Dream Log: Left-Wing Think Tank

Recently I had another one of those dreams about an abnormally-huge building. 

I dreamed I was walking by the side of a road in the Detroit area. There were no distinguishing Detroit landmarks, but I knew where I was. Snow was piled up high everywhere except for the road, and I often had to wade through it in order to stay out of the way of traffic. There were no sidewalks. I had no vehicle, no money and no place to go.

The first building I looked at more more closely was very large, but not abnormally so. I went in through a loading bay and saw that it was a warehouse holding second-hand clothes. The used clothes made a surprising contrast with the new, generic-industrial-park exterior of the building. 

Walking further along the road, I passed two buildings which had been abandoned and were beginning to crumble. The first had once been a large bank in the middle of its parking lot, with several lanes for drive-through traffic.

The next building harder to identify. It was several stories high, it high white aluminum siding which was discolored in patches. 

And then I came to the abnormally-large building. There were cars in its parking lot, new ones. I walked through an entrance with two sets of automatically-sliding glass doors. The place looked like a hospital, except that I couldn't see any signs pointing to this department and that. A lot of people were bustling about, but the rooms were so huge that the place was not at all crowded. 

I walked through one high-ceiling after another, continuing to see many people and no signs. I also didn't notice any ID cars/security keys.

Most of the rooms were very monochrome: all the walls of each room were the same color, with large, expensive-looking sculptures always exactly matching the color of the walls. I was reminded of those men's suits with jacket, shirt, tie and trousers all exactly the same color. My initial impression was that I found the decor unimpressive. My second thought was that the amount of work which had gone into this whole huge interior, the amount of thought and planning, was impressive. The ambition was impressive whatever one thought of the finished product.

Eventually my presence was noticed. Instead of being briskly shown back outside into the deep snow, as I expected, everyone was very friendly and very nice. People asked about my circumstances, and I honestly replied that I was homeless and broke. People asked whether I was hungry and tired, I said yes to both questions. After being handed a faux-leather pouch stuff very full of 20-, 50- and 100-dollar bills, and then given a nice faux-leather backpack to carry the pouch, just because it was too big to fit into any of my pockets, I was given a very nice meal, and then shown a very nice room, and told it was mine. It contained a big bed, a big desk, its own big bathroom with a really huge shower, and just lots and lots of room and nice furnishing.

The next day, I was told that the director wanted to speak with me. I told myself that this might be where I found the big catch to all of this nice stuff. Like maybe that this was a cult, and I'd never leave the place alive.

The director's appearance did not immediately allay the cult suspicions: Like the ground-floor rooms, his attire was monochrome, but more like that of the villain in a 1950's sci-fi movie than a more recent fashionable man's suit. The director was tall and wiry, with blonde hair and blue eyes.

"What have you been thinking about?" he asked me.

"Andre Gorz," I replied, "and the necessity of changing from economic to ecological thinking."

"You agree with Gorz about that?"

"Absolutely," I said.

"I agree too," the director said. "But there are a lot of difficult details to be worked out."

I finally just asked straight-out what had been puzzling me the whole time: "What is this place?"

"A left-wing think tank."

Dream Log: Top Apps For Celebrities Only

Last night's dream was strange on several levels. For one thing, it had to do with some celebrities, such as Jessica Simpson, about whom I rarely think except to wonder why they're celebrities. Some people might say about Jessica Simpson that, talented or not, she's gorgeous. The thing is that, to me, she's not even particularly interesting-looking. I can understand when someone who's not particularly talented is a superstar if I think they're gorgeous, like, for instance, Raquel Welch in the 1970's,

but then there are others where I just don't get it. And last night's dream was about celebrities about whom I just don't get it. In fact, they are celebrities who are so uninteresting to me that I can't even remember, now that I'm awake, who they are, other than Jessica Simpson. There were about a half dozen of them, both genders, most, I guess about as old as Ms Simpson (39 years old) and with careers which peaked about the same time as hers (late 1990's and early 2000's).

Another thing which was strange about the dream is that I was acting like a celebrity-hater, which I'm not. I've never been able to understand why people go to the trouble of commenting that this or that celebrity, in their opinion, is hideous is some way or another. For example, above, I gave my opinion that Jessica Simpson is not gorgeous. I only said that to try to express how strange I found it that I was dreaming about her, and not because I think anybody has the slightest reason to care that I don't find her to be gorgeous, Jessica Simpson herself least of all, among other reasons because, of course, many people DO think she's absolutely gorgeous.

Anyway -- in this dream, I was wasting my time intensely disliking Jessica Simpson and some other celebrities for some reason or reasons I can't fathom now that I'm awake. And in this dream, there was a certain kind of app which was offered only to celebrities. Billionaires couldn't buy these apps, unless they had managed to make themselves into celebrities as well as billionaires, like -- Mark Cuban. These apps would transform the celebrities in some way. It was sort of like plastic surgery without the wait and the physical pain. There were lists of these celebrity apps on websites: for each celebrity associated with the apps program, there was a list of apps, each one with a picture of the celebrity showing what the app did.

And what exactly the apps did, is not clear to me. I mentioned plastic surgery because it's the closest real-world example I can think of. All that's clear about these apps is that they were exclusive, and that a wide public was envious of the celebs for having the apps -- envy of celebrities: there's another thing, liking hating celebrities, which I can't understand -- and that the celebrities were sort of addicted to the apps. A lot of celebrities steered clear of this sort of thing the way they steered clear of alcohol or recreational drugs.

For some reason, I was put in charge of the apps having to do with these half-dozen or so celebrities. And with gleeful hatred, I discontinued some of the apps which had been offered to Jessica Simpson and the half-dozen others. When I made the changes in the apps, the pictures in the online lists of apps, instead of simply disappearing, changed into other pictures of the celebs.

Jessica Simpson got very angry at me and complained, publicly, wearing a long, tight sequined dress, with an elaborate hairdo with her hair piled up high and with strands of diamonds holding her hair in place. It was not clear whether she was physically near me and we both were being filmed at the same time, or if we were communicating with some sort of Internet video-phone setup, like Skype except more elaborate. Either way, we were top news on shows like "Entertainment Tonight," which showed video of her complaining in the sequined dress with the elaborate hairdo, and me sitting at my computer and smirking like the weasel and jerk I was acting like.

I just want to say that, in real waking life, I have absolutely no reason to even say something mean to Jessica Simpson, and that my behavior in this dream seems very unlike myself. The apps seem like something (some completely fictional thing) which might have been dangerous, but to take them away from someone out of sheer spite is really completely unlike me.

Dream Log: Reporter in Philadelphia

I dreamed I was a newspaper reporter who lived and worked in downtown Philadelphia. I had some sort of unexplained gift of making myself almost completely unnoticeable, so that I could get up close to people and listen in on conversations they thought were private. Some of my colleagues in journalism referred to me as "the Ghost."

In the lobby of a huge skyscraper was a white-tablecloth restaurant patronized by people who were very expensively-dressed. The restaurant's dining area was separated from the rest of the lobby only by a waist-high partition, with no wall or windows. Against a wall across the lobby from the restaurant, a homeless man wearing an orange-and-black checkered overcoat sat on the floor. Two expensively-dressed men approached him and spoke with him, and I did my unnoticeable thing and listened in.

"Does the restaurant ever give you food?" one of the expensively-dressed men asked the homeless man. He was tall and broad-shouldered and bore a slight physical resemblance to David Harbour.

The other expensively-dressed man was nondescript.

"No," the homeless man answered. "Some of the customers are very nice. They'll get leftovers in a doggy bag and bring it out and give it to me. Good stuff. The duck is out of this world, but all of the leftovers I've had from this place have been outstanding. But the restaurant itself seems to have an official get-rid-of-me policy. The maître d' especially seems to have a hard-on for me."

"That's too bad."

"I can see his point of view," the homeless man said. "Some restaurants will give you food, but I can see why they might not want to. They pay God only knows how much for the rent here, and they see me as bad for the ambiance."

The next day, the two expensively-dressed men-- silk suits, both of them -- were at the same place at the wall where the homeless man usually was, but the homeless man wasn't there. They were looking across the lobby into the restaurant and smiling. The homeless man was there, seated at a table in the dining area, scrubbed and brushed and clipped and clean-shaven and wearing a silk suit, looking like three million bucks.

Suddenly, the maître d', holding the overcoat the homeless man had been wearing the day before, charged up to where he was sitting, shouting something which was unintelligible from where we stood across the lobby, threw the overcoat at the homeless man's feet and literally chased him all over the dining area. The two expensively-dressed men ran across the lobby and into the restaurant and got between the maître d' and the homeless man. I stayed back and watched. The two expensively-dressed men and the maître d' were all yelling at the same time. I couldn't make out what anyone was saying. The homeless man wasn't saying anything. He just looked embarrassed.

Finally, the yelling died down a little, and the two expensively-dressed men stood protectively on either side of the homeless man and walked him out of the restaurant, out of the skyscraper's lobby, around the corner and into an only slightly less-fancy restaurant nearby, where they all three sat down together for lunch.

Dream Log: Commercial Success as a Writer

Last night, while I was still awake, there were some noises just outside, and I couldn't figure out what they were. Then I fell asleep. I dreamed that I had suddenly become very successful, commercially, as writer. In the dream I was an adult, but I was living, by myself, in the house I lived in from the late 1960's to the mid-1970's, from age eight to fourteen, a large house with a very large front lawn. It was nighttime. Many people were coming to congratulate me. Many, who arrived in huge 1940's automobiles, identified themselves as distant cousins of mine. Typewriter copies of many things I had written pre-Internet were laying around here and there in the house, paper-clipped to handwritten comments by various people. I kept trying to read some of these comments, but the handwriting was hard to read, and I was constantly being interrupted by the many visitors.

In addition to the many visitors, many congratulatory gifts had been sent to me. The packages were piled high on the porch. I had received 300-pound

slam balls, gold and platinum watches, all sorts of hard-to-find books.

My distant cousins took me to a time machine. In real life, when I lived in this house, behind it were cornfields. In the dream, behind it was an urban residential area with narrow streets and small houses. The nearest small house was a time machine.

I went back into my house, went through a maze of hallways and stairways to reach a small room with a piano in it, with shelves on two walls crammed with sheet music. This room was crowded with people singing American songs from the early 20th century to piano accompaniment. Among these singers was Gore Vidal, wearing a tuxedo with the bow tie undone and the collar open. As soon as he saw me, Gore said, "They're going to turn you in to Langley!"

Langley, Virginia is the site of the headquarters of the CIA. Gore did not literally mean that, as soon as my distant cousins and I got to wherever we were going in the future, they were planning to hand me over to the CIA. What he meant was that these distant cousins of mine were right-wing reactionaries, and that I belonged with Leftists such as himself and the others singing in that small room.

I was going to start to try to explain to Gore that these distant cousins of mine were much more liberal than he thought, but instead I woke up.

Dream Log: Time-Machine Secret Agents

Last night I dreamed that I was in the future, and there were time machines, but time travel was much more problematic than many had thought. Specifically, it was much more difficult than many had thought to change the past. The more significant the results of the intended change would be, the harder it was to make the change. It was as if 1) history wanted to remain the same, and 2) it knew your intentions. Let's take everyone's favorite example, going back in time to kill Hitler. If you went to Vienna in 1910 with the intent of killing the young Hitler, chances are that a falling piano would kill you within seconds of your exiting the time machine.

It was a drab and dilapidated future, generally speaking. Most of my dream took place within a huge mall, the size of a major international airport. Most of it was empty space between the stores. Most of the stores resembled half-deserted warehouses which were themselves mostly empty. There was a lot of dingy linoleum and tacky fake-woodgrain wall paneling.

I was a secret agent, with most of my assignments relating to the time machines, which governments and large corporations were still trying to keep secret. I don't know what government or other entity I was working for. I was waiting in the mall to meet another agent. It was going to be our first meeting, and we were going to make some repairs on a time machine hidden in an actual warehouse in back of one of the stores.

Just before I met this agent, I received a phone call telling me that she was a double agent working for our enemy. My assignment was to send her on a time-travel trip somewhere far into the past. Like Stone Age-far. It wasn't yet known what her mission was, so I should be prepared to fight for my life.

She was short and pudgy, she had short hair, one of her eyes seemed to be permanently crossed. Right away I felt more sorry for her than concerned for my own safety. I reminded myself that some extremely dangerous agents deliberately cultivated such a harmless appearance, the better to catch their enemies unawares.

We walked about a mile through the mall. To my great surprise, and, it appeared, also to hers, the time machine was not in the warehouse. I called HQ -- they, too, seemed very surprised. I was instructed to try to keep the double agent from leaving, and await further instructions.

I treated us to lattes at a coffee stand outside the mall. We were downtown in a big city, but the place was not crowded, and there were tall weeds everywhere.

I thought to myself that if her sad-sack routine was just an act, then she was a very good actor. I was tempted to tell her that I knew she was a double-agent, and to go ahead and beat it. But a limousine pulled up, one of my superiors, who looked a little bit like Dean Norris,

opened the back door and motioned for me, just me, to get in. So I said goodbye to the double agent with the crossed eye and got into the limousine.

My superior apologized, I asked what he was apologizing for, and he said, "She's one of their top killers. We didn't know that, or we would've pulled you sooner. Her assignment was to pump you for information and then kill you. Did you give her any intel?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Other than where the time machine was supposed to be."

"No, that was part of their story. Maybe they hoped to get you talking in a dark corner of the warehouse, so the killing would be better hidden. Good thinking, getting the coffee."

"No, not good thinking. I was just jonesing for coffee."

"You're sure you didn't tell her anything."

"Positive. I was tempted to tell her I knew she was a double agent, and she should call it a day. I didn't realize she was the dangerous one. That eye..."

"Looked like a crossed eye?"

"Yeah."

"It's a lens, for long range shooting, made to look like a crossed eye to get sympathy."

"Wow. Almost worked."

"Yeah," my boss said. "Like I said, she's one of their best ones."

And then I woke up.

Today

I woke up from dreams about a girlfriend I don't have, who didn't look like anybody I know. She was tall and pretty, had long dark hair and dark eyes and a Latin American accent. I've been dreaming about Latinos a lot more often since Trump was elected,. I'm sure many others have been too.

In the dreams, she and I were doing little helpful healing things for each other. For example, she said she was tired and tense, and I rubbed her shoulders and her feet.

Three days ago, I had gone to the local used-sporting-goods store and lifted an 80lb dumbbell with each hand, one hand at a time. Several days before that, I had tried to lift 2 80lb dumbbells at once, and it hadn't happened. I think I could've done it except that my technique was a little off. When I lifted the 80lb dumbbell with my right hand, I felt a bit of pain in my lower right back, which has been painful a lot of the time since I had surgery in August -- exercise-related pain, I believe. I'm not alarmed by the pain. It's been there for a long time, but not at an alarming level.

Today I lifted a 100lb dumbbell with either hand, and felt no pain at all.

These are standard dead lifts, rising up until I'm standing straight up with the weight in my hand.

Of course, what such dumbbells are made for is one-armed curls. I did not attempt to curl either an 80lb nor a 100lb dumbbell. The most I have ever curled with one arm was 70lbs, some years ago. I have no idea how much I could curl today. I don't want to try for a new personal best and injure myself in someone else's store. The people in that store are really nice, they don't deserve that sort of aggravation.

Does everyone become much more prone to exercise-induced injury as they get older, or is it just me? I used to be able to just let it rip, quite uncautiously, with weights. Not these days.

I tried to find a copy of The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle,

and the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson.

I couldn't find anything by Wilson today, and only one book by Tolle: Stillness Speaks. In the early pages of the book, Tolle says that it doesn't need to be read straight through cover to cover, but can be picked up and set down often, read just a little a time if one wishes, and also talks about connecting with your inner stillness, and about observing the stillness of plants.

I'm cool with all of that. I wouldn't say that that means I'm a spiritual person, but apparently some people would disagree.

Dream Log: Stuck in the Mall, and Year-Round Major League Baseball

I had a 2-part dream: in the first part I was in a mall and couldn't find an exit except for one which led out into pitch-black unlit night; and in the second part I was on a major league baseball roster, but I wasn't playing baseball, and the major-league baseball season was all year long.

I've frequently had dreams like the first part, where I'm stuck inside a mall or some other large building and can't find my way out.

Last night, as usual in these dreams, I kept going around and around the whole huge building, and somehow kept coming around to the same exit, which in some of these dreams just leads to more buildings, and in this dream, where the exit was in Sears, led outside, but it was too dark outside to see, and I wasn't going to go stumbling around in the dark, hoping to eventually come across some sort of light. So I went off looking for another exit.

I had a sweater on over my shirt, and I was too warm, so I took off the sweater and folded it and put it on a stack of sweaters in a store. And then I kept on marching around and around the huge mall, feeling as if I would never find my way out. In last night's dream, a big crowd of other people was having exactly the same problem. We were getting more and more upset, because no-one who worked at the mall would help us.

But apparently I eventually made it outside, because suddenly my brother and I were outside, walking on a sidewalk on a busy city street, coming over the top of a hill. Below us a bridge crossed the road. I told my brother that we could go to the left, crossing the bridge, and head to an area with lots of art galleries, or --

and before I could say anything else my brother was already turning to the right, heading to the stadium where the San Francisco Giants played major league baseball.

And before I knew it, my brother and I had both been hired and were on the Giants' roster.

In the dream, as in real life, it had been guite a few years since I had payed close attention to major league baseball. I didn't know whether or not the Giants were having a good season. I got ahold of a newspaper and looked at the sports section, and it turned out that the Giants had played 6 games the day before, and had won 5 of them, and that this had been the final day of the season, and the Giants had managed to pull themselves up out of last place. Then I saw that it was February. I had been used to baseball season starting in April and ending in October, but now, it seemed, the baseball season ended in February, and the next one started later on in February. There were about as many games per season as before, though, so the players got about as much time off per year as before, they just didn't get it all at once.

Then came some changes which I didn't understand at all: now, not all of the wins and losses were decided by actually playing baseball. Some of the players on the roster, although they wore the same baseball uniforms as the regular players, did not play baseball, but instead performed some sort of work at computer terminals, and depending on how well or poorly they did, the team would get more wins or losses. We computer "players" could add as many as 30 or more wins or losses to the team's total in a single day. My brother and I had been hired to be two of these computer "players."

However, I had absolutely no idea how this job worked, and no-one would tell me anything about it. I couldn't find my brother to ask him about it, the actual baseball players acted as if they had nothing but disdain for me and my job (which I could actually understand), and the other computer "players" whom I could find seemed to have their own nerdy club of which I was not a member (and which didn't look like a club I'd want to join either).

And then I woke up.

Dream Log: Uptight Movie-Star Detectives

Last night I dreamed I was working with Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint. They were not in the roles of the young wizards they played in the Harry Potter movies --

-- but all four of us were playing fictional roles in a movie. We were playing detectives. However, it was one of those dreams in which it wasn't really clear whether we were acting, or if we really were solving crimes.

The other three certainly didn't seem to be as wealthy as they are in real life from the Harry Potter movies. For example, we had about a dozen pairs of socks and briefs to split up between the 4 of us, and these socks and briefs were going to have to last us a long time, and there seemed to be a lot of unspoken tension about whether they were being split up fairly. For example, these socks and briefs were not new, and there was some tension about whether one or two of us might get unfairly many holes in our allotment of socks and briefs.

There also seemed to be some unspoken tension about my being an equal in the group of detectives although I'm 25 to 30 years older than the other 3.

A lot of unspoken tension in general. Some examples were: we were operating out of a ratty old van which needed repairs -- who was going to pay for the repairs? Who was going to go out and chase the bad guys, and who was going to wait at home base -- that is, in the van? Did I get to take less risk of beingt hurt or killed because I was old? Who was going to go get coffee? Who was going to go around to all of our homes to drop off the socks and briefs and pick up badly-needed cold-weather gear?

We were so caught up in a million little issues that we never actually got around to investigating any crime.

Dream Log: Surprise Birthday Party

I dreamed that I was in a restaurant kitchen attempting to prepare a meal of many small dishes for about 20 people, some of whom I recognized, some not. I have never done anything remotely like this, and in the dream I was very worried that I would screw it up. In addition to a full kitchen and wait staff under my command, there was a woman in the kitchen helping me. She seemed to be a full-fledged gourmet chef, but she also seemed to have decided not to help me too much: her help amounted to a few words of encouragement or advice every now and then. It seemed to amount to what people call, for some reason, "moral" support.

After we had been in the kitchen for quite a while, after the guests had been seated for quite a while, we still had not served any food, and I felt completely confused, and I was sure that complete disaster was much more likely than not. Then the chef-like woman reminded me that I had put notes to myself all over the kitchen: all I needed to do was to find them. And sure enough: I found the notes, put them all in order, barked out commands to the staff, and very soon, the guests were being fed which apparently was passing for haute cuisine. 20 small plates later, some of them were on their feet and shouting, "Chef! Chef!" I stepped into the dining room, and all of the guests stood up and applauded, I was patted on the back and shoulders and complimented, everyone seemed very happy about the whole situation.

Then someone shouted "Happy Birthday!" and some others started shouting "Happy Birthday!" too, and eventually I realized that they were shouting it at me. I had forgotten it was my birthday. Some of the guests hustled me outside, and some more people were out there waiting on the sidewalk and shouting birthday wishes at me. We all piled into some waiting vehicles and drove off. Eventually I gathered that we were going to a Pearl Jam concert.

We pulled up in front of arena on a university campus, 10,000 seats or so by the looks of it. But it was closed. No sign of a concert. Someone, consulting GPS, called out, "It's behind this building!" We went around the arena and found a theatre which looked as if it might have around 2000 seats, but it was closed, too. After a moment of confusion, the person with the GPS device said, "It's behind this building!" We walked around the theatre and found a smaller theatre with its entrance lights on and signs announcing a Pearl Jam concert.

Inside, there were perhaps as many as 200 seats. Some people were on an unraised stage setting up the band's equipment. I assumed there were Pearl Jam and some roadies. One of them was Eddie Vedder, and he's the only member of Pearl Jam I would've recognized by sight. I thought it was impressively down-to-Earth of the band to be out there with the roadies and the crowd, and not making a big deal of it. It matched with what I'd heard about them being unpretentious.

One of my friends at the concert was Craig Robinson:

Irl I've never met Mr Robinson. He pointed to a coat-check area where a graduation gown and cap were hanging, and said that they were going to make me wear them. I said I didn't want to. He grinned and said, "We'll MAKE you." He seemed pretty determined about it, and gradually I began to think that the easiest thing to do might be to just put them on.

Another friend of mine pulled our tickets out of his pocket. I was surprised by this because I had gotten the tickets for our whole group, more than a dozen people. (When I'd gotten the tickets I hadn't noticed that the concert was on my birthday.) My friend just shrugged and said that I would've forgotten them.

The tickets had been at my home in a locked drawer to which I'd assumed no-one else had access. I didn't ask my friend how he'd gotten the tickets.

Eddie Vedder, tuning an acoustic guitar, called out, "Where's Steve Bollinger?" Several people pointed at me. Several people shouted to the effect that I preferred to be called Steven. "My bad, Steven," Mr Vedder said.

"No big deal, Mr Vedder," I replied.

"I prefer 'Eddie'."

"Okay, Eddie."

"You got a favorite Pearl Jam song?"

"I got a lot of them. Hard to think of just one. I like 'Alive,' and 'Wishlist'..." and around then I woke up.

Dream Log: Renewable Energy Hero

I dreamed that the renewable-energy revolution was winning, worldwide. I was an electrical engineer who traveled the world helping people to set up solar and wind power, people who in some cases had previously had no access to electricity, and in other cases had relied on electrical generation which polluted heavily. I was world-famous for doing this. Many individual people, NGO's and actual governments gave money and other assistance to the projects with which I was involved.

Because of such projects, worldwide demand for oil, gas and coal was rapidly disappearing, and because so often I was a public face of such projects, petrochemical corporations kept sending assassins to kill me. But this fact was so well-known, and I was so well-liked, that the assassins were typically stopped long before they got to me. Some former assassins were now my allies. Some former petrochemical executives who had sent assassins after me had given up, and converted to the cause of renewable energy, and were now among the biggest donors. One of these former oil execs was famous for having publicly said, "It's just a lot more satisfying not to be a son of a bitch." Others were said to have given up fighting me and my colleagues and started planning their exit from the industry, although they had not yet publicly said so.

I and my team of engineers landed in an electric airplane in Central Africa to meet a group of local engineers who were working on the construction of a high-rise building which would contain public housing. We believed that when it was finished it would be the first high-rise in the world to be sheathed by transparent solar cells. Besides generating all of its own electricity, it would provide electricity to a wide surrounding region, and to a water-recovery plant which was being built next to it.

A crowd of joyously screaming children ran to greet us as we got out of the plane. We were used to that sort of thing. We made a conscious effort both to appropriately appreciate such kind welcomes, and to keep them from going to our heads. When we made speeches, we kept emphasizing that we were not essentially different in our outlook and actions from many other people who were getting much less attention. While we were being mobbed by the children, we could see a couple of petrochemical-industry assassins near the runway, being surrounded, disarmed and taken into custody by a crowd of local adults and juveniles.

After touring the construction site of the high rise and water recovery plant, I asked if we could be shown some typical homes in the region. Not places that had been dressed up for our visit, but actual average homes. We were shown huts with grass-burning fireplaces, with sewage ditches dug outside. We were carrying backpacks loaded with hand-cranked electrical devices which we distributed to the poor people we met. When I handed these radios and phones to people who kept bowing to me and thanking me profusely -- I knew what "thank you" sounded like in dozens of languages -- I felt like a phony who was vastly over-appreciated. Then I woke up.

Dream Log: FB Meet-Up in the Mountains

Last night I dreamed I was meeting face-to-face for the first time with some Facebook friends: mostly friendly, non-judgmental, leftist, pro-science Christians.

Our meeting place was in a mountainous region. We parked in a lot surrounded by shops selling things like candy and tourist-y knickknacks. From there we had to keep going up on foot, up a very steep slope. We had the choice of climbing the mountain slope itself, or taking some stairs which were enclosed in sort sort of white plastic. I started to climb these stairs, but as they went higher the white plastic enclosure got closer, and very soon I became claustrophobic and climbed back down.

Then I noticed that there was another set of stairs. These were in a very spacious and sturdily-built stairwell of the kind one sees in fine early-20th-century public buildings in large US cities.

In the dream, the stairs were not entirely enclosed from the elements. It was very cold, there was snow on the ground, I had left my winter coat in my car, and after I had climbed a great distance, I realized that I should not have. As I climbed the stairs back down, I reflected that all of this physical exercise was good for me.

At the top of the stairs, we made various remarks about how this or that person was either just like this or that one had pictured him or her, or entirely different. After that sort of talk had died down, there was a lull in the conversation which seemed like it might last, but soon several lively conversations were going on on a variety of topics. I ended up talking about the stairwell with a young married couple. The young husband (there was a husband and a wife in this couple, in the traditional manner) went on for a while about the stairwell and the turn-of-the-20th-century American public architecture which it represented. In the dream, he seemed to be making many profound points, but now, awake, I can't remember any of them.

I mentioned that none of what he had said explained why this stairwell was semi-exposed to the elements, while most stairwells of its kind were fully enclosed within buildings. I hadn't meant to upset him with this remark, but it seemed I had greatly upset him. He turned away and didn't seem to want to talk any more. Then I woke up.

Dream Log: Reporting on Long-Distance Mountain Running and Women's Gymnastics

Lately I've been dreaming a lot about running. Very vivid dreams. In the dreams, the difficulty and exertion have been very vivid too, but still, the running is exhilarating, and the dreams make me more and more determined to get in shape enough to run at an advanced level in real life.

Last night I dreamed that I was covering a long-distance, high-altitude running event in the European Alps. I went there to participate in the running as well as write about it. Right from the start, I was confused about the rules. The other runners knew I was covering the event as a writer. Most of them were distrustful of me and made no attempt to hide how they regarded me as an outsider and a threat. There were a few exceptions, runners who were friendly toward me -- but only a few.

I was really completely uninformed about what we were doing. For one thing, I wasn't sure how long the event was going to last -- all day? Several days? Dozens of miles? Hundreds of miles?

After I had run for a while, race officials stopped me and said that I had to wait here for ten minutes. We were in a little meadow between cliffs; other runners were resting there. It was unclear to me whether all of the runners were going to start again together, or whether each individual waited for exactly ten minutes. In any case, after I was running again, I saw some others well ahead of me, and gaining visibly, although we were making a steep climb and no-one was going very fast. One of my competitors who was friendly mentioned to me that this stage of the race involved a gain of altitude of two thousand feet, so that I might want to be careful and pace myself. There was a small flag of France below the collar of his jersey. I thanked him, but said that I wanted to run the very fastest race I possibly could, no matter how difficult it might be. He laughed, gave me a friendly smack on the back, and then darted well ahead of me.

The next stopping point was at a luxury hotel. Other runners were sitting in a room which was very bare and white, and stared at me with frank hostility. I could smell very good smells coming from a gourmet kitchen, and I wondered whether we runners were going to get some gourmet food.

Then everything got very hazy, and I lost consciousness. When I came to I was in a hospital bed in what seemed to be an emergency room. A doctor who spoke excellent English with a French accent asked me what I remembered, and told me that I had taken a great fall, and was very fortunate to have landed in a grassy area rather than a rocky area. He asked whether I had trained at high altitude before this race. I said no. He said that it was very important, if I ever competed in an event like this again, that I train extensively beforehand at very high altitudes. "Extensively," he repeated. I thanked him for his advice, but he turned away with the deeply annoyed manner of a man who is used to giving good advice and seeing it go unheeded.

Next, I was in Madison Square Garden to write about a women's gymnastics event. The event organizers were nervous about investigative journalists covering the event, because of the recent scandal surrounding Larry Nassar. They seemed to relax when they saw me, because I'm an essayist, and they therefore seemed to assume that I was not going to cover the event negatively.

I felt that they were wrong to relax about me, because I had a lot of very pointed questions about whether the sport provided cover and protection for sexual predators, and also about whether and to what extent the competitors were harming their health and stunting their growth by malnutrition. But before I could get down to any investigation, I woke up.

Dream Log: Ancestral Home

I dreamed that my brother and I were spending some time together at our ancestral home. The house kept changing size and shape, and in any of its permutations didn't closely resemble any place my brother and I ever actually lived, and in any case, our family has moved so often that no one place could be called our ancestral home.

At the beginning of the dream it was night, and my brother and I were walking through alleys filled with snow turning into slush, toward the family home, a small house painted white. The house's back door was on the alley. In the alley was a small mobile-home trailer. The trailer was empty of people, its door was open, it had several steps leading up from ground level, and on every step was a cigarette butt. Seeing the cigarette butts made me angry: nobody in our family smoked (not in the dream, anyway), and the butts made me think that my mother had once again been kind to someone who'd abused her kindness.

When my brother and I went into the house it was suddenly, much larger, with some individual rooms bigger than the small house we had approached from the alley. I started singing the Beatles' song "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," singing the lyrics and scatting between the sung lines to sound like the piano or Eric Clapton's guitar on the record. I thought I sounded pretty good, and became absorbed in this music-making.

Then I noticed that there was a third person in the house, a young woman wearing torn blue jeans and a denim jacket and colorful scarves. My brother was being very attentive to her, giving her various things she needed, and then politely but firmly showing her to the front door and closing the door behind her. Then he turned on me: he was angry, because I had been singing loudly and had left the front door wide open, a combination which had attracted the young woman and might have drawn more strangers to just come up and walk in.

I walked through some other rooms which appeared to be bedrooms -- enormous bedrooms. These rooms were full of books, on shelves and in piles on the floor. I came to a room which appeared to me my bedroom -- I wasn't entirely sure -- and in which very tall piles of books swayed precariously. Leopold von Ranke's book Die Paepste in the 1953 Duenndruck edition from K F Koehler was laying open on top of some stacks which were the height of a standing desk. (Die Paepste is a history of the Papacy, focusing on the time since the Protestant Reformation, first published in the 1830's. Duenndruck -- literally, "thin press" -- is a German which refers to books with very thin pages, which makes it possible to keep very long books relatively small. Books with Duenndruck are heavier than conventional books of the same size. In the realm of English-language publishing, many Bibles have this sort of very thin pages. I don't know any English term which is equivalent to Duenndruck. This K F Koehler edition of Die Paepste is a little over 1400 pages long, about the same as some editions of the King James Bible.)

In another room, my brother and I were looking out into our enormous backyard. Our house was no tiny and longer crowded on all sides by other tiny houses. Now it wasn't winter any more, but early autumn. The yard was enclosed by a wooden fence. Some pink flowers on vines were spilling over the fence from our neighbor's backyard into ours. I said that they looked like roses. My brother informed my that they weren't roses. He told me their name, but I've forgotten the name. Some of the buds were still tightly rolled and were the size of small roses, and others were wide open and floppy and as big as bushel baskets. I was slightly anxious about what sorts of insects might be in and around those big flowers.

Dream Log: On the Tough Side of Town

I dreamed I was living in a large apartment on the top floor of a four- or five-story building with a motorcycle gang: a couple dozen tough-looking guys wearing biker colors, and a couple of their lady friends. It was pretty crowded. I don't know whether I had moved in with them or they had moved in with me. In any case, a lot of my books were there, out there in plain sight where anyone could touch them.

I felt I had to leave -- not just go out for a walk, but go out for a walk and not come back. Even though it meant leaving my books behind. When I got out into the hall, I realized that I was barefoot. And outside, it was cold-autumn or semi-winterish weather. I went back inside and looked all over the place, but I couldn't find my shoes or socks. Finally I mentioned to some of the bikers that I couldn't find my shoes or socks. Someone took pity on me and found a pair of sneakers that fit me okay, and a good pair of socks.

And so I walked out, leaving the bikers behind forever with those books and hoping that at least some of them would get something out of the reading, with my feet quite comfortable in the cold weather. I hadn't taken a good look at the socks and shoes before putting them on, and now I wondered whether perhaps the bikers, what with their high profits from who knows what all sorts of scary activities, were connnoisseurs of fine expensive footwear. (I am not.) Outside it was dusk and getting dark. As I walked I had to keep my eyes open, for in the park outside the apartment building, in addition to sparrows and squirrels, there were buffalo, and some of the buffalo were aggressive. For the most part I managed to avoid them as I crossed the park, but once I had to run fast and climb a tree, just barely evading a charging buffalo who crashed into the big oak just below my climbing feet and made it sway alarmingly.

On the other side of the park my Dad had an apartment, and he let me spend the night on his couch. The next morning, somehow, my mail was already being forwarded to my Dad's apartment. A box about a foot long and wide and tall was addressed to me, from a Christian publisher. Inside the box was an enthusiastic letter about a piece of writing I didn't remember sending to them, and a small television monitor which played a video in which people were acting out the writing I had submitted to the publisher, intercut with brief shots of me watching the performers, wearing a dark stocking cap similar to caps which several of the bikers had worn. I called the publisher, who was definitely interested in publishing the piece, but kept tenaciously avoiding any mention of money -- he wanted to publish the piece but didn't want to pay me for it. I told him that if he ever published anything I'd written without giving me an agreed-upon amount of payment in advance, he'd be hearing from my lawyer, and I hung up.

My Dad and I had breakfast together and discussed the buffalo problem in the park. Heavily-attended city council meetings were discussing the issue, with very vehement members of the public loudly weighing in on both of the two main options: let hunters come in and blast away until all the buffalo were dead; or shoot the buffalo with tranquilizer darts, put them on trains, and ship them west to some place where there were already a lot of buffalo. (This was in a part of the Midwest where there hadn't been large numbers of wild buffalo since the 19th century. Nobody knew for sure how these buffalo had managed to suddenly appear in this park in the middle of a Midwestern city.) My Dad and I were firmly on the ship-'em-west side of the debate. Besides the two main opposing sides of the question, a small minority wanted to leave the buffalo alone, and remove people from the area if necessary. I had a lot of sympathy for this view, but didn't see how it would be possible to realize it, and was supporting the ship-'em-west side in order to stop the shoot-'em-all side.

Dream Log: Travel Blogging Project

I dreamed that I was one of around a dozen bloggers chosen to participate in a corporate-sponsored project, one of the corporations probably being General Motors, because each one of us was put as a passenger into an identical boring new GM car. Starting in a parking lot in downtown Detroit, the cars took off together, following identical GPS routes hundreds of miles east.

My father, my mother, my brother and I were in my car. We were all decades younger than we really are, although it was still 2017. As it was decades ago, my Dad was driving.

The GPS route took us over a variety of roads, from Interstates to rural dirt roads to streets going through the middle of towns.

Only a couple of the bloggers blogged mainly about cars, and only a couple were travel writers. The rest of us represented quite a variety of approaches to writing. We were told that we could blog about the cars, or about the journey, or not, just as we pleased. We could link blog posts by the other bloggers -- current posts about this road trip, or posts years old. We could critique posts by the others. Or we could do none of the above. In fact, we were given no requirements whatsoever about blogging, only suggestions.

All the traveling expenses, gas, meals, hotels, everything, was being covered by the project's sponsors. Whether we bloggers were also actually being paid, or whether this was a blogging contest, with the blogger judged best by some experts or by any randoms readers who expressed an opinion, won a prize, I don't recall.

It was also stressed repeatedly to the drivers of all the cars that this was not a race. On the contrary, we were all encouraged to take our time and enjoy the trip.

It's a good thing we weren't racing, because the driving got hairy enough without us racing. In northwestern Ohio, just a few dozen miles into the trip, on a stretch of Interstate full of construction and detours, three lanes full of high-speed bumper-to-bumper traffic were suddenly required to merge to two lanes. This was impossible to do, of course, and many of us screeched to a stop and a few cars were rear-ended, although thankfully it seemed that there was no major damage done to humans or cars. As we waited to get rolling again, I said, "I just hope whoever's re-designing this stretch of road isn't done yet."

The trip had started late in the afternoon. Just as he had been decades ago, on this trip my Dad was a bit of a leadfoot, and we soon were out of sight of the other cars with bloggers. Shortly after nightfall, on an uncrowded multi-lane stretch of Interstate near Cleveland, we were suddenly zooming up toward a brown Corvette with some body damage motionless and sideways in the right lane. (Although he drove above the speed limit and never used his turn signals, Dad respected some other good-driving habits such as staying to the right except for passing.) Dad calmly reacted, turning to pass the stopped car on the smooth paved berm to the right, then put us back into the right-hand lane, all with no lurching, no screeching of the skinny entry-level tires, no danger of flipping the car. "Good driving, Dad," I said. Then I said, "Should somebody call 911 and report the stopped car in the road?" But none of us did.

Driving through the gentrified-looking downtown of small town in western Pennsylvania, on a narrow old two-lane road, with everything well-lit by streetlamps, traffic was stopped coming the other way. People had gotten out of the cars and were standing around looking angry. I wasn't sure whether this was a traffic jam or a demonstration. The angry people and their cars looked much less prosperous than the surrounding downtown area.

In another town, a stretch of road which was much less well-lit twisted through and under -- overpasses -- some interesting-looking architecture, buildings lit mostly just fleetingly by our headlights. Red-brick and concrete, all curved, very few angles, no right angles, just like the road twisting through it. Here and there a corporate logo was fashioned of the red brick and concrete. Except for the corporate logos it could have been a university or a hospital. I wondered whether an expert on architecture would find it interesting or hideous or neither. While I was honestly trying to think what I thought of these red-brick and concrete buildings -- the corporate logos struck me as rather hideous, but they were far from the whole. They could be removed rather easily -- I woke up.

Dream Log: Big Kind Dutch Museum

Last night I dreamed I was in a big modern museum somewhere in the Netherlands. As I am in many of my dreams, so in this one I was alone, broke and surrounded by strangers. I don't speak Dutch very well at all. In many of these dreams, in addition to my other immediate problems, I don't speak the local language. But of course, Dutch people speak English very well.

This was a very modern museum, and it seemed to be dedicated to the "everything is art" approach. And so for example, there were large groups of children in the museum, and it seemed they were being treated in the anti-disciplinarian "let them find their own way" approach of some modern schools. In a large room, the size of a large gymnasium, a group of children, maybe 10 or 12 years old, were kicking a soccer ball around. I was in a hallway which led into that large room. The ball came down the hallway toward me. I don't know whether the children had seen me standing alone in the hallway and intentionally kicked the ball to me the first time. But after I kicked it back to them the first time, they definitely kicked it back to me on purpose. And so we kicked the ball back and forth for a while, they in the large room and I in the hallway. They seemed to generally approve of my performance. However, I was not certain whether it was obvious that I was American, and whether they were taking into account, when judging the way I ran the ball down and kicked it, that I can from one of the very few places on Earth where most of the people, or at least most of them my age, hardly ever play soccer.

After the children took their ball and moved on, I sat alone on a staircase near the top of a large atrium, and wondered where the word "soccer" came from.

Then suddenly I noticed that I had lost both my shoes and my socks, and it was wintry outside. I had definitely had my shoes and socks just a moment earlier, when I was kicking the soccer ball, and now, suddenly, somehow, they were gone. I felt very embarrassed about this. But at the same time I had a feeling that I was not going to be treated harshly just when I most needed help, because I was in the Netherlands. (I don't know whether this was a realistic estimation of the Netherlands.) In any case, eventually I found a lost and found which had a variety of clothing items in a large cardboard box. A pair of shoes which could have been mine were in the box. I took those shoes and two unmatched socks from the lost and found. The museum guard in charge of the lost of found seemed to notice that I was taking socks which didn't match, and presumably weren't mine, but he seemed less concerned about that than about the fact that a person was here who needed socks. It was twilight, getting dark, and I assumed that the museum was about to close. But then two possibilities occurred to me: one, that maybe the museum didn't close; and two, that even if it was closing, they'd let me stay there. Just because it was clear I needed somewhere to stay.

I didn't talk to anyone all throughout the dream, and yet somehow I was fairly certain about what they were thinking, and what they thought of me. And it seemed that, by and large, they didn't want to go out of their way to make my troubles worse.

Dream Log: Cast Reunion Of "Gilligan's Island"

I dreamed that I was a cast member of "Gilligan's Island," and that some surviving members of the cast had gotten together at a resort hotel for some reason. It was not clear what role I had played on the show. Outside of the guest rooms and suites, all of the walls and doors of the hotel were white, as was much of the furniture.

Besides people associated with "Gilligan's Island," some people I actually know in waking life were there. Some of the latter were doing some pole-vaulting at a track-and-filed facility close to the hotel. A friend of mine suddenly got upset for some reason, and I hugged him and did my best to console him. I did some pole-vaulting. In waking life, I have never attempted pole-vaulting. In the dream, I was clearing 10 or 12 feet, rather unrealistic for right now, given my age, 55, and weight.

Suddenly I realized that I had no money on my person except for a trouser pocket full of nickels and dimes.

Robert Downey, Jr was there, and was connected to "Gilligan's Island" in some way. He had been pole-vaulting with us, and now he was sitting on a white chair in the white hallway outside of our hotel suites, dressed all in white: white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up over a white T-shirt, white trousers with a white belt, white loafers and white socks. He was handling some of the finances related to the show. It was not clear whether, in the dream, he, and not Russell Johnson, had played the Professor on the show. I mentioned my residuals to him, and he said that I could get a daily payment of $170.00 if I so chose, beginning the next day. We agreed that I would take the $170.00 per day. The lodging at the hotel was being provided without charge. Whether the money was being taken out of our residuals payments, or if some person or company or other entity was footing the bill for the hotel, was not clear.

I went out to the beach next to the hotel. Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island," was sitting on the white sand of the beach on a white towel wearing a white one-piece bathing suit. I said hello to her a couple of times but she didn't answer. It wasn't clear whether she was ignoring me, perhaps because she'd heard I was broke, or if she had become hard of hearing, or what.

Suddenly I felt very hungry. I didn't know what the prices for food were around here, but, it being a resort hotel, I thought they might be rather steep. I didn't know whether my pocketful of small change would buy me any food at all. I went back inside and asked Robert Downey, Jr, whether he could loan me the price of a sandwich. He handed me a $100 dollar bill. Then he pointed to the door beside him, the door to his suite. Suddenly for some reason he had a British accent which lasted for the rest of the dream. He said, "The kitchen in there is very well-stocked, you could make yourself a sandwich." I thanked him and tried to give him back the $100, but he refused to take it, and also told me that it wasn't a loan. He also mentioned that there was some pasta salad in the fridge in his suite which was very good, and that I should try at least a bite before I even started to make a sandwich.

Then he pulled me close and muttered, "There's a full bar in there, too. Go nuts. Mi casa su casa. I insist."

Then another man, I don't remember who, pulled me aside and thrust a $100 bill at me. Somehow he had heard I was nearly broke. "Thanks," I said, "but someone already beat you to it."

"Good," he replied, forcing the bill on me. "That just means you're another $100 ahead. Please. It'll hurt my feelings if you don't take it."

I went inside Robert Downey Jr's suite. In stark contrast to the whiteness outside, in here the walls were painted dark colors and the floor was covered with dark carpet, and there was a lot of exposed wood and leather and stained glass. The lighting was pleasantly subdued. I was intensely looking forward to the first bite of that pasta salad when I woke up.

Dream Log: Lost

I dreamed I was traveling from Berlin to Paris. I had taken advice from a man I shouldn't have listened to because he was foolish, and as a result, I found myself by the side of the road in the middle of an extraordinarily complex highway interchange, with a cardboard box in my arms, filled with some of my favorite books. For a moment I thought I could see the television tower in the Alexanderplatz in Berlin behind me, and the Eiffel Tower off in the distance ahead, so that I knew at least that I was pointed in the right direction. Then I realized that Berlin and Paris are much too far away from each other for me to see them both at the same time, and that those things I was looking at in the distance couldn't both be what they seemed.

Traffic was very heavy and going very fast. Running from one side of a one-lane offramp to the other without being run over was not easy, even without carrying the heavy box. It was quite annoying to have to simply abandon those books by the side of the road. I was angry at the person who had given me poor advice, and angry at myself for having listened to him. But I told myself that, although some of the volumes might be hard to replace, it would be even harder to replace my life, and decided that I had to leave them there.

A middle-aged woman wearing a conservative dress and high heels walked past me. She began to cross the road in a leisurely manner, but right away beeping, speeding traffic chased her back to the side of the road, and seemed to let her know that she was in a very precarious situation.

I helped her get off of the highway. I held one of her hands and encouraged her to run as fast as she could. She held her shoes under her other arm.

After a long and frightening struggle, we found ourselves on a sidewalk. She put her shoes back on and thanked me for my help, assuring me that now she was alright. I was far from convinced about that, but she insisted she'd be fine.

It didn't seem at all certain that I would be fine. I was in a French-speaking town, but I didn't know which town. There seemed to be a pronounced lack of street signs saying that such-and-such a town was this way or that way. But, I told myself, maybe those signs were there, and the problem was just that I didn't know where to look for them.

Eventually I found a train station.

A man of indeterminate age with very long curly greying hair was standing behind a counter inside the station. I approached him and asked, "Parle-on anglais?" The man smiled heartily and said Yes, he spoke English. I asked how to get onto a train bound for Paris. He chattered away in broken English, but it was very hard for me to understand anything he was saying. I couldn't tell whether he had even understand my question.

On top of having lost a boxload of books and being tired, hungry and thirsty, having difficulty communicating and not knowing exactly where I was, I was not sure whether there was a sufficient combination of cash and plastic in my pockets even to pay for a train ticket to Paris, let alone to secure lodging and sustenance once I was in Paris.

I thought to myself that, if I eventually began to starve, knocking on the door of a church might at least get me a meal, depending on which church I knocked at.

Dream Log: Huge Campus

I dreamed I was on the campus of a large university; indeed, it may have been somewhat larger than the largest real university campus in the world. I was supposed to meet some friends of mine, but I was lost, and the people I asked for directions weren't very helpful.

At one point I was inside a library. I saw a sign over the doorway to a room which said "THEOLOGY," and I went in, because oftentimes, items shelved under the heading of theology 1) aren't actually theology and 2) are written in Latin. I saw some volumes whose covers looked promisingly old -- but then I remembered that I was already late: my friends and I had agreed to meet for lunch at 1:00 PM, and my Seiko 5 read 1:06.

(This is my Seiko 5. There are many others like it, but this one is mine. Squeeee!)

Reluctantly, I abandoned my search for interesting things written in Latin, noting the location of the library and the room labeled "THEOLOGY" for a possible future search, and continued to look for my friends.

This search for my friends was particularly difficult because I had forgotten where we had agreed to meet.

Most of the people I saw were young adults -- students, most of them, I supposed -- who seemed to be in significantly better physical shape than I. For example, there was a large store, several stories high, which seemed to sell mostly sporting goods, and the staircase which descended from the 2nd floor to the ground floor had hand rails which stopped 8 feet or more above the ground floor, and students (probably students), instead of climbing down the stairs, were standing upright on these handrails and sliding down and jumping 8 feet or more down to the floor and landing without injuring themselves. Sometimes they absorbed the shock of landing by letting their legs bend very deeply; other times they rolled as they landed, like expert parachuters. And I wasn't about to try that.

It's not that I'm in bad shape for my age: I do pushups and crunches and cardio every day. But these young people all seemed somewhat athletic even compared to average young people. It was unusual that they all seemed that way, that I couldn't spot an exception.

I went into another very large store which seemed to sell mostly appliances. These stores weren't across the street from the campus, as I've seen in some college towns: they were in the middle of the campus, they were university operations. People continued to be not much help in finding my friends, not that I gave them much to work with.

Gradually I started to get the impression, from the expressions on their faces, sometimes pleasantly dreamy, sometimes very unpleasantly fanatical, that these fit young people were in some sort of religious order, and that all of the vigorous and sometimes dangerous physical exercise was a part of their religious practice.

Dream Log: Big-Time NCAA Basketball

I've dreamed about this at least one time before: I was an incoming freshman on a big-time NCAA basketball team. I don't really know anything about what that would be like, but it seems to me that there were unrealistically many players on the team, even before a lot of players might be cut. It was more like the number of players on a football team, or maybe even more than that.

We were inside a sprawling facility with many full-sized courts and many other rooms and halls, all for the basketball team's use. The walls and ceilings, and our practice uniforms, all tended to be white. And the towels were also white, as they tend to be in gyms.

At one point a bunch of us -- not all of the players. Maybe all of the new players -- were sitting on benches lining both walls of a long white hallway, and a coach was talking to us. He said that we had many things which most students at the university did not have: much bigger dorm rooms. Much better food, as much as we wanted to eat. Massages and steam rooms. And many other things. The coach said that it was not fair that we had all of these advantages. He didn't mention easy, basket-weaving-type classes designed to allow us to graduate without being distracted very much from athletics, but I assumed that that was one of the advantages he was talking about.

The coach also said that we were expected to work very, very hard if we wanted to stay on the team, exerting ourselves physically at a level which most of the students at that university would never be able to imagine. He said that this, also, was unfair. Life was unfair, the coach said. He said that if we didn't know that already, hopefully we would learn at least that much while we were at this university. He added that some of us would not be here long at all: another example of life's basic unfairness. He added that we would be burning several times as many calories as most of those of the other students who were very active, and that that meant that we had to be sure to eat enough, or we would pass out from the exertion.

The player sitting to my right began to mutter as the coach talked about eating. He was definitely short for a basketball player, and he looked a bit pudgy too. I tried not to let him distract me from what the coach was saying, but he leaned in close to me and informed me that he was a member of PETA and that he planned to disrupt the carnivorous behavior of the team. I stood up and moved away from him.

Later, on one of the many practice courts where a large crowd of us each had our own ball and were practicing long-range jumpers, I recognized someone I knew from life before college. I hadn't known he was a basketball player. He was not wearing a white T-shirt and shorts like the rest of us, but a grungy light-brown denim jacket, very old and torn, and old greyish painter's pants. He looked at me and gave me an ominous grin and said something. I got away from him as soon as a I could. I didn't want to hang around with anyone who wasn't completely focused on playing basketball as well as possible.

My arms began to cramp up and I headed to the massage room. And then I woke up, and realized that my arms weren't actually cramping: they were too cold because the windows were open and it had cooled off outside and the fan was on. I turned the fan off and felt much better.