service in the Air Force. Apparently he had fought in World War II. My great grandma and/or my sister told how my great grandpa would send these photos home in letters. The letters would be kind of cheerful, not hinting at any danger my great grandpa was experiencing.

My great grandma had put all these photos into a book and then had then captioned each one in the same kind of cheerful, breezy tone that my great grandpa had used in his letters.

My great grandma now laughed. She said that, looking back on these photo captions, she was shocked at how naive and silly they sounded, and how they trivialized the hard experiences my great grandpa had had in the war. We all laughed.

My sister took the book. She may have had the intention either of putting the book away or of showing us the pictures, but not reading any of the captions. I asked my sister, a little forcibly, if I could see the book. I wanted to read some of the captions aloud. After my great grandma's story, the captions seemed like the most interesting thing of all.

I sat down on a footstool on the other side of the room from my sister. I looked through the pages. Some photos had captions on their bottom edges, typed in. Others had captions written on the backs of the photos, scrawled out in big letters with some purplish pencil. Others had a combination of typing and handwriting.

I now started actually looking at the photos. I was stunned when I saw a photo of a jet fighter, like an F-4 or an F-16. The fighter was on the ground, and it was largely hidden from view by big vehicles like trucks, so I only saw the nose, cockpit, and two rectangular air intake valves on either side of the nose.

I looked at the back side of the photograph. It said F-15 and something like "Flurry or Fury" or "Fluffy or Fury." The word "Fury" was then repeated. This was all typed, centered, at the top of the page, as if by an official agency. There was a little bit more official text, followed by a lot of scrawled out writing from my great grandma.

I stuttered to my family, "This -- this -- must be one of the first uses of jet fighters in actual combat situations!"

My great grandma nodded in affirmation.

I then flipped through some more pages. One group of photos showed some kind of switchboard area. Women were working the switchboards. There was one photo with a woman with dark hair, in a 1940s style, curly, down to about her shoulders. The woman wore a uniform, but I don't remember if she wore a hat. She may have been wearing small, round eyeglasses.

I said, again in surprise, that this was one of the first groups of women to be used for something like strategic or technological operations.

Dream #2

I was walking into a really busy clothing store, coming in behind a big group of people. There were racks full of clothes as soon as we came in the doors. The people in front of me kind of filtered out to different areas of the store. A little girl in a cheerful-patterned, red and white dress followed the people.

I basically went to some set of clothes racks with panties on display. There were some other people there. Two were a couple, a young man and a young woman. They both looked kind of well-off. I was afraid they would think I was a pervert for being here. I also worried whether the parents of the little girl I'd seen would think I was a pervert.

Dream #3

A song. A guitar played a nice sounding, strumming melody with a solid, but relaxed rhythm. I took this to be the foreground music. Then another stringed instrument (???) Would come in occasionally and add a little riff that sounded a bit like that "Brazil" song from the movie... um... Brazil, by Terry Gilliam.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a scientific laboratory. The floor I was on looked like the lobby for a nature center or a church. There were tall glass walls showing a clear day outside. The floors were some kind of deep-red stone, polished heavily. One other window to my left and about 5 meters away from me looked down, apparently, to a basement area, which was dark.

My great grandmother was going down into the basement area to test out some kind of atomic science device. It was like some kind of atomic particle beam ray. It could be used either for scientific purposes or as a weapon.

My great grandmother now walked into another room to my left and went down the stairs. I may have stood on the threshhold of the first room and the room with the stairs. A man and a woman stood with me, though they both stood in the first room. The woman was talking about how once a proton beam was set in motion, it would go into an orbit around the earth, destroying whatever came into its path. This could possibly lead to the destruction of the whole earth.

The man now said, "Hmm... maybe we should get ----- (something like Swami Sarasvati) to talk about that kind of stuff." The man was basically implying that the physics of the machine were basically like the elements of Hindu religion.

The woman said, "Or we could get ----- (some famous Western physicist)."

To make a joke, I thought I'd recommend getting the Play-Doh man to talk. I envisioned holding a Play-Doh ball in my hand and smashing it. This was basically to suggest the destruction of the world, but as a joke, apparently.

I made the hand gesture and said, "Or maybe we should get --," but I was suddenly interrupted by my great grandmother calling me from downstairs. She sounded pretty insistent, so I ran toward the stairs. I called out to the man and woman, still making the hand gesture, "Maybe we should get the Play-Doh man!"

The woman got my joke and said, "Play-Doh man. Oh...!" as if she were going to start laughing.

I now lay on my stomach before a staircase down to the basement. The staircase looked like in a suburban house, and it was bordered by a thin, wooden railing, like for a child's crib.

My great grandmother's voice came from below. She said, "I need you to go get the money. I can't do the project without it." But she also discussed how she needed me to go get the money to protect it from getting into some other people's hands. My grandmother told me that the money was in a place outside of my usual activities. I took this to mean it was in some mansion in a rich neighborhood in Georgia.

I asked my great grandmother how I could possibly get into these mansions. She told me that I wouldn't have as much trouble as I thought I would, and that I should be pretty honest about my aims with anybody I encountered.

There was now a tall, bald, black man in the room with me. He stood over by what looked like a kitchen counter with a bunch of appliances, boxed and unboxed, on it. But the devices were actually weapons and parts to the device that my great grandma was testing out.

The man made some kind of threatening statement, in a smirking way, about how he was going to destroy the whole project. I tackled him and pinned him to the floor. We were down beside a bed. I was on my knees, on the man's ribs. I had him pinned, and he couldn't move. But he didn't seem worried at all. He was still smirking.

He made some move where he was now on his back. He had better control of his arms, and he tried to make some weird move against me. But I managed to counter that move and get control of him.

Suddenly I was "my old self (?)," an old, white haired, German man who had been a Nazi. I had apparently tortured this man in the past.

I lifted the man up and carried him over toward the head of the bed. The walls were grey concrete, like in a basement. At the head of the bed was a single wooden pole, kind of thin. I lifted the man's head up and said, "You couldn't leave things alone, could you? You had to bring the old me back. Well, now I'll treat you like the old me treated you!"

I was going to slam the man's head down on the thin pole so that I pierced his brain through one of his eyes. But I was a little disgusted at the thought of this, and I either didn't do it or didn't see myself doing it.

I was myself again. Some series of events had taken place, the project was completed, and my great grandma was up out of the basement again. A few people were around, like family, meeting after the project. But I still didn't have the money.

I went to look for my great grandma to tell her I didn't have the money. I found her in her bedroom, apparently changing clothes. The bedroom was dim grey.

I called out, "Grandma? I couldn't find the money. I don't know where it is." This actually wasn't true. I was actually kind of too shy to go to the Georgia mansions to look for it.

My great grandma yelled, "Well I told you where it was! Go to a place outside your usual activity. You know what that is. And tell people exactly what you're doing!"

I felt terrible. I was too shy and afraid to do this. I figured I might fail entirely at getting this money. What would happen?

I was now in some kind of bedroom that looked like an exotic bedroom in an Arabian mansion, like in the movies. A bed stood atop a few marble steps, curtained on either side by thin, pink-orange drapes.

Before the bed stood a kind of pretty boy dressed as a girl. He had long, blonde-brown hair and he wore a yellow-green and black striped shirt and a denim mini-skirt. He was apparently Harry Potter.

Harry explained how I could get past my fear and take care of my mission. It took a few minutes before I realized that Harry was wearing a diaper under his mini-skirt. I started to vanish from the room, but I remained fixated on the fact that this transvestite boy was wearing a diaper.

Harry, all by himself, began dancing in a kind of wild but sexy way all around the huge bedroom. I now saw a view from below the floor, looking straight up Harry's skirt, at his diaper. The diaper seemed to be blue, like blue jeans.

I seemed to be sinking lowe and lower. I ended up on some kind of portico area with a group of students and a couple of male teachers. The students and teachers were all Latino and black. The students were a mix of boys and girls.

I somehow figured that since I'd failed at my task, there would be no Christmas for these children. The children, without mentioning me (I wasn't present), kind of sadly complained about this fact.

I felt terrible about this, but I thought there had to be some kind of magical way that Christmas could appear for these children. After all, Christmas is a magical holiday. Suddenly, slightly glowing objects began to fill the air. They were all supposed to be things like Christmas objects. But they were actually things like fast food items.

One of the boys, seeing these items, said, "Hey guys! Don't worry! We've got Christmas right here! Just eat one of these Christmas hamburgers out of the air!" The boy himself ate a Christmas hamgurger. One of his male friends did so as well.

The two boys were suddenly acting like they were drunk or stoned. The students were all walking to some educational site. One boy grabbed on to the arm of one of his teachers, a big, Latino man with long hair in a ponytail, as if the boy were the teacher's girlfriend. Another boy was at the back of the line, bouncing around and acting crazy.

Finally, as the group continued walking toward the educational site, the first boy woke frfom his stupor. He ran back to the second boy and warned him not to eat the hamburgers.

The school group was now of little, Japanese boys and girls. There were two male, Japanese teachers. I was now present with the group.

We were walking into a forest full of yellow-leafed trees. A couple of girls, as we walked into the forest, called out, "Kirei!"

I noticed that the scenery was getting all fuzzy, like a digitized video view getting more and more pixellated. I thought I'd comment on this to the teachers. But I didn't know whether, if I did this, I'd be breaking the Japanese customs of respectfulness.

We walked along a really muddy path. At some point, I had to push aside the stalks of a tall, tree-like shrub. One of the branches touched my face. It was all muddy. I just decided to let the stalks go and not worry about whether I was clearing a way for the students behind me. But just as I decided to do that, it turned out that we were past that area.

The teachers were now turning us around, but we were walking back on a path parallel to the path we had walked out on. This second path was flooded with water, which reflected the blue of the sky. I thought this would be kind of inconvenient. A horse was also standing in the water.