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…by special request. Reader discretion is advised…

(onward)

There are two camps, and at the beginning I’m jogging back from one camp to the other with some people I work with; for some reason I end up in the lead, which I know I shouldn’t be but I don’t fee like complaining about it. We’re getting to the place where the evergreens grow thick and droop down to actually form a kind of tunnel in which it gets very dark. Inside, there is moss and ivy all over the walls. I always get nervous when we go through here; part of the reason is because sometimes there are wolves, and we have encountered them before. I glance nervously around me as we jog through, occasionally clapping my hands and shouting in an attempt to startle any wolves that might be around.

(more…)

There is a woman, an artist, who has come home to find people brutally murdered in her apartment on at least three separate occasions.  Then she has looked down to find blood all over the front of her clothes.  Each time, she’s called the police, hysterical, and each time they came to her apartment, investigated, questioned her involvement, and ultimately cleared her of any wrongdoing.  She doesn’t know why they believe her when she tells them that she doesn’t know how the blood got all over her clothes, or why they honestly believe that the same situation happening three or four times is really a coincidence.  She knows that it’s unlikely that she had nothing to do with it, in spite of the fact that she doesn’t remember anything more about it other than coming home and finding the gruesome scene in her living room.

She paints and writes about this, partly to keep herself from going crazy.  (“Maybe I’m crazy already,” she thinks.)  One day she notices that she has stopped writing in any color of pen except red, and that red paint dominates most of her paintings.  She starts to cry.

She doesn’t have a lot of friends and none of them ever come to her apartment.  Nevertheless, she starts to find unsettling notes from someone else, written to her, in red ink, in her own handwriting.  After that she stops going out of the apartment at all for fear of coming home to bloody corpses.

Then she starts to find hand-written dialogues between two people, both in her handwriting.  One side of the dialogue is in black; she remembers writing that.  The other is in red, which she does not remember.  Now she only paints the scenes in her mind, the murdered people she’s found in her living room so many times, and herself in bloody clothes, always different colors of outfits.  She had never realized that before but now she stops wearing any colors except those she was wearing on those horrible days.

She has a vague sense of people getting worried about her and coming over to talk to her, but it’s like a dream; she doesn’t really hear them, and though she hears herself responding to their words from time to time she doesn’t really know what she’s saying or understand the gist of the conversation.  Anyway they’re always gone soon so it doesn’t really matter.

Then she wakes up one day to find a group of people standing around her living room, which is empty except for her canvases (she got rid of all the furniture with blood on it, which was pretty much everything).  They say that she has been found guilty of murder and must now be executed, once for every murder she committed, in the same way as she murdered that victim, and wearing the clothes she herself was wearing on that occasion.

She begins to sob, hysterically, afraid they’re right, angry that she didn’t see this coming, somewhat confused about how they’re going to execute her more than once.  (“Does it really matter, though?” she thinks.)  But once is all it takes, and while she lays dying on the floor she realizes the truth—she wasn’t crazy; she was being framed, and now whoever it was that was framing her has finally won.

We open in a courtroom. Someone has been killed but it’s not clear who. A man and a woman are there – they are both alright, but I think something may have happened to the man’s first wife. At first, the judge asks her to give an overview of what happened and I find myself swept into her memories of the event, turbulent as they are. I see her wearing a pink dress and matching hat; she is running into a house and trying to close the door against a man with an ax who is wearing the same hat as her. I see her husband in the background shouting something.

“Wait,” says the judge, “back up. Start at the beginning.”

(more…)

A friend of mine has bought something that was made in Taiwan, but now it turns out that he needs to exchange it. He talked to the company over the phone a few times, and the last time they told him that they could only exchange it in person. He thought that they were only saying that to try to get rid of him, so he “called their bluff” (or at least that’s how he put it when he told us later) and told them that he was coming to Taiwan to make the exchange.

“So I think we should all go! As long as I have to go to Taiwan, we should all go, and we should stay a few days!”

“What city?” I ask him.

“Taipei, of course,” he beams, “the only real city in Taiwan.”

(more…)

One night after karate we’re all listening to the radio (not sure why), and we hear a news bulletin about how a sniper has been shooting people in the east bay. There was no more information, but the report makes me extremely eager to get out of the east bay and back home. I think about the news a little as I head toward the bridge – on foot for some reason, but covering the same amount of ground as if I were driving – but for the most part I’m concerned about something else that has me in a melancholy mood (can’t remember what).

(more…)

I’m standing in the kitchen of my family’s house with my mom and dad and one of my sisters. It’s kind of a flashback dream, apparently; my sister and I are both teenagers. But it’s sort of a false flashback, since this is quite a posh kitchen, much posher than ours ever was, and by the time my sister and I were teenagers our parents had longsince been divorced.

But here we are, and my dad is a movie star, and it turns out he’s just landed a huge contract for a role in what will probably turn out to be a landmark film. We’re all ecstatic and celebrating together.

(more…)

In August 2006 my college roommate Monica and I spent 3 weeks in Holland and Scotland. I recently had a dream in which she and I had decided to do a whirwind tour of Western Europe. Only we decided not to plan ahead of time — we were just going to go, and figure out the details on the fly. We decided to do this during the winter holidays, from about December 15 to January 15, mainly because neither of us felt up to visiting our families during the Holidays. We also figured it might be a fun time to travel, because who goes on European vacation during the winter holidays? No one, obviously.

(more…)

I don’t remember a lot about this dream, but it stuck in my mind enough that I thought it was worth writing it down.  In this dream, the world was definitely in some kind of serious crisis.  For some reason I was visiting some super advanced high tech place where they were working on techniques for identifying and locating people who would be able to help the world get through the crisis.  Their main technique involved a bunch of supercomputers and some INSANELY insanely ridiculously complex math which ultimately produced a 4 x 6 matrix, which could then be fed into ANOTHER machine that could somehow decode the matrix and come up with a list of about twenty-five of these very important people and their addresses.

The thing about the matrix technique was that it had been proven theoretically, but the people who worked at the super-secret, super-high-tech facility were still trying to get it to work in practice.  They seemed very frustrated.  I also remember there being some weirdness around the fact that there was something sort of mystical and religious about this whole process, which made them a little touchy about it.  While I was there, I was looking at some of their research and decided to take a shot at coming up with one of these “magical matrices” by hand.  So I thought about it and played with the numbers for a while, and then wrote down the following matrix:

[0 1 1 0 1 0]

[0 0 1 0 0 0]

[some numbers I don’t remember, all integers]

[some other numbers I don’t remember, all integers]

(& if you’re a linear algebra type, you’ll have noticed that this ain’t such a bad start toward row-echelon form.)

Then I went up to one of the  researchers and showed her my matrix and asked if I could put it in the machine.  She, of course, knew it wouldn’t work, since I’d basically come up with the numbers out of my head (almost; somehow intuition had told me that I definitely wanted one row that was basically solved, and another that was in only three variables, & all in the same proportion).  “There’s no way it’ll work with only integers,” she said, seeming a little put out as she took the matrix and put it in the machine.  And low and behold, the machine spit out a beautiful list of smart and talented people (& their addresses) that might be able to save the world from its crisis!  No one could believe it, but then it turned out that I fulfilled some kind of prophecy or something by just coming up with the numbers out of my head.

Weird, huh?

I only remember this one in bits & pieces, really.  I started with a little girl that had been terrorized by some evil presence (we don’t know at first what it was exactly), and after being saved several times, she’s put into a sort of protective custody with a man who’s supposed to be this great protector.  Somehow, we are able to see what’s going on there (it’s like a big greenhouse or something?), but can’t take action right now.  Someone starts to notice that something is wrong; it’s like the man is putting her to bed, only someone suddenly notices that the bed is actually a kind of sacrificial altar that the evil uses.  Everyone starts to panic a bit; then the man looks up at the camera (or whatever), and his face has changed, and he has a knife in his hand.  People get hysterical and are trying to figure out what to do, only this is happening too far away for anyone to be able to stop him.  And, sure enough, he winds his arm up and stabs her right in the center of the chest while she’s sleeping.  We hear her screaming and see her writhing around, trying to escape, only the knife has gone right through her and pinned her to the altar.  It is a gut wrenching scene.  Then the evil man is gone.

The people who had been in town trying to protect her decide that there is nothing to do but leave town.  There is an older man (he’s like the master evil fighter), and then he has a few sons & other apprentices who work with him.  At some point, there is another child that needs protecting; he bundles her up in the back of a wagon with the supplies.  “The wolves will come after us,” and we understand that the wolves are a manifestation of whatever evil is at work here.  “They’ll be on our trail.”  There are pillows that have some sort of protective significance, and definitely some protective sort of bread.  He gives us bags of grain from which to feed everyone; I get frustrated that we only have flat pieces of cardboard to use for plates, and the people in my wagon don’t seem to understand that you have to bend it in order for all the grain not to just roll off.

We also have at our disposals some magical knives, which are about the size of little plastic butter knives, but are made from the bones of unicorns, which makes them powerful against the evil wolves (though you have to get into very close range to use them).  We also have the spirits of the unicorns themselves, which are ghost-like, and seem to appear when needed.  At one point we get ambushed by the wolves; the magic pillows go missing and a few people are freaking out; and at one point I see an evil wolf sneaking up and slash satisfyingly at it with the unicorn knife.