lucyoncolorado

In which H knows she's dead...

H was in my dream again last night, only this time she was dead and she knew she was dead. She tried to explain why she did it. I can't remember her reasons, but I do remember feeling that I was finally getting some explanation. I tried to tell her how it crushed us. I asked her if she thought of us, and she said how she thought we'd get on and get over it, and I explained how actually everything was different now and how we aren't talking about being sad, but rather being completely unable to even function for months. She became defensive, and I tried to reassure her that I wasn't angry. She told me something to tell J, only she called him B. I corrected her but tried to make it sound like a question. "Don't you mean J?" "That's right!" she answered, and she threw her head back and laughed in a hearty way. It sounded just like her, and I can hear it now.

Then it turned sinister. She started to poke at my ribs. At first, I acted like it was just goofing around, and I tried to be a good sport about it. Then I started to tell her to stop, but she became more aggressive. I tried to walk away, but she came after me and overpowered me. I realized I was dreaming and became lucid. H started to look more like a phantom or a demon than herself. I tried to stop the dream or run away, but I couldn't control it. I tried to wake up. I screamed and tried to hold my breath. There was no way to get out of the dream. Meanwhile, the demon was attacking me now- pushing me, holding me down and tickling me, punching me in the face. I was frustrated that I couldn't wake up. Even though I knew it wasn't real, it was still very painful. I decided to just submit- to lay still and relax in the hopes that I would fall into a different dream, but the pain and the attack was too uncomfortable. Finally I succeeded in screaming so loudly that it woke me up.


In which I go fishing...

My father was helping me prepare my rod to go fishing. We were attaching small lead weights and packing the tackle box. He told me to use cheese as bait for catfish. The only cheese I had in my fridge is the yummy new cheddar R bought last night at the grocery store. My father told me to smush the cheese into a little ball around the hook, the way we used to do with Catfish Charlie's when I was a girl. I asked him if we could use any old cheese or if it had to be the nice cheddar, and he said even sliced yellow American would work. Later I threw all the materials and a giant catfish in the back of my truck.

In which tiny people live in my backpack...

I'm at someone's house, and a man is ill- sleeping on a pallet on the floor of the living room. I'm in the back bedroom with my work backpack which contains my water bottle and coffee thermos. A family of tiny people live in the back room. Two of them crawl inside my backpack, and my thermos falls over and crushes one tiny person's arm. I run into the living room with the ill man and ask how much Ibuprofen we can safely give per mg of body weight. He is still on the floor, but he looks up at me and scoffs. "Stupid American! We don't measure body weight by mg!" I try to explain that we do when the people in question are part of the tiny family that lives in his back bedroom, but he is just convinced that I don't understand the metric system and won't help me calculate the correct amount of painkiller. I get some Ibuprofen and try to break off an incredibly small crumb for the tiny hurting lad. It takes a long time to reset his bones and wrap them up in a tiny splint. Then I remember that I left the catfish in the back of my truck. I run outside and have a look at it; it has rotted and it stinks. What wasteful behavior! A pointless death.


I haven't posted my dreams regularly for a long time now. Maybe I'll come in later and start writing up a few I've missed.

In which I stumbled into North Korea...

An emergency call brings us outside of Seoul to the DMZ where a group of 2012 Apocalypse believers has committed mass suicide. We fly an ambulance plane to a circle of bodies on a hillside. About a dozen young Japanese immigrant women, dressed in kimonos, have gutted themselves with swords- harakiri-style. Some are still alive, writhing around in a mess of blood and intestines.

Each emergency responder drives his or her own ambulance plane, a single-person ultra-light aircraft like a Pipistrel. We carry the dying or dead cult members in pods attached to each wing. When my two pods are both full, I fly to the nearest emergency room in the DMZ which happens to be in a subway-like network of tunnels. The passage is almost too narrow to navigate without clipping the wings of my plane.

I land safely, and several medics run over with stretchers to take the women from the pods, then they rush off down a tunnel before I have the chance to speak to them. This is my first trip ever to the DMZ, and I don’t know how to get out of the tunnel network. I can’t fly my plane backwards, and there isn’t enough space for me to turn it around. I take off on foot down the tunnel after the medics but I quickly find myself at a fork and must decide which way to turn. Holding up a wet finger to check for air flow, I choose the direction that I assume will lead me back above ground.

Soon enough I’m standing in the open air in a plane parking lot. Hundreds of Pipistrels and small Cesnas are packed side-by-side so densely that I must climb over wings and crawl between wheels to make it across the lot. After some time, I notice I’m no longer climbing over planes but instead climbing over giant Chinese dragon parade floats. Then after some more time, I’m climbing over F-16 and F-35 fighter jets.

Eventually I come to the end of the lot where I take a bridge over a ditch and then walk up a hill towards a shopping strip. There is a bakery directly in front of me with neon signs of Korean lettering selling sweet rice cakes with red bean paste. I’m completely confused about where I am, but I’m also very hungry so I decide to enter the shop, get a bite to eat and ask the clerk how to get back to Seoul.

As I get closer to the shopping strip, I notice that the buildings are dilapidated and the people shopping in them are older and less fashionable than the people you normally see shopping about in South Korea. I purchase a dessert and ask the clerk where we are. He tells me that I’m in Kaesong. I try not to reveal how shocked I am. I can feel the panic in my body and my mind races through my options, but I decide the most inconspicuous thing to do is to continue to sit and finish my sweet rice cake. It’s hard to swallow.

I leave the shopping strip and head back down the hill towards the bridge. I decide just to crawl back through the lot of fighter jets, Chinese dragons and single-person planes towards the Southern side of the DMZ, but before I even step off the bridge, a few North Korean military men point guns at me. I hold my hands up in the air and brace myself to be shot, but instead they put me in the back of a jeep and drive me to a dingy office in a concrete building overlooking a river. A North Korean woman sits behind a desk. She has a kind face, and I hope for a moment that she will be reasonable.

I explain that I’m an American medic living in Seoul and that I’ve stumbled across the border accidentally. I ask her if I can just walk back across the bridge; surely she can just phone the people on the other side and see that my story checks out? She smiles at me sympathetically and says, “You’re in pretty big trouble.”

I don’t have a passport or identification. They suspect that I’m a spy, and even if my story is true, I’ve already seen that they have hundreds of F-35s. No one in the world knows about this, so there is no way they are going to let me go home. I’ll be under house-arrest indefinitely. The kind-faced woman explains this to me very calmly, then she takes me by the hand and leads me to a house where I’m to live out the rest of my days with a North Korean family. They feed me a nice meal and send me to bed, but I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of the American hikers who stumbled into Iran several years ago and were detained for years. No one believed their story; we all wondered how they could’ve done something so idiotic.

I’m in bed watching the intense starlight flood in through the window when the son of the North Korean family with whom I’m lodged slips into my room. He’s wearing a black wool felt Alpine hat, workers trousers and shepherd’s snow boots, and he’s extremely good looking. He hands me a medic’s kit and some papers that explain that I’m a volunteer guest of the North Korean government with permission to travel the villages administering vaccinations. He explains that without a passport or a North Korean guide, these papers aren’t enough for me to cross the border or fool the authorities, but they will allow me to pass the streets and between towns. The trick is to be inconspicuous enough that no one asks further questions. Then he opens the window and wishes me luck.

I climb out the window and the first thing I notice is the darkness of the city and the brightness of the stars. Then, with my medic’s kit in one hand, I sneak from shadow to shadow unnoticed across the town until I make it back down to the river by dawn. The river is barricaded with barbed wire and armed soldiers in towers. I can see the DMZ on the other side. I walk confidently along the river walk with my medic’s kit and volunteer papers and no one stops me, but I notice that there is no way that I can get across the barricade. Eventually I come to a set of subway stairs, and because there is nowhere else to go without turning around and heading conspicuously back the way I came, I descend into the subway.

I wander around lost, constantly on the move so as to not draw attention to myself, but before long I realize that I’m never going to leave. It’s ridiculous even to try. I’m going to spend the rest of my life stuck in North Korea, and because I don’t have the courage or the wits to join a resistance group and defy the government like the good-looking son of my house-arrest family, I’ll probably end my life as a prisoner. I'm not resilient enough to spend a lifetime in wandering and hiding. I sit down and cry, full of despair and still shocked by how quickly an entire life can be destroyed.

I've got several dreams to post before too long, but right now they are just outlines. I've been busy and sick and don't have energy to write them down. But this little semi-nightmare really disturbed me last night so I'm going to post it immediately, even though it's nonsensical.

In which someone shouting wakes me up...

(I've been feverish and spent last night in semi-lucid states. I kept getting sleep paralysis and also dreaming that I was waking up only to discover I was still in bed, etc.)

I feel like I've suddenly been pulled up from underwater. I can hear, but everything is muffled and distant. I can't see anything. The room sounds big and hollow. A man with an American accent shouts to me as if he is crying with anger, "This is a test! I wish I could just take you and force you to stay at home with your friends!"

The shout really shocked me awake. It sounded like it came from outside my head, not from a dream. I woke up immediately thinking that it was R shouting. He was sleeping in another room because I've been too ill for us to share a bed. I thought he must be having a nightmare, and I wanted to calm him down. I opened my mouth to shout back that I was coming, but when I tried to shout, I realized I was paralyzed. I could feel my body in my bed but I couldn't move. I've had sleep paralysis before, but this was slightly different because the temptation to just fall back into sleep was so strong. I felt desperately tired and wanted to just go back into the dream, but I kept trying to force my eyes open until I could see my room with a blur. Then, I did what I always do when I have sleep paralysis- I held my breath until the urge to gasp for air woke my body up completely.

I stumbled out of bed and went into the study where R was sleeping. I could still hear that voice echoing with such urgency. The voice sounded like someone in a violent argument. For a second, I was actually afraid to approach R until he was totally awake unless he was still as angry as he sounded when he was shouting. So first I peaked into the study and called at him from the doorway. He didn't move as he was sleeping soundly. It was about 2:45AM. I walked over to him and gently woke him up. "You're having a nightmare," I told him. But it was very hard to rouse him, and when he finally woke up he said he'd been sleeping peacefully and hadn't shouted out all.

Then I realized that voice sounded nothing at all like R, who does not have an American accent and who almost never screams or becomes angry. Moreover, I told R what the voice said and as I was saying the words out loud, I realized they are non-sensical. I dreamt the voice myself, but it seemed so real!

For the next hour after that, the house seemed to dark and too still and everything seemed fake and surreal. It was a really creepy feeling and I was too scared to sleep alone. Damn fever dreams.

mostly fragments but the emotions of the dream were really strong


In which we are in a war zone...

We are living through a war. I remember only that our town had been completely reduced to rubble, and whether or not we were aware of the national situation was irrelevant since we were on our own anyway. It was the immediacy of the situation that I remember, not the plot. There were soldiers everywhere, not our own, and they were ordering us about without regard for whatever personal crisis and trauma we were experiencing. Our houses were burnt and flooded, people were injured, parents couldn’t find their children, and we were made to move on trucks. I was with B and C hiding in my living room but not scared. We were completely absorbed in matters of immediate survival. At that moment, it was how we were to get back into C’s house to rescue his children who he’d been forced to leave there to die. I asked if the tunnel between our four houses was ever completed, and B said it was not. So we’re doomed then, I stated. They were shocked that I could be so matter-of-fact about it, but it was clear that there was nothing we could do. The soldiers would come to round us up too soon. We had nowhere else to hide. If we tried to make our way to C’s house out of line, we’d be shot. And I thought that really this is what it’s always been like. You read about some town in the ancient past that was razed, all the inhabitants slaughtered, when Genghis Khan or Hannibal or Attila the Hun roll through. It was complacent of us to think we couldn’t be caught up in something similar. Just now, people in Gaza or Syria are having their houses blown apart with their children inside, too.

But then I’m in another house and there are two blonde children knocked out on the floor. I see that they aren’t C’s kids, but I pick them up and carry them off anyway.

Then I’m in a restaurant with the kids and we have some cover to play to keep us from being recognized.


In which my neighbor is moving and selling her house too cheaply...

My nextdoor neighbor has a For Sale sign in her yard. I’m sad to see her go and a little hurt that she didn’t tell me about it beforehand. I walk over to her house for coffee, and she confirms that they are putting the house on the market and moving. They are asking 77,000. I know they bought the house for at least 120, so I ask why she’s going so low. She explains that her husband believes that sellers should never try to make money off a house as it is against his complicated system of ethics. He believes that sellers should subtract whatever home maintenance they’ve paid for, the taxes and insurance payments and their to-date mortgage payments from the amount they are asking. So since they’ve already put nearly 50 into the house, they don’t expect to get that back. They just want the difference.

I’m frustrated, and I try to explain that this isn’t how it works. By that logic, a person who completely owns a house out right should just walk away from it and give it to someone else for free. She nods her head and explains that this is exactly what her husband believes. Well, I know there is no sense in trying to reason your way through people’s ridiculous belief systems so I try another angle. Their house is nicer than my own and also worth quite a bit more. If they reduce their price to 77, which is less than I paid for mine, then they could affect the market of the whole neighborhood. I’m not going to be able to sell mine for what it’s rightfully worth.

No matter. She’s steadfast. I go home and call my husband to tell him that we should buy their house ourselves. We could sell it at a profit since they are asking too low, or we could keep it and give it to his mother. He agrees, but when I hang up the phone, I feel trapped. I’m never going to get to move anywhere else.

In which Grandma's pottery melts in the sun...

I'm at Grandma's house on the back sun porch. I've lined up four pots, two green ones and two striped ones, on the ledge of the porch's screen window. The next day, I go outside to collect them and see that they have melted into the sun. They are now four piles of mushy pottery clay. I try to shape them back into pots, but the colors are now all messed up.

In which my feet have been amputated...

I’m sitting on Grandma’s back patio sipping a drink and talking to my brother. He is complaining about a pain in his legs. I laugh and point my gold-tipped, brass governor cane down at my own legs. “At least you have feet!” I tell him.

Then I look down at my amputated stumps. I have no feet at all. This realization causes me such a surge of horror that I wake up with a jolt.


In which I have crackers for brains...

I’m in a hospital bed after a car crash. I can hear the conversations around me but I’m unable to respond or move. My mother and R are there, and they decide I need a brain transplant.

The doctor lays me across two sawhorses with the crown of my head hanging over the edge. With a circular saw, he cuts off the top my skull and then drills hinges into the two parts so that it can be opened and shut like a trunk. Then he reaches inside my head to remove my brains. I see what he pulls out: several cardboard boxes containing packages of Lay’s peanut butter crackers.


In which I'm a rock reporter in Rome...

We are in Rome. I’m a reporter assigned to interview a pop star. Beneath an arch of the Colosseum, the musician has placed an over-sized, antique Louis the 16th armchair where he sits to receive questions from the press. The chair’s wooden frame has ornately carved designs around the red velvet upholstery of the backing, seat and arm rest. It’s tacky, like a cartoon throne. Because of the chair’s ridiculously large size, the pop star sits upon it like a child in a grownup chair; his legs dangle and don’t touch the ground. He cracks a joke about the colossal size of the chair and the colossal importance of this interview.

The pop star is in disguise, and no one knows who he is. His face is painted clown white, and his hat is pulled down over his eyes. Someone has painted black designs all over his face so that he looks like a Dia de los Muertos skull, only his cheekbones have been made to look like eyes, his mouth has been made to look like a nose and his chin has been made to look like a mouth. This trick completely changes the appearance of his face so that no one recognizes him.

I’m standing in the crowd of reporters and photographers who are shouting questions and taking photos, but I’m no longer feeling interested or ambitious enough to cover the stunt. I know it’s Bob Dylan. I recognize him immediately but I don’t tell anyone. I’m irritated that he is in my dream again, but I don’t become lucid.

In which I live in a tiny, impractical house in a beautiful village and watch a horrible Tom Waits concert...

I’m living in a small A-frame house deep in the woods in another country. I have neighbors nearby, but we are all isolated in a valley like a small Swiss village. The floor of my A-frame is a small kitchen, sitting area and a loft-style bedroom. There is also a ladder leading up to a tiny wooden door from the sitting area. It's a little messy because I’m not expecting guests. The floors are dusty and there are dishes in the sink.

From the front door, a cobblestone path curves through a wooden picket fence to my neighbor’s garden. She has a cute black bob and wears punk chic clothes. We both have lush green gardens with bright flowers and many trees. She is waiting for me near her fence with a blonde girl with 50s style curls wearing a pink cashmere sweater. The neighbor and I joke that her friend is going as Ed Wood for Halloween.

We three walk through the village to the local outdoor pub. Picnic tables are arranged in a semicircle around a raised deck that acts as an events stage. Behind the stage is a Swiss style brown house with white shutters and trim. Its front door opens on to a moving walkway that carries entertainers out to the stage and then back again as if they were birds in a coo-coo clock.

We’re here to see Tom Waits. I tell the girls that I’ve seen Tom Waits in concert twice before in large urban venues. We’re excited to see him in such an intimate setting, and we move close to the stage.

Waits comes out coo-coo style and then steps over to the microphone. He tells a story, but I can’t listen to it because the Ed Wood girl and my neighbor keep talking to people through a chain-link fence that now encircles the concert area. The acoustics are poor, and I can’t understand what he's saying. A crowd gathers just outside the fence, and people inside the beer garden play horseshoes and washers. I can’t pay attention to the show admist the noise and distraction.

Tom Waits is annoyed as well because no one can hear his story. Instead, he starts singing a song from an unreleased album. He’s obviously not into the performance, and he starts to look nervous. The song isn’t going over well, and no one is paying attention. He stops singing and instead starts walking around the beer garden, jumping from picnic table to picnic table. When he comes to my table, I hold up my hand to shake his. He shakes my hand and smiles. The Ed Wood girl tells me that it was stupid to hold up my hand as if he were Bruce Springsteen. I decide I don't like her.

Then Waits disappears backstage. He returns with sunglasses and bleached hair like his mid-80s self. He asks us all to stay put while he runs out into our village for a quick bit of exercise. I’m confused about what is going on. My two companions explain that sometimes he gets stage fright and has to try things like this to get himself into the zone. This seems weird to me, and I tell them that the last two times I saw him, he was an energetic performer. But no one else seems to think it’s weird. Everyone just sits down patiently and waits for him.

Before Tom Waits returns, I notice my Aunt C and her family through the chain link fence. They explain that they’ve come to the village as tourists and would like to see my home. I’ve bragged a lot about what a beautiful place it is. I’m nervous now about showing it to them because I remember that I’ve left it messy, and besides, they are wealthy people who live in a large house in the suburbs. They won’t understand what a beautiful place I live in because they are accustomed to sitting around indoors with modern furniture and electronics.

On the walk to my house, I try to explain that people here have small houses because they spend most of their time outdoors. My house is tiny but it’s cute, and besides, I’m usually sitting in my garden or hiking in the surrounding mountains. I point at the majestic landscape surrounding us, but they don't appreciate it. They give it a glance and say she understands, but I can tell they're looking down on me.

We step into my house, but the sitting room doesn’t have enough chairs for my aunt, two cousins and their partners. They look around confused about where to sit. I suggest we sit in the garden, as I explained, but they want to be indoors. I tell them that when it is cold or raining, we usually sit on the floor in front of the fire place. They try to act like they are comfortable, but I can tell they are not.

One of my cousins sees my loft bed and says it is really quaint that I have a guest area. I feel too embarrassed to tell her that this is actually my bed and that we have no room for guests. So instead I just smile and nod. Then she asks me if she can see my bedroom. She points to the ladder, and I realize that they think the ladder leads to a master suite. Actually, it just leads to a bit of storage in the attic, but I figure they are too fat and unhealthy to climb up it, so I lie and say the bedroom is upstairs.

Later I climb up the ladder and it leads to a small window. I open the window and then have to crawl through a tunnel to another smaller door. The door is so small that I can barely squeeze my way through it. Then I’m straddling the ledge of the doorway looking into a small room below. I have to jump down to get in, but instead I just look at the room. I remember that in a previous dream, I’d jumped into this room and then found it very difficult to get back out. It’s hard to crawl back up the wall to the doorway ledge. Once you get there, you have to go back through the tunnel backwards. Plus the room has a window that doesn’t open so it gets hot in there. Instead of continuing, I just return back the way I came and sit down in my sitting room. I’m feeling disappointed now and I wonder why anyone ever built that room in the first place. It’s just a waste of space.

In which I find out that my grandmother isn't really dead...

I'm at my dad's cabin and we are drinking beer and sitting on his bunk beds. He accidentally tells me that my grandmother is still alive. I don't believe him at first and remind him that I went to her funeral. He points out that there was no coffin- just an urn- so how do I know that it was really full of ashes from her body? I'm shocked.

He explains that she actually had some brain damage and now lives in a nursing home. I start to cry about this. Guilt rolls over me. I'm thinking of her sitting there alone for a decade in a nursing home. My dad explains that she wouldn't know me anyway and that the reason he staged the funeral was to spare us the hurt of trying to help her when she wouldn't even recognize us. I tell him that I'm sure she'd know me, but he says this is emotional thinking. He says that everyone thinks their loved one will recognize them, and then they are doubly hurt when they don't. He explains that it's not personal, it's biological, and that there is no way my grandmother knows who we are. She can't even remember who she is.

Well this relieves my guilt a little bit because it means that at least she isn't sitting around wondering why I've forsaken her. But then a new horror upsets me. That means she's been sitting in this nursing home for ten years in a frightened and confused state. She doesn't know who she is or where she is and she can't remember anything about her life. Can you imagine how horrible that might be? I start to cry and I tell my dad that he shouldn't have left her all alone. Maybe the people aren't nice to her. Maybe we could at least make her less afraid or less lonely even if she didn't know us. We would have more patience and try harder to make her more comfortable.

I'm really upset and full of regret. It's such a horrible feeling that I wake up slightly. In reality, I'm actually in a hotel room, but I don't wake up enough to realize that. I wake up and I still think I'm in the bunk in dad's cabin. I'm in bed still upset, determined that in the morning I'm going to jump a flight to Houston to see what I can do about my grandmother's situation. But then slowly it dawns on me that she really is dead. She died of cancer and I wasn't there at the end because I was young and busy and going about my life. The end came fast, and she'd been surrounded by the people she loved, except for me. I hadn't wanted to face it, so I never even talked to her about it in the last few months. So on the one hand I'm relieved that the dream isn't real, but on the other hand I stiill feel guilty about the truth. It was a horrible night.

In which I leave misplaced hospital patients out in the sun and dream of movie scenes...

I'm walking up the path to my grandmother's old house. Everything looks just as it used to. My key still works, and I open the door to her main hallway where I'm surprised to see two people, in hospital beds with IV poles sticking up, covered by white sheets so that only their faces are exposed. I'm annoyed that they are blocking my grandma's hallway and realize immediately that the hospital has made some mistake. I wheel the beds out into the front lawn and go inside, leaving the sick people in the heat.

A news woman then approaches me with a microphone and television camera. She tells me that she understands that the hospital mixed up the addresses and that I have no legal responsibility to care for the patients. She agrees that it is a bizarre thing to happen. She turns to the camera, and in the news anchor's overly serious and dramatic tone, she asks her viewers, "What would YOU do, if you came home to find in YOUR living room, two sick people lying in hospital beds?" Then the camera crew pans my grandma's front lawn and shows the now dehydrated patients before turning back to me. The anchor continued, "This woman just rolled them out into the sun. They are someone else's problem to her, and she has broken no law since the patients shouldn't be on her property in the first place."

After setting me up this way, the anchor then addressed me directly. "Most of us would've taken care of these people until the mix-up was sorted out. Why don't you feel a moral responsibility to help?"

I push her off the patio which no longer looks like my grandmother's old front porch. It now looks like the raised wrap-around patio surrounding the Tara house in Gone with the Wind. The anchor woman lands in the mud and drops her microphone. Her skirt flies up above her head and I laugh at how undignified she looks. I tell her it doesn't matter if the patients wither up and die out in the sun. They are just a nuisance. They are an obstacle in my dream. Just like she is. She argues that I'm not dreaming. She lectures me that if I continue on in these reckless delusions, I will have the blood of the patients on my hands.

I point to two men sitting on the patio eating gruel with big wooden spoons. They are unshaved and have long scraggly hair. They are dressed in the faded and dusty tatters of Civil War uniforms. "If this isn't a dream, where did those guys come from?" I ask the muddy newswoman. "You just wait. Any minute now, Ashley is going to come walking up that drive, and Melanie will run out to greet him."

As soon as I say it, a woman wearing a beautiful, layered 19th century dress comes running up the drive with her skits and petticoats gathered in her hands. But it's not Melanie. It's Claude Chabrol's Madame Bovary. I'm completely lucid now, and I feel some embarrassment that my dream has just become a patchwork of scenes from movies. I wonder what would've happened if I'd just continued into the house. I realize then that I can do whatever I want for the remainder of the dream, but this idea is so exciting that I wake up instantly.

In which we find messages that foretell the deaths of our young hikers...

I'm leading a backpacking group of boy scouts on a hike through the woods. I've slept late, and the troop has gone on ahead of me under other adult supervision. I'm panicked at first as I hurry with packing up my tent, bag and cooking supplies. I'm afraid that they will have gone on so far ahead of me that I can't possibly catch up. But then I look at the itinerary and see that we are only moving 1.5 miles this day. This seems absurd, but instead of questioning it, I just feel relieved to have time to have coffee.

Some park rangers come along with a basket of plastic Easter eggs for the kids. Inside each egg, they tell me, is a message for the scouts that will lead them on a scavenger hunt. It sounds like a fun idea to me so I agree to deliver them to the kids.

Now I'm at the new camp. There is a playroom in the center of our campsite where the scouts are all playing. The kids are very young- toddlers mostly and a few young elementary-aged boys. They are all platinum blonde curly headed boys with pale blue eyes. I joke with another adult that it's like we are hiking with the kids from Village of the Damned.

I bring the Easter eggs to two of the boys who are brothers. One is slightly older than the other but neither is older than five or six, yet both can apparently read quite well. The boys take the eggs excitedly, and the elder one opens his first. He pulls a piece of paper from it as if it were the message from a fortune cookie, and then he looks back up at me with horror. I take the paper from him to see what it is about. It is a numbered list of four things that will happen to him that day:

1. You will get an Easter egg.
2. Your brother will die.
3. You will find a hat full of pine needles.
4. You will die.

Just as I'm absorbing the message and thinking of how to explain it to the older brother, the younger one starts to scream and then cry loudly the way a child does when he has seriously hurt himself. He is standing helplessly with his own paper in his hand, howling. I take it away from him and read what his says:

"You will die in the next seventeen seconds."

The child is terrified, so I pick him up and hold on to him to try to give him some comfort. I'm patting him on the back and holding his head on my shoulder while I tell him that it's not true. It's just a mean joke and he is perfectly safe.

"See?" I tell him. "It's already been seventeen seconds and you are fine." This soothes the child, and he climbs down from my arm and starts to suck on a mango pip which he inhales accidentally. He gasps for a moment, then collapses dead. He suffocated instantly- exactly seventeen seconds after reading his egg.

Now it is his brother's turn to cry while I'm busy trying to do the Heimlich on the younger one. Other scout troop leaders rush over. They start arguing over what we should do. Some tell me to turn him upside down and hit him on the back instead of doing the Heimlich. Others say we should do nothing since the boy is obviously dead already. All the adults start screaming at each other.

Meanwhile the elder brother is sobbing and looking at his dead brother's body in my arms. I lay the body down and look at the brother. All around us, I see the calves and knees of the panicking adults who are still running amok and shouting at each other. The sobbing brother and I are still. We are just staring at each other because we know now that the messages in the eggs are true. But I realize I need to be strong for the child and not let him be so afraid.

"It may be a long time before it happens," I tell him. "Years, even." But as soon as I say that, a ranger comes into the group and lifts up the dead child's body. Underneathe him is a hat full of pine needles. The elder brother sees this and shrieks so loudly that it wakes me up with a start.

In which I try to navigate an Asia water freeway and then run late to a meeting with my family...

I'm standing and holding an innertube around my waist, trying to merge on to a river freeway. There are two sections of the waterway with a rock wall median in between. The one I'm trying to enter is flowing from my left to my right, and the other is flowing in the opposite direction. I'm poised at the chute, and the water is rushing by me. I'm looking to my left at the white water, waiting until there is a lull to jump in. The timing will have to be just right because I want to get up on the rock median quickly after entering the water so that I can u-turn and head the opposite direction. If I miss my exit, I'll have to take the river all the way into town.

I take a deep breath and then jump. The waves start pummeling me and the current is pulling me fast. I'm grasping the innertube to keep my head up and kicking my legs furiously to move me towards the wall. I lose my flip flops in the water. But I can't make it. I come frustratingly close to the median. I see others standing on safely on the dry rock. They look down at me passively. I reach out and rake my fingers along the wall as I pass by. It's cold and smooth and I have nothing to grip, but I fling myself at it anyway in a desperate attempt to pull myself up. In reaching up at the wall, I let go of the innertube and it slips off my legs. Then I slip away down the river myself.

I float along for a few more minutes until the river calms, then I come to a low section of the rock median. A thin Indian laborer with a pencil mustache and wearing only a dhoti motions at me from the wall. I reach up and we grasp each others' arms just above the wrist. He pulls me up, and I notice the musculature of his workers' arms. His wife is nearby with plastic bucket of rocks on her head. They are the median builders. There are shards of broken bottles cemented into most of the wall to keep stragglers from exiting at places like this. The next official exit is in the city central.

"Where is your innertube? Why are you barefoot?" The laborer asks me. I explain that I tried to catch the last exit up and let go of the tub in the process. He clicks his tongue and shakes his head in disapproval. I ask if there is any way I can jump in to the other side so that I can get home. He points over the edge and I see that there is a long drop off to get into the water. It's shallow there, and I'd probably break my neck trying to jump in. There's nothing I can do but finish taking the river on up to the city central and then making a u-turn there. But this will be impossible without an innertube.

"Can't I just walk up the sidewalk? If I cross the river back again to the side where I started, can't I just walk and avoid the water freeway altogether?" As I say this, the landscape grows around me. Buildings come up to line both sides of the river freeway and footbridges cross over us. We are suddenly in a bustling East Asian city. Storefronts and busy city sidewalks line each side of the river and apartments with balconies of laundry, plants and sweeping housewives rise up above us.

"Am I in Bangkok?" I ask the Indian. He nods his head. Oh! Well I can just walk home then!

I jump back into my side of the river and swim to shore. I get out and start walking but I'm wet and barefoot so it's not very pleasant.

At this point, either I've forgotten part of the dream or else it blends into another one without any real segue, but next thing I know, I'm walking into the front door of my grandmother's old house. My father, brother and uncle are there, sleeping. It is night time and everything is dark.

My brother is in the living room sitting on the floor next to my grandmother's old orange armchairs rolling a joint with a girl by a dim tableside lamp. I'm surprised because I didn't know he smoked, but I don't want to embarrass him in front of his guest, so I act like I don't notice. He's rolling the joint with a sheet of notebook paper. He starts to light it up and I stop him and explain that he can't inhale that burnt paper without injuring his lungs. I tell him about how scar tissue in the lungs would affect the diffusion of gases across his capillaries and alveoli, and to illustrate I draw a picture of what looks like a light bulb to represent the alveoli and some squiggy lines on the bottom to represent the capillaries.

Then the situation changes. I tear off a shred of the paper that I was just drawing on and use it to roll a joint. My brother stops me and says that I need to use rolling paper. I explain that I have rolling paper, but that I don't know how to roll a joint. He says he'll do it for me if I bring him the papers.

I go to my uncle's room which is where I'm staying. But when I walk into the room and look at the familiar striped curtains, I remember that if I pull them open, I will see a frozen scene of birds flying. This was what happened in a previous dream and I know that this will always happen any time I come into this room in a dream. So I pull open the curtains and sure enough, there is a giant bird with a huge wingspan flying towards the window but it is frozen in time as if it were a picture. There are other birds behind it, and I can also see the sunlight, green grass and great tree of my grandmother's old front yard. I remember that I need to step outside to retrieve something that was left behind.

I go out her front door and start wandering around the front yard. I can't remember exactly what I was doing or who I was talking to. It is sunny outside, and I feel very young. Then I walk over to the garage and open the door, and suddenly it is night time and dark again.

My father is sitting in a chair in the dark garage. He asks me what took so long for me to come back home. I point to my barefeet and wet clothes and tell him that I had some difficulty with the water freeway. I tell him how I had to walk through Bangkok to get home. He just blows me off and laughs about how I'm always running late and can't keep regular appointments. I try to explain that I don't live the way he does, and considering that I've just managed to make my way through Asia on my own without transportation or shoes, I think I've done pretty well just to be a few hours late. My brother comes in and asks for the rolling papers and I remember that I left them in my uncle's bedroom. They just laugh that I can't ever get anything done right.

In which my breath stinks...

Just a fragment:

I'm riding in the cab of a heavy work truck of some sort. I'm sitting in the middle of a long front seat between the driver and a passenger. The control panel with the stickshift gears is at my knees, and we're crowded. We are going through a rural mountainous landscape on a bad road. The drive is slow and difficult. Both men are dirty with sweat and heavy labour. They have bulging muscles and I feel tiny between them.

I say something to the passenger. He reaches into his work bag and pulls out a small green pack of spearmint gum and offers one to me. I'm keenly aware that I have horrrible coffee breath, so I accept the gum and try not to talk too much.

"I'm sorry," I tell them, "but I just can't stay awake on these roads without any coffee."

I know it must be horrible to be stuck in a crowded place with someone who has stinky breath, but these guys are too tough to complain about it.

In which MCA is shot and I must give him emergency care...

I'm in a very fancy hostel with a white tiled common room. The walls are also white, there is a fountain in the middle of the room and there is a large mirror on one wall. In the back of the room are two doors, each leading to a locker-room type shower. I'm sitting on the couch chatting with the Beastie Boys' MCA.

I know I'm dreaming, but I'm not lucid. Throughout our conversation, I repeatedly tell MCA that we are both dreaming. He knows he is dreaming too. But we can't manipulate the dream, and the fact that we know we are dreaming doesn't change anything. It's just like knowing you are alive. You can look at someone and say, "We are alive" but that doesn't change anything about being alive. It's just a statement of fact. That's how it was in the dream.

MCA is telling me how he is going to die that evening. He says that someone is going to come into the hostel and shoot him. He's very calm about it and not at all afraid to die. He says it will happen as soon as I go to take a shower and leave him alone.

I respond that if this is true, that we can change the course of events. I tell him that I'll simply not take a shower, then the dream can't unfold as planned and he won't die. He is stoic about it. He says that he accepts that the dream must end with him dying and that there is no point in trying to change it. He says that he has come to the hostel just so that it will happen here and his wife and daughter won't have to see it. He says that if I refuse to leave for the shower, then he'll be forced to go home and get shot, and his daughter will have to watch him die.

He convinces me that I should leave the room and allow the dream to unfold. I'm really sorry about it, but I agree that it must be done. I go into the locker room type shower. I'm the only person in there so I can shower without embarrassment even though it is a group type shower. The whole time, I'm fighting the urge not to rush through and run back out into the hostel common room to save MCA. It's a hard thing to let someone die, and I just keep telling myself that it's only a dream anyway. When I step out of the shower, I look at myself in a full length mirror near the sink. Something is wrong. I notice that I have a penis and I wonder if it was there before. This can't be right, I think to myself. Even in a dream, this isn't right. I look in the mirror again, and the penis is gone. I'm starting to feel some relief about that when I hear a gun shot ringing from the common room. I quickly dress and then run back into the room to see MCA laying on the floor in a pool of blood. He's been shot in the stomach, but he's still breathing.

I run over to him and try to apply pressure to his wound to stop the flow of blood. A crowd is starting to enter the hostel, and they all gather around me and tell me to do something to save him. He is looking around, stunned and scared and in pain. I can't stop the bleeding. My professor and my step-mother are both there. They tell me I need to calculate his cardiac output. I try to think about the loss of blood volume and whether or not the heart would speed up or slow down to compensate. Would the force of contraction increase or decrease? I can't remember, and I feel a lot of pressure to act quickly. I keep getting confused about blood osmolarity and blood pressure. More people are around us in a circle. Some are shouting at me that I'm not working fast enough. Others are crying because he is dying.

I realize that it is hopeless to try to save him, so instead I just focus on making him comfortable. Now his head is in my lap and I'm holding his hand. He is losing a lot of blood, and he looks scared. I know he will die in another minute or two, and he knows it too. He looks at me and I say, "Adam, it's OK. This is only a dream, remember?" He smiles and dies.

I stand up and notice in the large mirror that I am covered in blood. I see Mike D standing nearby, and he tells me he is going to call MCA's wife and tell her he is dead. I tell him not to call her since this is only a dream. But Mike D says, "This isn't a dream. He's really dead."

Then I realize it's true, and I feel really guilty for not studying more for my last physiology test. If I understood more about osmolarity, I might have been able to save him.

In which I narrowly avoid stepping on a rattlesnake...

I’m walking barefoot down some concrete apartment steps at night. E is just behind me, and my right hand is on the metal railing. The lighting is poor, and it’s dark enough that I only barely see what looks like a colorful bandana on the step below. I’m about to place my foot on it and continue when I think of the live coral snake we saw in the street a couple of weeks ago, so I quickly lift my foot back up and halt. E bumps into me, and I point at the step.

I squat on the step and bend forward to get a better look. I hear hissing and rattling, and I jump back several feet up the stairs. E and I fall over back on the balcony, and her hands are on my shoulders. “There’s no mistaking that sound,” she says.

In which I feel a lot of guilt for ruining a family 4th of July gathering...

It’s the 4th of July, and I’m at my grandmother’s house with my brother and uncle. I’ve brought along some flags, and A pulls out a tin drum. We don’t have a flute, but my brother has a basket of eggs from my chickens and somehow this is a good substitute. We start to march down the street playing Yankee Doodle, but A stumbles over a rock in the street. He stops playing drums and our mini-parade halts. We try to get him to keep walking, but he just stares at the rock and says he can’t figure out how to get around it.

My brother and I go back into the house. I suggest that we dye the eggs and have an egg search, but he thinks this idea is silly. We sit down in the living room with my grandmother who is watching TV at such a loud volume that we can’t talk to each other.

I look out the window and A is still standing there in front of the rock. I tell him to just walk around it. He shuffles slightly to the right and left, and then he throws his arms up in the air as if to say that it’s impossible.

I walk out to the street and tell him that he has a cerebellar disorder. I know because I have one too. I tell him about the sheep’s brain we dissected. We just need to eat more cauliflower. He agrees, but he’s angry now. We go back into the house, and he joins us in watching TV.

I decide to leave because I’m bored and irritated. I feel really terrible that the whole day was such a disaster. I feel like it was somehow my fault.

In which I make a puppet movie...

I’m a young man on the roof of a building with two other friends. We’re dressed like urban folkies from the 50s in the faux-working class style with long sleeve, snap-button denim shirts, work boots and engineer’s caps. It is dark all around us except that the stars are shining brightly.

We’re filming a string puppet movie, and each of us is the master of a different Beat writer puppet. I’m pulling the strings for Jack Kerouac, making him act out a scene in which he talks about something with such enthusiasm that he flails his arms about excitedly, loses balance and almost falls off the roof.

Later, I am running, carefree, along a city sidewalk behind my two friends. It’s dark still, but there are lamp posts and everything looks gray and blue. I zig zag along the edge of the sidewalk, alternately stepping into the street and stepping up onto the curb, flailing my arms about like Kerouac on the roof. We laugh and talk loudly.