At first I am driving a car: cramped, one-lane, one-way city streets. I am crossing an intersection, and just as I reach the far side traffic is stopped up ahead. After some confusion it comes out that a cop has been stabbed and killed on this block, and traffic is stopped completely for the crime scene. Some hardened city type ahead of me curses angrily at the news (because he is inconvenienced) as he turns to find another way.

I am able to back up a bit and turn into the cross street. Still holding a mental map of the grid in my mind, I am confident I can re-route myself.

Now I am on a bicycle, still in the city heading to meet my sister. I am stopped at another intersection, waiting for the light to change with a group of pedestrians. A group of teenage boys asks me where I got the bicycle, and we start talking. They ask if I’m from here and I say, “No, I’m in from Baltimore.” I ask about them and they’re tourists, too. San Diego or something.

Now I am driving again, and giving the boys a ride since we’re heading in the same direction. The streets have become a little more suburban now — reminds me of Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. We’re stopped at another intersection, waiting for the light to change. It is a clear, sunny day.

Suddenly we see a plane overhead, coming in low. Its tail is on fire. We see orange flames and thick black smoke trailing behind it. It passes overhead on the left, attempting to land at the airport nearby, but overshoots and pulls up. Circling back around for another try, it is again coming towards us on the left, but it is beginning to lose control. We watch in anxious horror as it falls lower and lower. It is coming almost right at us!

The plane slams into the ground just behind us and to the left. If it had hit any further in front of us we’d have been fried. The sound is incredible — a roar and then a huge impact and explosion, a blast of hot air and debris. We and the car are unhurt, but smoke is filling the neighborhood. One of the boys starts to roll his window down, but we all yell, “No!” We don’t want the car to fill with toxic fumes from the burning gas. I even make a point of switching the air intake from external to recycled.

We are all in shock. There are clearly no survivors in the plane, and I drive on, continuing on my south/west route through downtown. Stopped at the next light I slump forward in my seat and pant, “Oh God! Oh God!” The horror and intensity of what happened — and how close we were to obliteration — are overwhelming.

We are seated indoors at the restaurant. The atmosphere is nice, almost fancy, but one of the walls is swarming with millipedes and other bugs.My parents comment that this is rather unappetizing, to which I point out that we ARE in a valley near water, with a lot of trees. Some insects, I say, are almost inevitable. Plus millipedes aren’t so bad.

“There are even honeybees,” I point out, gesturing to a nearby tree. We are seated outside now. Bees swarm around the upper branches of the tree, circling several honey-dripping combs.

Now it is night, and we are in the lodge where everyone will sleep. The bees live in the rafters of a large public room. They are not a source of alarm. On the contrary, the honey practically pours from their work.

I am a kid again, collecting honey in a small jar. The honey is so abundant, I can hold the jar under a stream and fill it quickly. I drink the honey, delighting in its rare sweetness. It is luxurious, a treat from before civilization, unmediated by commerce or control.

The others have gone to bed, asleep in various rooms. I want to make a present of the honey to our friends’ daughter, so I find a cardboard tube with a plastic base. The tube is open along its length, though, so as it fills with honey I worry about it spilling out. There is a small refrigerator in my room, with a freezer on the bottom. I put the tube with the honey in the freezer, thinking this should keep it solid till morning.

Now the dream, up till now quite beautiful, turns terrifying. The honey, freezing, begins to expand. There is a sense of mounting alarm, of an explosion building. Flash of an animated Disney train whistle, frantically tugging at my sleeve to get me away from the freezer. It is too late! A huge chunk of frozen honey bursts open the freezer, startling the others awake. There is a cat partially frozen in it, crying in terror at being trapped. “Oh God! Oh God!” we are saying.

The dream-terror reaches a crescendo. I am panicked and appalled at the tortured animal. But I am also afraid and ashamed because my foolishness has broken the refrigerator, and I will get in trouble. It’s all gone suddenly, horribly wrong. I awake, screaming and gasping for air. My heart is racing and a chill of fear reverberates through my entire body.

The bus moves on, but to my dismay stops somewhere before reaching its final destination. It’s the driver’s house, where he has stopped to pick something up. My friend and I stay on the bus, sensing that something is not right. There are bison on the front lawn.

Suddenly, the bus pivots in place and rolls down the road. I say, “That was odd.” Building sense of dread.

I am outside the bus on the pavement. There is yelling from above. Looking up, I see the fat man appear in a clear sky, falling from a great height. He almost hits me, splatting bloodily on the pavement. As I expect, his eyes open and he floats up and onto the back of the horse I am now sitting on. There is something evil about him, unholy. I understand now that we are up against some sort of powerful demon, but am unsure whether there is personal danger. He vanishes, ominously. I look around.

Suddenly his voice rings out, resonant, massive, and sarcastic: “I’m crumbling with love.” (Referring to the woman who helped him, clearly.) Some distance away, he materializes AS a high-rise building, immediately cracking and collapsing in a spray of blood. I’m getting scared. He keeps reappearing, dying horribly, persistent, mocking our initial dismissal of him as a harmless geek.

I make eye contact, and am noticed. I cannot draw myself away from the attractive otherness of this still-human creature.

My route along the street takes me towards her. Finished with her meal, she stands and steps to the sidewalk. Though she seems to join some (human) friends, and holds herself a bit like a standoffish punk, I introduce myself. There seems little need for pretense in a case this extreme, and I find her responsive and articulate. “What are you?” I ask.

“I am from the human future. This is what you [humans] become.” She hands me a pill. “Here. This pill will allow you to gain nourishment from almost anything.” Understanding begins to dawn on me. I think of a future where overpopulation and ecological disruption have changed the food supply beyond normal human capacity, but where the tools of science have not been entirely lost in the regression to tribalism. If the usual food supply can not be sustained, why not modify the body to accept what is available as food? I think of the dead pigeon. And the bluish skin — doesn’t this suggest lower levels of oxygen in the blood? Perhaps a corrupt and depleted atmosphere might some day give rise to such a condition in the larger population. I shudder at the vision.

Yet this human is healthy and efficient, emminently alive. She speaks to the survival of the Human amid unthinkable adversity. There is a pill resting in my palm. If I take this, it will change me in ways which I do not know. Will I start eating roadkill? Worse, will I survive while watching those I love perish horribly? The taking of this pill seems to have far-reaching implications. Dare I do it?

I have entered a residence, it seems, but such an ornate one! The space is incredible, with huge, idiosyncratic chambers whose layout hints at some larger plan. Some chambers are tiered, with one half raised several inches above the other — usually the outer edge, the one with the windows. Through the windows I catch glimpses of lawns and patios, and pools of water. As is becoming common in my dreams, many of the rooms are paneled with heavy, dark wood, sometimes with metal finishing.

No one is around, and I am increasingly nervous about being caught trespassing. Yet the space is enchanting! All too soon my fears are confirmed as through a window I see a car pulling up to the building. Somehow the plainness of the vehicle, augmented by ‘dream intuition’, tells me that this is not the occupant of the building, but rather an undercover security agent sent to kill me and hide the evidence. I will not have a chance to negotiate or reason: this is a professional in the service of powerful interests, who have little time to waste on me.

Luckily, forewarned by this intuition, I make my way out without being apprehended.

Space 2: I am in an environment somewhere between Burning Man and a computer adventure game. It is a large outdoor area consisting of various structures and enclosures. Most of these are self-standing, though a few are connected in some way. Each represents a particular puzzle or challenge, and yet together form one ‘level’ of a larger activity. In order to move past this level, I am required to execute a chain of problem-solving, acquiring objects or modifying existing configurations. And I must keep my water bottle with me at all times.

Several of these challenges are almost gymnastic in nature, requiring climbing, swinging, or sliding. At some points I am very high off the ground, other times I am walking or crawling through passageways. I am very close to the final goal (for some reason envisioned as a square blue portal), but need to figure out how to get to the top of a large structure. It is a sunny day and I am entirely engrossed in this massive goal-oriented activity.

I give them a compelling spech about how I got the whole thing on videotape, and their corrupt empire is about to fall apart. I really didn’t care about the shirt, but I was full of hatred and anger. (Not often experiencing or at least acknowledging these emotions on a day-to-day basis, I wonder if I don’t use dreeams as a form of catharsis.) My speech was very effective: they got scared and pulled guns. Using my dream magic, I quickly grabbed the guns and held one gun in each hand, aimed at each man. I had them look up, and there were the station security cameras, which I think I planted as a semi-lucid stunt. Someone was playing a harpsichord…

So I am then with some lady in a strange house. There is a large piano there, and I realize it is actually an electric organ. But when I hit the keys, it plays a real piano note in addition to the synthetic organ note. An interesting effect. The lady I am with can play one melody on the piano and one on the organ at the same time. I can only get the same melody in different tones, as I can only hit one key at a time. How does she do that? I notice a harpsichord, and ask if I can play it. I have never seen one before, but I love the sound and am dying to experiment. She starts playing and I am hungry…

I go into a convenience store, which doesn’t seem to be open. Some friend I am with takes some cheese popcorn, which I find nasty. I look around for something else. The clerk suddenly emerges, and suggests the cook’s famous red-hot french fries, but I have to find him and ask him to make them. This proves to be simple enough. But I realize that there is a fight going on outside. Not one to get involved, I watch detatchedly for a little while. Then I realize it is not a fair fight; it is a friend of mine being killed by about six men. I run out there, and again, summoning some dream magic, quickly remove the weapons from one of them, who happens to be the old-generation Spock! I aim the phaser at his neck, and ask him why he is fighting — surely it is not Logical.

He says that it is not logical to fear death, so my phaser aimed at him doesn’t phase him! Well, I give him a little blast and it changes his mind. I say, “Aha, you ARE half human! now stop bickering! Can’t we all listen to the Carpenters in peace?” I give another moving speech, words coming out of me from nowhere. I realize that I have taken on Kirk’s odd, melodramatic mannerism. (I must interject, I really hate old Star Trek, and never watch it, never really have.) I talk about Harmony, Love, and the Carpenters. Spock finally agrees that listening to them might not be so bad, and I go back to the piano/organ thing, and try to play “Close to You”. I can’t do it, but the lady can. I notice that the clock radio has turned on, and is playing the Carpenters. Soon it plays “When You’re in Love With a Beautiful Woman” by Smokey Robinson, or Al Jarreau, or some other “smooth lover” type guy. Strange, I didn’t know there was Lite Rock in Japan. I certainly don’t remember setting the clock radio to turn on.

Somehow my friends continued on ahead, and I got delayed. The room I was in was fairly large, two stories high, with one huge window overlooking a busy intersection from a couple of stories up. The sunlight slanted in, illuminating paints and boards and brushes and pens and pieces of stage scenery, filing cabinets and drafting tables. The whole thing had a very arts-and-crafts sort of feel to it, which reminded me of my art classes in elementary school. Within the space was a sort of second level, an office against the back wall, reachable by a small flight of stairs, and opening into the rest of the building. There were also entrances leading from the ground level of the room, underneath the office.

Attempting to find my way to the theater, I walked through a doorway and down a short hall. I heard voices. Peering through an open doorway, I saw a man and woman rehearsing on a small stage as if for a play. Somehow I realized that they were actually rehearsing for one of the movies showing at the theater! It didn’t make any sense, but anyway I was too nervous about lurking around in this office, so I ducked back out the way I came.

But then I heard footsteps, and quickly climbed up into the elevated office. It was a tiny room, with a few paint cans and brushes, and a window that overlooked the rest of the room and the street outside. To my dismay, the footsteps came straight to where I was standing. A busy-looking woman my age rounded the corner into the room, and seemed only mildly startled to see me. I apologized and explained that I’d gotten a little lost in here. I noted what a neat space it was, and how enchanted I would have been as a child to be in here. She directed me through a door that would supposedly lead me to the theater, and I thanked her.

As I stepped through the doorway, I entered a kind of space which I often encounter in the dream world. It is a network of passageways, portals, chutes, stairs, and ledges. There are sometimes dead-ends and cul-de-sacs, but more often one chamber leads to another, and so on, opening up endlessly to my exploration. Each such space I dream of has a particular character, or ‘texture’, which is generally consistent with the rest of the dream. In this case, the space was composed of wood-paneled stairs and hallways, wooden doors with brass knobs. Everything was polished and slightly muted, as wood rooms are, and the floors creaked slightly underfoot.

I was not in the space for long, and can remember only a few features. There were two stairways, one immediately beneath the other. The top one led to a little wooden door, which was locked, and the lower one dead-ended in a wooden railing. This double stair was in the middle of a room, which had another, single stairway on the right side, and hallways leading off beyond the staircases. It seems there were more rooms before and after this, but I don’t recall.

Soon I emerged and found my friends, who were having a picnic! Apparently, the movie didn’t start for another half hour, and everyone was hanging out eating in what appeared to be a backyard patio. There was still plenty of food left, so I went into the kitchen, washed off a plate and a glass, and helped myself. (The potato salad was particularly yummy.) While I was washing, one of the net.friends, an intense woman with wavy blond hair and glasses, was talking about shamanic brews. She said something like, “Yeah, I’ve tried ayahuasca, but what really interests me is aya_____.” (I can’t remember the word she used, something like ‘ayawhopo‘ maybe.) “That’s where they basically mix everything together!” (Implying that it was particularly potent, maybe ayahuasca with a psilocybin admixture.)

As we were sitting around, I was struck with a sort of déjà vu. Something about this scene, the people and the sunlight, reminded me of a movie. No — it reminded me of another dream. The strange thing was, I couldn’t remember ever having actually had that dream! Was I remembering a dream, or dreaming a memory? In retrospect, I think that I was remembering a fragment of a dream I had had earlier in the night. It had something to do with a group of people, hanging from the edge of a cliff. Someone had a knife… Just an impression, nothing more.

That was it, really. I never did get to see the movie, I think, but a picnic with friends isn’t half bad. Potato salad, anyone?

I work at CNN, and when I got to work, my producers had decided that the accident was actually sabotage, and they somehow knew of a clue: a long, human hair found at the site of the explosion. This was somehow a link to the saboteur.

Myself and two other people from my unit (Natalie and Julie, our writer and assistant producer) were sent to the neighborhood around the airstrip (MY neighborhood) just to browse around and try to find what we could find. I drove to the spot where I’d been when I heard about the explosion, and got out of the car: through some bushes, on the other side of the road from the interstate, I saw a cluster of houses around a cul-de-sac that didn’t connect to the access road.

I climbed through the bushes and reached the cul-de-sac. The houses were a kind of fake Bavarian style, with diamond-pane windows and steeply pitched roofs. They were yellow with dark green highlights… not at all authentic. I noticed that each house had three street addresses on it, and realized that they were triplexes.

I went into one of the houses, and found a hallway running through the middle of it with three “front doors” in it. I rang the bell at one door, and got no answer. I went to the next one, and an old man opened the door. I explained I worked for CNN and was looking for people who might have been at the airstrip when the explosion happened, and he let me in.

The room inside was small and crowded, with lots of bookshelves. It was very gothic, but with plenty of windows to the outside. There was a recliner in the middle of the room with an even older man laid back in it, and a younger man was standing nearby, a little older than me, but not by much. He was very muscular and had long, dark hair and a thick beard. The oldest man in the recliner spoke to me first.

“I heard about that terrible accident,” the oldest man said to me, and I realized that I knew him. He was Eddie Albert, the actor who played Oliver Wendell Douglas, the main character on Green Acres. I asked him if he was Mr. Albert, and he said yes. Rolling his eyes, he asked, “I guess you watched me while you were growing up, right?” and I said, “Actually, I watched you in RERUNS while I was growing up… I’m sure you didn’t want to hear that!” He laughed at that, and at the same time, my co-workers from CNN showed up, wondering where I was.

Julie and Natalie started going through Eddie Albert’s apartment like a couple of police detectives looking for evidence, while I kept talking to Mr. Albert. His hands were very mottled, almost purple, and I asked him what had happened to them. He said, “They tried to shut down on me,” which I took to mean that he had circulation problems. I realized then that Natalie and Julie didn’t know whose apartment they were in, so I asked them, “Have you ever seen Green Acres?” Julie (who is younger than the rest of us) hadn’t, but Natalie had, and she was as enthralled as I was to meet Eddie Albert, as prone and weak as he was.

The youngest man in the apartment, with the long hair and the beard, was now naked and covering himself in thick oil from a jar. I’m gay, and I found him VERY attractive, but I tried to avoid staring because I was around co-workers. I felt very awkward with him being naked around two female co-workers, but neither of them seemed to notice him. The other old man, who I now realized was a butler, explained to me that Mr. Albert’s assistant was about to go through a time-machine kind of device, to live in an “alternate today.”

“It’s like the alternate universe’s version of today, right?” asked Eddie Albert.

“He refers to it as the ‘opposite‘ of today,” replied the butler.

It suddenly occurred to me that the long hair found at the site of the explosion could have come from this long-haired man, and that neither the butler nor Eddie Albert had made this connection. My alarm clock went off then, so I never saw the machine that was going to transport the younger guy to the alternate “day,” nor did I find out who this guy was or why he would want to cause a disaster.

Though I found the guy very attractive, I saw no clue that his relation to the Eddie Albert group was sexual… in fact I remember someone in the dream mentioning that he had a wife. I’m not sure what purpose he served.

They have established a base in an unused building of a large industrial plant (possibly a gasoline processing plant). A sort of concrete bunker has been converted into a shrine in which they hold their meetings. I remember it clearly. Concrete steps lead up the side of a low, grassy grade, narrowing as they approach the entrance to the shelter. Buildings in the background. There is no door, only a small stone archway, revealing a colorful, softly-lit interior. The walls are panels of light, the same rosy color as the boys’ robes. Some sort of backlit scene dominates the rear wall — I can’t make it out, but it is a light blue. The building is effectively a small chapel.

The first time I see it, it is in the daytime; the chapel is empty. Later, two robed boys hurry along a dirt road within the plant. A gasoline truck barrels by on the other side of a dirt embankment. Night is falling as they ascend the stairway, which is now lined with candles or lights. A meeting of the Brotherhood is in progress. They are restless; a hubub of thought-projections bubbles from the open archway.

Closeup of the interior: a single boy — the leader? — faces the assembled, his head backlit in blue. No one speaks aloud, yet an argument is in full swing. There seems to be dissent about an action to be taken, or perhaps about the time of the great burning. It is not clear whether the Brotherhood seeks to instigate it, or merely to act when it does come. The voices grow louder. The leader struggles for control. My dream ends with him projecting, “Do we have a complete veto here, or is there any agreement at all?” He is shouted down, and the crowd moves forward between the glowing panels, wrestling him down from the podium.

The key had a nubby little arm with a wide, flat body, kind of like the keys used to get change out of gumball machines, only larger and nonsymmetrical. It was distinctively clean and shiny. There was a glyph etched on the flat part, really a double glyph. Larger, and on the right side, was a swastika, with thin arms (it was all hand etched). To its left was a smaller rectangle, with details suggesting an electronic apparatus.

Who was I with? We snuck inside the cathedral, past wooden doors, the floorboards creaking slightly. We were on an upper level, and through window reinforced with chickenwire, we could see down into the nave of the church. I noticed a plastic box on the ceiling with a small slot in it. I tried the key and it fit, turning on the lights in the nave.

And that’s all I remember. The key seemed to hold some important meaning, though in the end it wasn’t very impressive. Were we rebels against Nazi occupation? Did the key represent enemy technology which we would use against them? There was more to the dream, also in the same setting, but it’s gone.