Dream - The man with the wrap-around eyes

A few months before "The girl with the disappearing face" dream, probably in late 2004 or early 2005, I had a dream which, like the later dream, also had a lot of flashing of lights.

In the dream, perhaps eight or ten feet away, a person stood, almost in a sideways view. There seemed to be something like fog, and there were a few other people here and there, mostly just shadowy images in the fog.

This particular person was seen fairly clearly, particularly the head area. His eyes wrapped around the sides of his head, and the eye facing me was looking at me very intensely.

Like the girl in the other dream, this person was evidently an extraterrestrial alien or at least a hybrid.

Dream - The girl with the disappearing face

I had an odd dream the night of April 24-25, 2005, part of which featured an extraterrestrial alien. Most of the dream was about something else, though it, too, had some strange features.

The part about the alien occurred near the end of the dream. I was taken by someone to a meeting with an alien, or I at least followed the person there. It was dark, and we were outside in a small, dirt parking area with a wooden railing at the back. The area was lit up by one or more lights, so I had no trouble seeing.

The alien was a human-looking female. She was pretty, and her face had somewhat square features. She had blondish hair and was smiling broadly, showing all her teeth. Her skin looked odd, though. It was too smooth and seemed to be all the same color. It almost looked like plastic, or like someone with heavy makeup.

Light started flashing brilliantly, then, like lightning flashes. Her mouth and nose disappeared, replaced by skin color, like an area being deliberately fuzzed out on the TV screen.

The light continued to flash, and the lower part of her face seemed to be lost somehow. Her eyes, cheeks, and part of the top of her head remained, though. Sometimes her eyes seemed to have eyebrows under them, and sometimes they seemed to have eyebrows both over and under. Sometimes, it seemed that her face was actually upside down, and then it would seem right side up again. It was starting to get pretty scary.

Abruptly, then, her head was mostly gone. The section with her eyes was left, and parts of her forehead and cheeks, and long, ragged strips of skin trailed back around the sides.

The tattered fragment of her face hung there in the air, with the eyes having the same intense expression as before.

Dream - The figure in the doorway

I had an odd dream in early January 2005.

I fell asleep for awhile in my chair at the computer. I sensed that there was someone in the doorway, which was across the room and to my left. The person, who I didn't actually see, just sense (my head wasn't pointed in that direction), was dressed in a long, tan trenchcoat, like old-time private eyes might wear. The coat was wrapped tightly around the figure and was tied closed. The figure also had a very wide-brimmed hat pulled down low on its head. Its face was just a dark shadow under it. The figure was very skinny and did not seem to be very tall, perhaps 5 to 5 1/2 feet.

I tried to move, but I was partially paralyzed. I could move my legs back and forth, but when I tried to move my hands, they seemed to move with excruciating slowness. Perhaps they didn't really move at all.

The figure in the doorway seemed to be watching me. I felt that it was more than just watching, though. That it was "aware" of me on some deeper level.

I finally managed to wake up. The figure, of course, was gone.

In retrospect, the figure in the doorway reminds me of some stories of extraterrestrial aliens (the Visitors) disguising themselves. It's hard to know what to think of it, though.

Dream - Composed of bright particles

A long time ago, perhaps in the mid 1980's, I had a dream in which I was composed of bright particles and rose up from my sleeping body to form a peak, like the ridge of a wave, and then sank back down into my body and spread out to the sides, and then drew back into my body until I was within it, at which point I woke up. I did not find it scary, just interesting. (Some other experiences WERE scary, though.)

Dream - Flying with a leprechaun

Sometimes in dreams, we may meet people, strange beings or even places that we seem to have known for a long time but without really knowing why. I met a leprechaun, once, in a dream that occurred probably in the first half of 2004.

To be very, very brief, in the dream I first went through a time of driving around doing various things. I think it started out sometime during the day, but progressed to evening and night, then started to get toward morning. Eventually, I turned a corner and started to go down a long street with a gentle downward slope. It was a mostly residential area.

At the end of the street, where another street crossed it leading to a more commercial section, a house had the remains of some creature buried in the front yard. It had been there for over a hundred years, but it was buried very shallowly, and parts tended to come to the surface from time to time. Sometimes it was supposed to be a smallish bigfoot, but frequently it looked more like some kind of dragon instead. I tried to cover it back up to protect it and sent someone to get an archeologist to come and see it.

Finally I had to leave, though, and I went to the other street and turned right and started walking toward the center of town. A lot of other people were doing the same thing. They seemed to be tired and waiting for something to happen. The sun came up as we stood there waiting.

I finally went to some professor's room, where I was supposed to see about a test. I think I had already taken it and he was grading them. The room was half sunken into the ground and I had to go down a few steps and open the door. I kept repeating the scene over and over. He was always sitting behind a desk in the small room, with papers in front of him. He had a beard and looked vaguely lumberjack-like, but he didn't seem to be very tall. He looked older as the scene kept repeating itself (always with variations), but he almost always looked at me, if only briefly, with a knowing smile. He usually had someone in the room with him.

I finally moved on. I felt I had to get to school (I do not attend school in real life, and have not done so for a long time). I started floating in the air, perhaps because it was easier, perhaps to impress the other people.

Some of them did seem to be impressed. In fact, I started getting chased by a mob of people. The surroundings had changed, and now contained long buildings with concrete walks along them. At least some of the buildings were more than one story high. I went along, moving from building to building and then I turned left and started moving down the long length of a building.

At that point, I met a leprechaun who was hovering in the air near the building on the other side. We seemed to know each other from long ago. He went with me and we flew down the length of the building, with the crowd after us. I was under the impression that the other people could not see him.

We reached the corner to turn left again, but there were some rough wooden steps going back and forth as they went up the building, which was several stories high, and the leprechaun wanted to go up the stairs and hide. He seemed to be getting out of breath.

I wasn't sure about this, and sure enough I soon heard footsteps of someone coming down the stairs. I also heard the leprechaun hurrying to get out of the way. He couldn't be seen, but he didn't want to be walked on. The footsteps kept coming and getting louder and louder. The leprechaun finally got back down the stairs (to the level of the top the first floor) and then left the stairs and went back to flying.

I left the leprechaun behind and continued on, turning left at the next corner. There was a parking lot there, empty except for a witch by the wall of the building, surrounded by a group of her followers.

I flew on, getting higher in the air and going over lot after lot. As I went, I sensed that I was crossing invisible barriers that had been set up for monitoring purposes. They had been activated by the government when they heard what was happening, and they were trying to track me. For some reason, they thought that because I was flying I knew something about UFOs and aliens.

Finally, they activated a barrier that was supposed to contain me. I went through it anyway, and then flew around in an arc to the right and started flying through a different area. The new area had big low buildings, like libraries or schools, with big lawns in front of them.

As I came to each lawn, the sprinklers came on, in an apparent attempt to do something to me, perhaps to have the water outline me, as if they were having trouble seeing me. I would reach out with my mind and twist the metal pipe of the sprinkler, to keep it from spraying me, but it always sprayed me before I could do anything.

As I continued flying, the grass on the lawns thinned, and patches of dirt started to show. At one point I stopped briefly and talked with a woman who came out of a building. I was under an overhang that ran along the building, and I hoped that I might be hidden from the pursuers that way. I was just about out of energy and couldn't fly anymore.

After talking with the woman, I walked on, under the overhang, and then a man came out. He had evidently heard about me, because he started chasing me. I ran from him, but he caught me. I got away and ran a short distance across the now mostly bare ground until I reached a barrier of dirt that went across it.

I threw myself onto the barrier, trying to get over it. I was just draped across it, though, staring at another dirt barrier and the dry ditch that went between them. I had the feeling that it was something for flood control. The man was still behind me, but seemed to be frozen in place.

A small amount of water started running into the ditch, seeming to come from the other barrier and down aways to the left. It was slowly eating away at the other barrier. I realized that something was buried in it: a small, old-style locomotive, a train engine of the type that might be seen in amusement parks. I felt it had been there for a long time, probably over a hundred years.

Then, suddenly, the dirt was gone and there was a sidewalk with the train beside it, shiny and new looking. An engineer with a big mustache was smiling and leaning out of it and talking to some teenage boys, of which I was one (in real life I am much older). I felt that I had somehow gone back in time, and that we were being recruited for something, that there was some role we were supposed to play.

And that's where it ends.

(Not quite as brief a story as we might have hoped, but it could have been worse.)

Dream - And fly away

I had a dream, probably in early 2005, in which I could fly, and I taught other people how to fly, too.

I'm not sure how the dream began. I remember, though, that at some point it was daytime, perhaps late in the day, and two men, members of some organization, enemies of the group I was with, came to the door. I fought against them.

One of them I threw in the air, partly through physical throwing and partly through mentally causing him to fly, and I then turned him into a bird and he flew away.

The other man was struggling with someone in the yard. They were on the ground, with the bad man on top. I threw him into the air and turned him into a bird, also.

There was a sense of danger and of others coming, and we had to leave and fly away. It's possible that this first part came later in the dream, but I'm not sure where it would fit.

At some point then, in the dream, I was out in the backyard with several other people, quite a few, actually. It was night. It seems that we then started some kind of competition to see who could fly best. I started to rise up in the air, and found that I could do it easily. The others seemed to be having some difficulty, though many or most could manage it to some degree.

After flying around in the yard a bit I flew around to the side of the house. There was a long, wide area there (not like in real life). I saw a woman I knew (knew in the dream, not in real life) and I picked her up and carried her in the air. I flew back and picked up my mother as well.

It was much harder to get in the air while carrying two people, but I eventually managed it. I couldn't seem to get very high; the top of the fence and the edge of the roof were about all I could manage. I think I was trying to show them how easy it was, at least partly in an effort to get them to fly on their own.

At some point I noticed that the woman, who had seemed to be perhaps around 50 now seemed much older, perhaps around 60 or even older. She looked vaguely like the actress Patty Duke.

Then we all had to leave, for They were coming. It was that secret group, perhaps from the government, that wanted to get us. We flew off through the night, over the houses of the neighborhood and over the streets and alleys. We went out from the backyard and turned left, went for quite a ways and then turned right. We started to separate, then, and some of the others turned left and I turned right.

I flew alone through the darkness. I was having some trouble with the telephone and electricity wires. There seemed to be quite a lot of them and I ended up flying just under them in an attempt to avoid them, though I believe that I hit a few.

I reached a main road and turned right and flew along it. It was getting lighter now, becoming early morning.

After awhile I came to another main road that crossed the first. On the corner, across the street, there was a tall building made of metal beams and triangular crosspieces, something like the Eiffel Tower, but straight. The building was tall and massive, and had another, similar, building attached behind it.

On the front corner of the building, a tall, bronze-colored figure constructed of metal beams and crosspieces faced the building, with its arms raised hugging it. The metal figure was extremely tall, perhaps 30 feet or more, perhaps a lot more. It was smiling, and as I flew up it started moving. I felt that my presence caused it in some way to be activated, but I also felt that it could move without me if it wished.

It seemed glad to see me, and I felt that it was a friend.

I flew up the building and along the top, and it climbed up the building to be with me.

Then I woke up in the dream, but I was still in the dream. I was in my bedroom, in my bed, and my brother was there sitting in his bed, like it used to be decades ago. I tried showing my brother how I could fly, and levitated myself a little ways off the bed and drifted off low over the floor. It was a much more intense feeling then in the dream (though I was actually still in the dream). It seemed to involve generating a feeling similar to a falling elevator feeling and maintaining it.

Then I was back with my followers, in a large house. They were showing me various things of mine from the old days that were on some low shelves. One of the things was like something from a model kit, though perhaps it was some piece of art that I made. It had several figures clustered around something large, holding it. I made them move for a while, with my mind, but a growing sense of urgency was intruding. I felt that They might know where we were, and might be coming.

I told my followers that we had to leave, NOW. I went to a door that led out the side. I could see through the windows to the alley and the restaurant on the other side. A few people were in the alley, but not many. The ones that seemed of most concern were a man and a woman, in dark clothing, that were approaching from the right, apparently going somewhere. They were in late middle-age, and had a vaguely Eastern-European look, thick bodies and pudgy faces.

I hurriedly opened the door and stepped into the alley. It was paved with small, rounded bricks. I had been trying to get out before the man and the woman started going past the door, but I was not fast enough. They were almost at the door and stopped abruptly when it opened.

They stared at me, and the woman held a pair of small, curved, thin scissors in her left hand, like it was a weapon. I felt that it was indeed a weapon, and that it was not what it appeared to be.

They were part of the secret group that was after us. I tried to make it through the restaurant's doors, but they held onto me and I was caught in the doorway. A huge crowd then came down the alley from the other side. More of Them.

I turned and looked at the couple and said, "You're too late. I already taught them everything." I didn't really know that, though. It was more of a wishful thinking than reality, but I wanted them to think they had failed.

I stood there in the doorway of the restaurant, facing the house. The couple was holding me on the left and the crowd came and held me on the right. I tried to levitate the whole mass of people into the air, along with me, and perhaps turn them into birds, but I couldn't do it. I didn't have enough power to lift that many. I was trapped.

I woke up, then, but I continued the dream in my mind. I had the giant metal figure, sensing that I was in trouble, walk down the road toward us. He came, always smiling, and swept the vast crowd of people away with his right hand. With his left, he picked up me and the couple. He then separated me from them.

At that point I went through several possible futures in my mind. I tried having the giant figure drop the couple from a great height onto the alley, but I didn't like that. I then had him drop them on the crowd, but I didn't like that, either. Finally, I had him lift them high in the air, where he mentally made them rise up off his hand and turn into birds and fly away.

Dream - My dead grandfather helps me look for the dogs

I had a dream, probably around the middle or end of March, 2005, in which my father's father, my grandfather, appeared.

I'm not sure what the first part of the dream was about, but eventually I became concerned about securing the screen door in the living room. In the dream, the door was on the wrong side of the room, but it seemed normal then. The screen door in the dream was ragged, and did not fit right. It was collapsible, like an accordion, and I was trying to pull it out enough to latch, but it didn't want to stay in place.

After a while I noticed that the hinges on the main door weren't attached to the wall, and I was trying to fix that. But then it changed so that the main door was actually off and was sitting against the wall on the other side of the room (the same wall the doorway was in).

I said, "That's why it's been so cold all winter." Then I moved the door back to the doorway and was trying to secure it, but the door changed from wood to some type of rubbery plastic. The plastic was formed to resemble extremely worn boards set horizontally with a couple of vertical crosspieces facing outside. It was all one piece and colored blue and white. It had big gaps around the worn "boards" and I was having trouble getting this door to reach the latch, too.

Somewhere in there, the dogs got outside into the front yard. We were worried about them getting lost. I went out to try and find them. We had two little dogs (like in real life) and two other, newer, little-but-somewhat-bigger dogs (unlike in real life). For some reason the newer dogs were considered less important, and I was more concerned with getting the original dogs back first.

Out in the front yard, there were a lot of bushes forming a hedge against the house, and other tall bushes forming rows of hedges across the yard (unlike in real life). I think there may have also been a very large cylindrical metal tank sitting on its side (like my grandmother on my mother's side used to have on her farm).

All this created almost a maze effect, making it difficult to search.

I did find one of the original dogs fairly quickly, though. It was near the house. It was laying on its side on the ground, looking at what I took to be a fox, which was laying on the ground almost touching the dog. They almost formed a circle, and they had their heads raised and their mouths open. The dog had its tongue hanging out, I'm not sure about the fox, and they were both looking at each other with peaceful expressions on their faces.

I was worried about the fox. I didn't know if it would try to bite me or maybe bite the dog, too. I saw a scrap of brown cardboard on the ground and picked it up. I used it to try and encourage the fox to leave. I nudged its shoulder a few times with the cardboard, but my hand kept bothering me. I looked at the cardboard and did a double and then triple take. I realized that it was not cardboard, but was some small animal, curled in a ball around my hand. It's claws were very long and looked like long straight gray nails, cut off straight across on the end, and they were dug into my hand. It had very expressive eyes, with dark fur around them. The dark fur was pointed up in the middle now, giving it a worried look.

I think I tried some to shake it off, but it didn't want to leave. I tried to nudge the fox with it several times, hoping that the fox would want to eat it, but the fox paid it no attention. The little animal now had the black fur around its eyes pointed downward in the middle, giving it a mad look.

I gave up on distracting the fox with it, and somehow managed to get it off my hand. The dog, in the meanwhile, had gone away somewhere.

I continued looking through the maze of the yard. I saw many strange creatures, some of which looked something like one of the "less important" dogs, but not exactly like it. Many of the creatures were quite large, and didn't quite look like dogs at all. Some of them looked almost like mountain lions, but not quite like those, either.

I had reached the sidewalk, now, and looked around and across the street, where a lot of cars were parked. All I saw were some more dogs that didn't match and various strange creatures moving about. They seemed to be aware of me, many of them looked at me, but they seemed also to be slightly wary of me.

I walked around to the side yard, which was much bigger then in real life. There was a slight dip in the ground, which was apparently to aid in runoff when it rained. I came to a tall chain link fence which, in the dream, went from my house to the house next door. There were a few strange creatures about, but not too many, and they were fairly small.

There was something in front of me and slightly to one side, that I took to be a small white dog. I wasn't paying too much attention to it, I was more looking off into the distance. I turned to it then, and gave a double and then triple take. The air almost seemed to boil. When I was finally able to focus on it, I saw that it wasn't really a dog. The front of it looked like a dog, almost puppy-like, with long floppy ears and a tongue hanging out. It had no back legs or hips, though. Its body just narrowed to a point. It lay there, propped up on its front legs, looking peaceful.

I thought, "THAT again. Things are really going to get strange now!"

I reached down and ruffled the short, white fur on its shoulder, and patted it.

I became aware, then, of someone standing nearby.

He was short, and older, and dressed in dark pants and a white shirt. He may also have had a coat, but I don't remember. He was also a little overweight.

I had trouble focusing on him. The air seemed to swim, and I was only able to get good looks at little bits of him at a time. He looked very much like my grandfather on my father's side, though, who had died over twenty years ago.

I asked him who he was, and he said, "Don't you know me?"

I thought about it, and finally acknowledged that I did.

He asked me if there was anything he could help me with. I thought again before answering. Was he really who he seemed to be? Would there be a "price" for the helping? I wondered these things, but did not actually speak. I decided that I had to go with appearances. I was afraid of hurting his feelings if I actually questioned him any more.

I told him that he could help me look for the dogs. He happily agreed, and we set off looking for them.

As we walked off, he said that he was here to be with my father when he (my father) went to a meeting next week (next week as measured from the time of the dream).

I was immediately suspicious of this, and wondered if something was going to happen to my father. I asked him a couple of times, in different ways, if something was going to happen to him. His first answer, while in the negative, was also somewhat ambiguous. When I asked him the last time, more explicitly, he finally turned to me and said, "Not as far as I know."

As we walked down the street, I looked closely at his face, trying to focus on it. My grandfather had a glass eye, and I wanted to see if he looked like one of his eyes was gone. I guess I believed that he might not currently be using a glass eye. After awhile, looking at his face in profile as he walked, I determined that his eyelids on that side of his face didn't have an eye in them, only darkness.

We came to a cross street and turned down it. We met a woman walking her small dog on a leash, and stopped and talked with her awhile. All the other animals seemed to be gone, now.

I looked across the road at a house. Some of its windows faced me, and one was very wide, and looked like a dark mirror. It appeared to also be bulging slightly.

I walked over and peered into it, trying to see my grandfather's reflection. I saw the shadowy form of my own reflection, and aways off I saw the shadowy form of the woman's reflection, but I was having trouble seeing my grandfather's. I was peering and moving my head around, but I still couldn't find anything I could identify as his reflection.

He walked up, then, and stood nearby, watching me. I kept trying, and finally saw it. His reflection was pale and washed out, and drastically stretched from side-to-side, but at least it was there.

We decided to go, then, and look in a nearby car dealership for the dogs. I believe it was because of something the woman said.

We got to the car dealership and started walking among the stalls where they worked on cars. I saw lots of strange animals, mostly large, that wandered and hid among the cars.

Finally, someone asked if they could help us (I had been wondering when someone was going to question why we were there). One of us, probably my grandfather, told him of our mission, and the person told the other mechanics about it. They tried to be helpful, and more strange animals showed up, including some that came over low walls. We also saw a dog that looked something like, but not quite like, one of the "less important" dogs.

We eventually came to, or were directed to, a pit where a mechanic worked on the underside of cars. More strange animals existed in the pit, and it had something like water in it, with strange animals coming to the surface and going back under again.

We never found the dogs, though.

Streaks in the air

I noticed when I was very young that I could see pale, transparent streaks going through the air in various patterns, like swoops and swirls. The streaks had slightly larger areas at the front of them, which seemed to be heads for the streaks.

The streaks traveled in groups, packed tightly together, and were always moving. They seemed to be much closer than the clouds, sometimes only a few yards away.

If I concentrated, I could change the direction in which they were moving. That is, I could make them turn in a different direction. Since they are always moving, I'm not sure if this would be an overwriting of the previous direction or just a change in course or even simply viewing them with a different set of prejudices.

They were most noticeable outdoors, especially against the sky, but the groups of streaks could travel down past trees and shadows and still be visible to me. I could also make them appear indoors, but they were easier to see when the background was uncomplicated, such as bare walls or the ceiling.

They were always faint, even outdoors, and most of the time I either didn't notice them or regarded them as a kind of background noise interfering with what I was trying to view. They were most noticeable, and annoying, when I was trying to look at the sky, and sometimes they seemed to form a faint random visual static where small dots and squiggly lines appeared and disappeared without moving very much. Usually, I would just focus on what I was trying to see and try to ignore them.

As I grew older, I tended not to notice them or pay attention to them as much, and months and even years sometimes went by without really seeing them, though they were always there when I thought to look. I just tried again to see them and I still can.

Dream - The drugstore outside the universe

In the summer or fall of 2006, I had a dream in which something strange happened near the end of it.

In the dream, I kept going to a small drugstore. Over time, it gradually changed into a much larger store, though it was still a drugstore. Also, very few people had been in it at first, but the store gradually accumulated more and more people as time went on. It wasn't just that the store itself got larger, though that of course helped.

At some point, I became aware that time was running short and the store was about to close. I think that announcements were being made, perhaps over loudspeakers. There may have been 5 or 10 minutes left. Although I had been going to the store alone, this time someone was with me. Unable to locate this person, I eventually went out the back of the store, still searching.

I found that the store existed in another dimension, or perhaps another reality. The store was on a square that looked like something generated by a computer, including having a grainy texture. A similar square was to the side and connected to it. The second square did not have a building, but it had rough terrain and steep, tall hills. It, too, looked computer generated, with dirt and grass being represented for the most part by grainy colors. There was also something to the back of the original square (the one with the store), but I'm not sure now what it was. The squares themselves seemed to have no thickness, like a computer generated terrain that consisted only of the surface, with nothing underneath it.

A formless grayness lay outside the squares and associated structures, a grayness which seemed to be without end but also without an up or down and where things like measurements had no meaning. I did not know exactly what would happen if I fell off the square areas into the grayness, but it seemed to be something very bad, and that I would, in some way, be lost. I seemed at this point concerned both with finding the person I was with and eluding some people who were after me or who were trying to stop me.

Eventually, I got back inside the store and had somewhere located the person, and we were trying to leave. I noticed that there were still quite a few people in the store, and I started trying to warn them to leave, too. I knew that when the store closed that anyone in it would be trapped in that dimension. A lot of people left, and we had to leave ourselves now. Time was almost up and there was no more time left to do anything else but leave.

As we rushed toward the doors (there were several doors at the front), someone rushed to try to block the exit. In his haste, though, he hit the door frame and was leaning against it at an angle. We rushed past him and out the door.

Once outside, we saw a broad aisle leading to some more doors that led to our reality. On each side of the aisle, the square on which the store stood extended forward to the dimensional barrier, but the area outside the aisle was dimly lit. In the dimly lit area, scattered figures were seen, figures who wanted to stop us and trap us there. We rushed past them and through the door into our reality.

After running a short distance, I looked back and saw someone go through the door at the last split second, practically leaping through. He fell on the ground as he came through, unable to keep to his feet. It gave us a little extra time to get away from him, and we got in a car and apparently escaped.

Dream - The brilliant light

I had a dream, probably in the summer or fall of 2004, about a large ball of light. The overhead light was on when I was sleeping, as it occasionally is, so that may have had an effect. However, the ball of light was not in the physical location of the overhead light, but was lower, perhaps centered at about five or six feet in the air and more toward the doorway.

In the dream, I was sleeping in my bed, as I was in real life, and the light hung there in the air, huge, blindingly brilliant but without hurting my eyes. The light was white, with perhaps a tinge of blue, and with rays like long needles stretching out everywhere. I felt the light going completely through me, and felt peace and love radiating from it.

Dream - Acquired by China

I had a dream, probably in late 2004 or early 2005, in which the United States had been taken over by China. We were mostly left alone. It was a little like a corporate takeover, where the acquired company mostly continues as it was. The parent company, though (China), did keep watch on things, and did ultimately control things.

In the dream, I was a soldier in a dark green uniform, standing with other soldiers beside me and behind me, in row on row, a vast array. We were standing there, like we were waiting.

At some point we had gotten word that China had decided that there were too many American soldiers, and had decided to execute a large portion of them. We continued to stand there, waiting for the decision as to who would die.

We were notified, then, that the portion I was in was chosen for death. I was hoping that there might be some sort of appeal, but there didn't seem to be a process for it. I continued to stand there, waiting.

Fears

What am I afraid of?

When I was young, there was a time when I was very afraid of the dark. Sometimes I could even seem to see things in it. The closet was a worry, too, in the dark, at least when it was left open.

Oddly enough, I don't seem to recall being afraid of the dark when I was very young. The memories I have of this are from later childhood.

I don't have a fear of clowns, though I know they can be somewhat disturbing at times. I recently wrote about a problem that developed with a Clarabell Clown doll that I had (Clarabell was a character on the Howdy Doody TV show).

I don't have a fear of cloth in my mouth. Indeed, I seem to remember chewing my shirt and chewing the sheet on my bed. They both tasted pretty good.

I used to be afraid of bugs, spiders and praying mantises in particular. I'm still wary of some spiders, but this is only common sense. I don't like bugs touching me, though. Or me touching them.

I used to be afraid of change. I wanted things to always be the same. Some of that is still with me.

I used to be afraid of meeting new people and doing new things. This faded fairly quickly, of necessity, but an aversion remains. In other words, I am more reluctant than afraid, though something of the fear still exists. I can be difficult to know on a personal basis.

I have gone through times when I did a lot of checking locks and things. To some extent it seems to go in cycles, perhaps influenced to some extent by events.

I used to be afraid of heights. It was a fear of falling, of somehow being almost pulled off the edge by the distance. It called out to me in some way, and reached out for me. I had to resist that call, and was afraid to go too close to the edge, or of being in a position where there was an edge.

Somewhere in childhood I developed a fear of failing, of somehow, and maybe in spite of all appearances, not being good enough. Some of that remains, though it is somewhat muted now with time and experience. Still, there is a concern that I could have made or could make a difference. Depending on what I do or don't do, things could go a different way.

I used to be afraid of the Biblical End-of the-World, and of somehow not being Saved. With time, though, I came to a less-than-traditional view of such things. Though I still consider myself a Christian, I do not subscribe to a fundamentalist viewpoint, and many Christians would, in fact, probably disown me.

I used to be afraid of growing up. I could see the future ahead of me, the years stretching away, and it would never be as good as it was before. I also knew that the best times had, in fact, already passed, as my life before I entered school contained the best times I would ever know.

I developed a tendency to worry about the future to the extent that the present could not be sufficiently enjoyed. I used to look forward to getting out for school for the summer. Then I started worrying earlier and earlier in the summer break about returning to school when it was over. Eventually, I started worrying about returning to school before the break even started.


Time changes things. I am over 50 years old, and some of the worries are more distant, now. I'm not afraid of the dark anymore. Too much has happened over the years. The dark can contain dangers, but it seems less important in the face of what has already happened. Changes and new things can also hold dangers, but I am less afraid of them, though I do retain, at times, a suspicion of them and even an aversion to them.

But things are not as bad as they were, or as they could be.

Finding the elephants

I remember reading a news story long ago, in which a train derailed. Evidently the train had been carrying circus animals or some such thing, because some elephants escaped.

Some of them wandered over to a nearby old folks home and broke inside.

One resident opened the door to a room and saw an elephant inside. The resident shut the door again.

Later, another resident, an old lady, was telling newspeople that "we get elephants all the time."

It reminds me a little of the UFO situation, and different people's reactions to it.

Perhaps we, too, would find the elephants if we didn't keep shutting the door.

The Clarabell Clown doll

I used to have a Clarabell Clown doll (Clarabell was a character on the Howdy Doody TV show). It was a stuffed doll with a thin plastic face. I used to take the doll to bed with me.

One night, I was looking at the doll, and its eyes bothered me. I knew it was just a doll, and not alive, but it felt like its eyes were somehow looking at me.

I looked at it for a long time. I couldn't go to sleep like this, with the doll beside me looking at me with its eyes. However, if I threw the doll away from the bed, I knew that its thin plastic face would probably be dented, and it would never be the same after that. I didn't want to get out of bed to take it somewhere, either. Probably because my mother had put me in bed, and by getting out of bed I would be undoing that.

Finally, I did throw the doll away from the bed. It hit the wall where the wall met the floor, and I knew that its face was probably damaged. I could get to sleep now, though.

In the morning, my mother, looking very disturbed, showed me the doll and told me that she didn't know what had happened, but she had found it over by the wall and somehow its face had gotten dented. I told her, briefly, what had happened, and she said, looking upset, "But this is your favorite doll, you sleep with this every night! We can't fix it!"

I think I probably just repeated some of what I had already said at that point. In my mind, I understood what she was saying, but it couldn't be helped.

It was very sad, but it had to be done.

Dream - The girl on the mountain

I don't have anything that I can identify as a past life memory, but an odd dream that happened long ago had some strange features.

I was probably about five years old when I had the dream. My brother was in the dream with me. I am older than he is, but less than a year and a half so. In the dream, we were the same ages as in real life at the time.

In the dream, my brother and I were in the Old West riding in a wagon pulled by horses. We were sitting in front with the reins. We were going around and around a mountain, like in the song, "She'll be comin' 'round the mountain when she comes." I believe the song was actually being sung in the dream, as background music. I think at first we were slowly spiraling up the mountain on a dirt path, but eventually we were just going around the mountain in a circle, part way up. At this point, anyway, the going was not difficult at all, with the surrounding area being fairly flat for most of the trip.

Each time we went around the mountain, we passed the farm of a family that lived there. There were always a few people outside, and one of them was a daughter about our age. All of the people were dressed in Old-West, frontier style clothes, with the women, including the daughter, wearing long dresses and bonnets.

The daughter had eyes that were open very wide and staring, and we were supposed to stay away from her, because she was crazy. She was scary to look at and I didn't want to look at her.

One time, when we were going around the mountain, I looked for my brother and he was gone. He must have gotten off or fallen off somewhere.

When I got to the farm again, he was talking to the little girl.

It was so awful and scary that I forced myself awake.


An odd thing happened a few years later. We had moved to Arizona and were visiting a wax museum. In one of the scenes, I saw the little girl.

In the scene, which takes place in a small log cabin, a man is on his knees getting scalped by an Indian. In the corner, a little girl watches, a horrified
expression on her face, her eyes wide open and staring.

I'm not sure what to make of this, other than that the dream seems to predict the seeing of the wax figure. But I don't know why it would do that, and it seems that some deeper meaning should be associated with it.

Is this really necessary?

One time in grade school, we were being taught how to spell words and "necessary" ended up being talked about quite a bit. The teacher said that if anyone missed it on the spelling test then that person would have to write it on the board fifty times (I think it was fifty).

Well, somehow I got confused and missed it. I was the only one. So I had to go up to the board and start writing "necessary" over and over again. After a while, the teacher told me that I could stop. I kept arguing with her that I wasn't finished yet, that I didn't have it written down enough times. She insisted, though, so I went back to my seat.

She was really a pretty nice teacher.

Reality - I think, but am I?

I think.

And I think that I am.

But am I really?

Or am I just in the mirror, looking back?

Or am I a character in someones else's dream?

Or am I in a play, believing that the play's the thing?

And if the play's not the thing, then what is?


Robert Heinlein wrote a story, once, in which a man invented a machine that could measure the span of a person's life. When viewed in the context of time, people did not appear as they normally do, but appeared as long, worm-like things that began at their birth and ended at their death.

What do we appear as when viewed from other dimensions? If we have a current existence that extends past the reality that we know, does all that we are or were or will be form just a projection from a greater entity? A lobe that extends into what we view as reality?

If so, which is the reality? Is it what we normally perceive, or does it include all that underlies it? How is reality defined? If reality is what is real, is the underlying reality real in that sense? Or would it be not real, but still exist?

Murmuring voices

Many years ago, probably in 1997, I had been going for a long time with very little sleep. Finally, I took a short nap. When I woke up, I heard what sounded like a huge crowd of people talking to each other. I couldn't understand what was being said, though. It was just a lot of murmuring sounds, with some voices momentarily becoming louder and then falling back into the background murmuring. No matter how loud a voice became, though, I could never make out any words. I walked around, but the sound followed me whereever I went. I was vaguely disturbed by it, but also amused. I felt that it was some side effect of my exhaustion, although I have been exhausted many times before and since. Perhaps, instead, the exhaustion allowed a breakdown of barriers and some kind of psychic manifestation occurred. Who knows? I finally started doing something, and at some point the sounds went away.

Half paralyzed, and something tried to take me away

An odd thing happened one time when I was sleeping. It was probably back in the 1980's. I heard a buzzing sound, and there was a roar, like a freight train. I felt that something was happening, and that someone or something was trying to take me away. I didn't know who they were, what they wanted, or if I would be allowed to return.

I fought against it, and tried to wake up. I was on my back, and the upper half of my body was paralyzed, but I could move my legs. I swung my knees back and forth and slammed one leg into the wall, over and over. It would have been so easy to just give in and drift back off to sleep, or to whatever it was that awaited me. I refused to give in, though, I felt that what was happening was too important.

Finally, I was able to fully wake up, and everything was normal. I'm not sure exactly what the experience means. It sounds almost like a partial or failed out-of-body experience attempt, except for the feeling of danger and the feeling that something was trying to take me away.

Dream - Destroyer of worlds

Around the first half of September, 2006, I had a dream in which I destroyed the world. It was an accident, though. I wasn't intending to destroy the world at all. Honest.

In the dream, I was in a room that seemed to be made of metal. It was apparently a large control room of some kind, or perhaps some kind of situation room. Someone was standing to one side and slightly behind me. I have the impression that this person wore a uniform of some kind.

A rectangular screen was on the wall, like a television screen. Below it, some kind of panel ran along the wall and protruded from it slightly. There were various controls and lights on both the panel and the wall, but not a large number of them.

The screen on the wall showed a picture of the Earth. It was not a photograph, it was more like a simple map, but without grid lines. It showed the Earth as a globe, but with everything flat. The water was a different color from the land, which also had an outline around it.

Initially, and I think probably before seeing the control room, I saw a large, wide ship filled with people and heading toward Antarctica, probably from someplace in the Pacific Ocean near Africa. The ship was low in the water and did not seem to have an upper structure.

Now, however, in the control room, the ship was replaced by a large island in the picture of the Earth on the screen. The island was vaguely round though somewhat irregular, and slightly flattened on all four sides.

I was happily talking to the person near me about continental drift, and about how over a long span of time the island would move toward Antarctica. To illustrate this, I reached out and put my finger on the island on the screen and pulled it toward Antarctica.

I came to realize, then, that the picture of the Earth was somehow connected to the real Earth, that perhaps it was, in some way, the real Earth.

And that I had moved a large island, perhaps a couple of hundred miles across, a large distance, perhaps a thousand miles or so, in a fraction of a second.

I took my finger away from the screen. There was a slight pause, as if it was waiting to see if I had finished, and then time started again. The island continued moving, cutting across Antarctica, which had become centered on the map. The image of Antarctica turned red, orange and white, and I could see molten rock churning and boiling. Only the far edges of the continent stayed the original color.

The island was destroyed, but momentum kept part of it going, not as an island but as a mass of associated particles and hot gases. It headed out past Antarctica, across the ocean to South America.

The view on the map shifted, then, and I was looking at the North American continent. It was covered with a dusting of snow. The remains of the island were circling the Earth, but going from north to south, not south to north. Each time it passed over North America, a band of the snow disappeared. The cleared bands were perhaps a couple of hundred miles wide, and a new one was added every second or so. The new bands were placed to the east of the old ones. The bands were not quite parallel, and were not exactly evenly spaced. Occasionally they even crossed. A rough striped pattern was being produced, though, as the new bands were added.

I could tell that with each new band the remains of the island became fainter, being composed more and more of hot air and less and less of dust and particles, though it was already so thin from the start that it was transparent from my perspective. I could feel, though, that it was fading out.


Thinking back on the dream, the effect on the Earth was similar to what would happen if a large meteor or comet struck it. A mass extinction of life. Perhaps even a total extinction. Something that could cause an entire continent to become molten rock could certainly do that.


My fault.

Sorry.

Dream - First contact

One time, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, I went to bed a little early and fell asleep. I had a dream in which I was on a spaceship (one of ours), apparently as a visitor, just observing. It was a very large ship, and people occasionally went by, apparently on various errands or carrying out their duties. Everyone wore light-colored clothes.

A few people, perhaps just two or three, were near a machine built into one of the walls. The machine protruded from the wall, almost desk-like except the top sloped upward toward the wall and the sides sloped out toward the wall. At the wall, the top narrowed and joined a flat section that ran up the wall. The machine had lots of small grills and rectangular lights on its surface, though everything was relatively wide-spaced; that is, lots of blank metal existed on the machine's surface, between the sections of grills and lights.

The people were waiting for a signal from space aliens. I got the impression that some kind of signal had actually been received already, and they had already sent back a response. Now they were waiting for a second signal, a response back from the aliens. The dream had a peaceful, expectant feel to it.

All of a sudden, the machine started making a series of loud buzzes, like BUZZ-BUZZ, BUZZ. I think some of the lights started going on and off, too. I was suddenly filled with an incredible amount of terror. I forced myself to wake up, and while I was waking up I realized that I was waking up and I forced myself to sit up, so that there would be no chance that I could accidentally fall back to sleep.

By the time I was fully awake, I was sitting up in bed. People who had not gone to bed yet were still moving about in the house; I could hear them and see some of their shadows on the hallway wall. It was still early in the night. Evidently, I had started dreaming immediately upon falling asleep.

The dream is puzzling. Everything was peaceful as we waited for a signal from the space aliens. When the expected signal came, in the form of the loud buzzes and possibly the lights going on and off, I was suddenly terrified. I wonder if some reason outside the dream, something that I don't remember, exists for the terror.

Is someone calling my name?

An odd thing happened to me when I was very young. On its face it doesn't seem to involve UFOs, but some similar things have been reported by people who claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens.

I was about 5 or 6 years old, living in a small town in Missouri. I was in the back yard, and I seemed to hear someone call my name, far, far away. I listened, looking in the direction it had seemed to come from, looking more at the sky than the town. I couldn't be sure I was really hearing anything, it seemed so far away. Still, I worried about it and finally decided to go looking to see if anyone had called me. I thought it might possibly have been one of the kids from school.

The house next to us in that direction had a tall, chain link fence. Somehow I got through it, through a gate between our yards and then through a gate at the back, and then along a drainage ditch and through other backyards. Finally, I reached a cross-street, which had new black asphalt paving, and I stood on a new sidewalk. The street had some traffic. It wasn't heavy, but I wasn't supposed to cross the street, and in any case, I didn't really want to try it, even if large gaps sometimes appeared between cars. So, my journey would end here, at the sidewalk. I looked around.

Down the sidewalk, some distance to my right, I saw a kid about my age. I went up to him and asked him if he had called me. Though I pressed him on the issue, he denied it and appeared very nervous that he was being confronted in this way. I finally gave it up and went back home, apparently retracing my steps.

I remember the beginning clearly, where I thought I heard my name being called, and I remember the street that I came to and the kid that I found, but the journey there and back seems almost dreamlike. Normally, I would never have gone on such a journey. And my mother doesn't remember a gate in the part of the fence that went between the yards.

I'm not saying that I was abducted by aliens (or anyone else) at that time, but the whole thing seems very strange and out of character.

UFO - A silver grain of rice against the sky

When my first remembered UFO sighting occurred, I was in school in the 7th or 8th grade in a city near Phoenix, Arizona. It was probably around 1966 or 1967.

For some reason, the class was on the playground behind the school, perhaps to draw the mountains in the distance for Art class. The sky was a brilliant blue, with only a few small clouds at the edges. I decided to look at the sky and see if I could find any UFOs. The sky was so bright, it was hard to look at. I kept squinting and turning away from it. I finally found something, like a silver grain of rice, far, far away. I looked at it for a while. It didn't seem to be moving, and it had no trail. It was just surrounded by the brilliant blue sky, with no reference points, so it was hard to tell if it was completely stationary. I finally decided to show it to another kid. After much pointing on my part, he finally saw it, too. It was very difficult to see, almost lost in the blue sky. He didn't know what it was, either. I finally went back to what I had been doing.

Much, much later, in the 1990s, I saw some strange things in the skies in Nevada. There are so many military bases there, though, that these were almost certainly military craft of some kind.

One time while driving at night I saw, flying over a small town that had a military base, the dark shape of a plane. All of a sudden, twin trails of glowing green smoke came from the wings. The smoke just came out for a second or two and then stopped. Chemtrails, perhaps?

Another time, while driving through the Nevada desert at night, I saw a triangular formation of lights flying around. It was too dark to see any details; all I saw was lots of lights in a triangular formation. I guess it could have been a group of planes flying very close together, in a very tight formation.

Dream - Captured and consumed

This dream, featuring extraterrestrial aliens, happened sometime in early to mid December of 2005.

The dream had been going on for quite a while, when I found myself in the jungle with several other people. It was very dark, but it was possible to see some, perhaps by moonlight. I seemed to be shorter than normal, and none of the people in the group was very tall.

Off a ways I could see some low hanging branches, just above head height. In the darkness above the branches, and apparently laying on the branches, were aliens with large black eyes and thin, gray bodies. I could feel them more than see them, although their eyes were dimly visible. They were waiting for someone to come under the branches, where they could catch them with their minds. I could feel the darkness from their minds from where I was.

I wasn't going to go over there, knowing what would await. The group of people I was with separated, though, with part of it going away from the aliens and part of it going under the branches where the aliens were, and becoming trapped. Not wanting to leave them to their fate, I went over there, too, and became trapped myself.

I could feel the darkness of the aliens' minds reaching out, like a light that shone darkness, and I could also see black tendrils of their minds descending in front of me, like vines forming the bars of a cage. I could move, but not much. It was like being trapped in tar. I twisted pitifully from side to side, as did the others.

Then, suddenly, I was spread-eagled on a table, with my arms and legs strapped down, and aliens were performing various procedures on me. I had my head turned to the side, and I tried very hard not to pay any attention to what they were doing, knowing that it would eventually be over, as had happened so many times before. The aliens were all around me, though most were a little ways off. I tried very hard not to look at or focus on them, because it was just too scary to do so.

Then I was somewhere else, and the aliens were requiring me to consume a long caramel-like string of some substance. It was being given to me end-on, and was slowly being fed to me. It was a light brown in color, and even tasted vaguely caramel-like, but less pleasant. The whole experience felt distasteful, but I continued with it.

Then, suddenly, I had a view of the situation from a different plane of existence. I saw my body, laying on its stomach. My body looked like a light yellow object, like something crudely carved out of butter. The legs were almost entirely gone, but I think some stubs remained for the arms. The rest had a somewhat eroded, frayed appearance. I felt I was looking at my energy body, what was left of it. The caramel-like string I was consuming was energy from the aliens, but several strings led away off my back, where they were consuming me. They were consuming a lot more of me than I was of them, and over the years that this had been going on, more and more of me had disappeared, until this was all that was left.

Then I was back to reality, with the fog of the aliens lifted from my mind. I saw that I was laying on my stomach on the gray floor of a gray room, and the string I was consuming came off the tip of the tail of a reptilian creature who was laying on its side at an angle to me. The creature had a heavy tail, very big legs and relatively small arms, and a big, dinosaur-like head. The creature might have been perhaps six to eight feet tall if it was standing up.

It was consuming the energy from me as I consumed the energy from it, and it lay there with closed eyes and a peaceful expression on its face. I felt that it enjoyed the exchange of energies, and perhaps obtained some benefit from it. I was getting by the far the worse part of the bargain, though.

Acting quickly, I broke off the last six to eight inches of its tail, got up, and ran away. It lifted its head up and peered back at its tail. Then it called out to me with its mind, radiating love and saying that everything was alright, and wanting me to come back.

I kept on running, though, through the jungle. I have the impression that it started chasing me, but I had a good head start on it, and it never caught up with me, at least not while the dream continued. I have the impression, though, that I came upon some new kind of situation, just as the dream ended.

The noisemaker

About 12 to 15 years or so ago, I had a strange experience early one morning.

I was sleeping, and I heard a strange, loud buzzing sound.

I was instantly awake, and went rapidly out of my bed and across the room to where the noise was coming from.

It was coming from a little plastic box, sitting on a piece of furniture.

I had no idea what the box was. I picked it up nervously and looked it over, knowing that I somehow had to make it stop. On the side that was initially facing me, it had a clear plastic cover with writing of some sort under it. A rectangular button was on the top. An electrical cord was attached low on the back, and higher up some kind of thin prong stuck way out.

I had no idea what any of it meant, or why it was making this sound, but I felt it was very important that I somehow stop it. I didn't know what to do, though, or what to push. I didn't know what might happen if I actually did anything. I might do something unfortunate, something unwanted, if just started poking things.

I kept feeling, though, that the prong at the back was important, and that I should push it. Not knowing what else to do, and hoping that nothing bad was going to happen, I finally pushed it.

The noise went away.

Standing there in the silence, holding the object, it slowly came back to me that this was my alarm clock, and that the alarm had gone off, as it was supposed to. Pushing the prong on the back had turned the alarm off. The button on the top was the snooze button, which I hadn't been interested in using.

In a partial defense, I should state that at the time I had not been getting much sleep, but I have had many similar times without much sleep where nothing like this has happened. (Not to say that some confusion has never occurred, but nothing quite this bad.)

Pouring water, hot and cold

Around 8 or 10 years ago, an odd thing happened to me.

I was trying to fix one of those instant soup cups. This particular cup was made of heavy paper, and I was supposed to peel the lid back halfway, fill the cup with boiling water, stir, and then put the lid back on and let it sit for a few minutes.

I had a tall electric pitcher to heat water in, so I heated the water until it was boiling rapidly and steam was pouring out. I decided to hold the soup cup over the sink while I poured, in case I spilled something. The paper lid wouldn't stay back by itself, even when folded, so I had to hold it open while I poured. I was trying to hold the cup in one hand, hold the lid back with my thumb, and pour the boiling water into the cup without actually spilling any on me. It was very awkward. The heat was coming through the paper sides of the cup and burning my fingers, and I was trying to pour the water in quickly so that I could set the cup down, when all of a sudden I poured the water over my fingers.

Oddly enough, it didn't hurt. It just felt cool. The heat from inside the cup was burning my fingers too much, though, and I had to set the cup down.

The outside of my fingers, though, where the water had flowed, seemed fine. There was no pain and nothing was visibly wrong with them. I turned the faucet on and ran some water over them, but it didn't seem to make any difference.

The water inside the cup had been so hot that the cup was too hot to hold, but the water poured directly on my fingers, other than the sense of coolness, had had no effect.

Somebody must have been watching over me. Again.


NOTE: Don't try this at home.

Dream - The contest

A small man in late middle age made his way between two houses through a yard partially strewn with garbage.

He reached the sidewalk and continued along it. The sidewalk also had garbage in places, but was generally thinner and flatter in this regard then the yard had been, though sometimes the garbage covered large areas.

The man had a cane with him, that he held in his right hand. The cane was much too long to lean on, and he held it out well in front of him and tried to somehow use it to pull himself forward by putting the point of it on the sidewalk and pulling down. He was hindered in this by the length of the cane and its thinness, and its excessive flexibility, which gave it a wobbly feel.

When he walked, he moved forward with an odd motion, with one leg taking a short step and the other more of a bound, sometimes a tremendous bound. Sometimes he seemed to have more trouble and went forward on all fours, still using the cane to try to pull himself forward.

Once, he stopped and actually got the cane beside him and pushed down hard enough that his whole body slowly rose into the air. He stayed there for a while, one hand on the cane and his body in the air at an upward angle, then he slowly straightened his body out until his feet were pointed straight up. The cane flexed and wobbled and snapped back and flexed again, and you would think that it would break under the weight, but it didn't. Eventually, he lowered himself to the ground and went on as before.

After a time, some kids in the neighborhood saw him, teenagers, and they made fun of him and were going to make trouble for him.

He proposed instead that they have a contest.

He showed them the garbage in a nearby yard. There were many onions, whole and uncut, looking like they had just come from the store. There were thick hamburger patties, still pink but cooked just enough to change color slightly. There was lettuce cut into thick slabs, and open hamburger buns. There were even some thin slices of tomato. Some of the items even had a little ketchup on them. There was more than enough food for everyone.

The man proposed that they have a race to see who could prepare a meal the fastest. The meal would be large enough to serve everyone there. Two fires would be started on the sidewalk to cook the meat. The first side to get the food fully prepared and ready to eat would win.

The side with the teenagers quickly began working. The man looked through some of the food that he had gathered and placed on a picnic table near the sidewalk. A girl had been assigned to help him, to make the contest more fair. She seemed to be slightly familiar with him, evidently from seeing him on his walks in the past, but she mainly just sat and watched him. There were perhaps three or four people in the other team.

The man discarded some of the slabs of lettuce, because they showed some signs of wilting at the edges. In truth, though, much of the remaining ones did not look very different from those that had been discarded. This disturbed the man, because he did not want to serve the others food that was not good quality.

Abruptly he got up, and, leaving his cane behind, raced home at incredible speed, getting there in an instant, before the kids even knew that he was gone. One of them looked up and somehow saw him there, despite the distance involved, and made an exclamation, surprised that he could have gotten there that fast, or that anyone could.

At home, the man gathered a thick package of raw hamburger, a head or two of lettuce, and some tomatoes. He also selected some sharp knives to cut things with, and grabbed some ketchup and a bag or two of chips and some cans of soft drink. He then rushed back and quickly prepared the meal.

Afterwards, everyone was sitting around a table, happily eating. One of the girls came forward, though, and stood in front of the man and accused him of cheating, of getting food that was already prepared. Considering the situation, it was a dangerous accusation to make.

The man looked up from his hamburger and stared into space, not looking at the girl or at anyone. He did not reply directly to her, but instead said, philosophically, "Death goes where it will, and when one reaches the place where he had been going, he never knows whether death will find him there. Most times, though, it does not. Anyway, in any case, no one expects death, but death will eventually come."

And the people continued eating, then, happy with the food.

And in the future, when the man was out on his walks, his journeys, and happened to see the kids, they called out to each other and greeted each other like old friends, which now, of course, they were.


-a story from a dream I had the night of December 17-18, 2005.

Dream - Possible futures and what came after

Early in June 2005, on a Sunday night, I had a strange dream.

In the dream, it was night and I was at my computer. I was looking at a lot of documents in a lot of moderately small windows. The windows seemed to be part of some larger program that filled the screen behind them. The documents didn't seem to contain much, just a few characters in some kind of alphanumeric code. I think many or most may have had just two characters.

I was puzzling over them, and my mother kept interrupting me. She was wandering around in the house going through things. It felt like there was a real strangeness to the night.

There were two little dogs in the house, and they were up, too, and we finally decided that maybe they wanted to go outside. We let them out back and they seemed happy. When I looked at them a few seconds later, though, they were far, far down from the door, in vertical distance. Somehow, the house had become multi-story and I was on at least the second floor. The door that the dogs went out of now just opened into empty space.

I walked from the kitchen to what would normally be the dining room and then the family room, but the house had grown huge. A few other people were there, too. I don't know who they were exactly, but I think they were supposed to be relatives. They generally looked young, like they might be teenagers. There was a long narrow room along the edge of the house, and it seemed to have a small balcony associated with it. I went and looked out. It wasn't quite so dark now.

I saw the next-door neighbor's house, which was also huge, and much farther away than it had been. I could see the back better than the front, and it had a very large, tall garage-like area that apparently came through from the front. A very large, tall, pointed tent partly stuck out of it, made of black, tattered cloth, virtually in shreds in places. A similar tent was in his backyard. I seemed to be on the third floor.

I turned back to the long, narrow room, which had doubled or tripled in width. I came somehow to understand that this was an alternate future, and I had somehow switched over to it. I was then essentially given a bit of a tour through the long room. I met a couple more young people, and then I came across a very strange person sitting on a small, old couch.

The person looked human, but not quite. His face had some dog-like qualities. The lower part of his face seemed stretched somewhat, and the upper lip projected forward in a bit of a point. I think his ears may also have been long and floppy, but I'm not sure. He didn't move much, he just sat there with his arms stretched out on the back of the couch. His eyes looked at me from time to time, mainly when he spoke. He didn't say much, except brief responses to what was said to him. I knew somehow that he was really a dog, one that had been genetically engineered in this now future (but still alternate future) time. I felt that he knew of his situation and was satisfied with it.


Then I was outside, farther in the future. It was night. There was barren ground, with a rise and a few people standing on it. I was aware of an occasional very large building, very far apart. Dark, reddish clouds were low overhead. I felt that they were toxic, and that the whole Earth, or most of it, looked like this.

I was given the story, in my mind, of what had happened. There used to be a big building, huge, very wide and several stories high. A smaller, square area projected several more stories toward the back. This building was the headquarters of a major aerospace firm. In the smaller area that rose toward the back, there was a conference room where executives from a rival firm had come to talk about merging or combining the two companies.

Everything in the meeting was going fine, the executives were happy and jovial and laughing with each other, but outside the room, some employees had become worried. They were afraid that something bad was happening in the room, and they tried to get in to protect their boss and their company. They knocked and banged on the walls, but they couldn't get in. They finally tried to blow holes into the room with explosives.

The CEO heard the noise and the explosions, and thought the building was being attacked by a rival. Rather than let the building fall into the rival's hands, he pressed the button to self-destruct. The entire building blew up and was completely destroyed. The repercussions of the event brought about a rapid series of events that eventually resulted in the destruction of the surface of the Earth.

I was shown two planes that were planned but now would never exist, except as prototypes (and I'm not sure about whether the prototypes actually existed). One of the planes was by this company and one was by its rival. I remember one of the planes had its whole nose open in a huge intake tunnel for the engines, and had one wing that trailed back fairly normally and one on the other side that was tiny and curved forward and upward. Somehow the shape of the tiny wing was supposed to balance out the full-sized wing on the other side. I don't remember what the other plane was like, but it seemed less visually remarkable. There would have been other planes that would never happen, of course; these were just examples that were shown to me.


Then, somehow, the building was back again. Some of the people had managed to go back through time. They wanted desperately to prevent the disaster from happening. I was with them, but I seemed to be somewhat older than I am now (I am currently 51). Instead of having dark brown hair with just a little gray, it now seemed to be all gray.

The other people seemed to be employees of the company, but they must have been somewhere else when the building exploded. They were all fairly young, probably in their twenties, and not particularly tall. I was not as tall as I used to be, but I was still taller than them.

I seemed slimmer than normal, too, and my face was different in some way. I think it may have had some fine lines on it, but it was more than that; it was like I was in someone else's body.

The conference room was mostly composed of huge walls of heavy glass. We were picking up little odds and ends and throwing them at the walls. The impacts made little tapping noises, but the people inside didn't seem to notice. The people outside desperately wanted to get inside and warn the CEO not to do it, that there wasn't any attack and the company wasn't in any danger.

I started trying to bang on the glass with little objects that I found, but the glass wouldn't break and only little tapping sounds resulted. I moved my hand around, trying to scratch the glass, but whatever I was holding wasn't good enough to do it. I picked up something a little heaver and more substantial, with some strong metal in it, and forced it against the glass and moved it around in a big, tall oval, but it just seemed to be leaving some scuff marks.

One of the people decided to try to blow a hole in the glass to get through. He brought some kind of plastic explosive over and smeared it all over in the center of the scuffed oval I had made.

I stepped back a bit and watched him, and something dawned on me. I told him that if he wanted it to happen as it did, to keep on going. He stopped and looked at it, then he stood there and stared at it.

Suddenly, to my left and around the corner, far down the wall a door opened and the executives came out, laughing and talking. We stared at them. The disaster had been averted.


Then the dream changed to a far future time, perhaps thousands of years in the future. The lifespan of people had been greatly lengthened, to hundreds and even thousands of years. I walked through a strange land, full of distorted little people. They were almost cartoonish, with short, impossibly thin arms and legs. Their heads and faces were human, but too big for their bodies and were distorted, sometimes too stretched vertically. The faces seemed to have a lot of fine lines in them, though the skin seemed tight.

As I walked by and looked at one person, his eye on the far side moved way down his face while the other eye, closer to me, moved way up his face and grew somewhat larger as he looked at me and I looked at him. It wasn't like the eyes had actually migrated, it was like the face had stretched and distorted.

Everyone was very short, probably three feet or less, sometimes much less, and they seemed to be engaged in various serf-like tasks. There were various small structures all over the place that provided a least a small bit of shade from overhanging stiff flaps held up by strong wood stems at one end, but they didn't usually provide too much in the way of walls. I got the impression that the structures were actually plants of some type.

There were also occasional large, fairly normal looking people, but still short by our standards, who seemed to be lounging on large wooden flaps that were shaped and/or grown. I came to understand that the vast majority of the people here in this distant future time were in fact the equivalent of serfs, with the rare large person being one of the extremely wealthy owners who lorded over the serfs. Everyone was even dressed in a vague, medieval kind of way.

I could see, a ways off, some actual buildings. They looked something like adobe structures, with tiny, dark windows.

Then, suddenly, two police or military type people were there. They were larger than the serfs, but still very small. They seemed to be wearing some kind of hugely padded armor, with an enormous rounded chest area and huge rounded areas on the shoulders. Their arms and legs were still short and skinny. The color of the armor was pale, washed-out bronze. They were each holding some kind of large futuristic weapon in their hands.

They fired their weapons, then, at some of the serfs who evidently weren't as docile as they should have been. I went over and ripped the head off of one of the police/soldiers. He continued to stand there, and no blood flowed. The other stood there, too, as if frozen.


Then I was in some large building, apparently one-story, in which some kind of party was taking place. The people seemed to be mostly young and fairly normal looking, but not very tall. I didn't seem to be very tall, either. After a while, I followed some people who went out some glass double-doors to a side area of the building or house. It was dark outside.

There was a small metal shed a little ways from the doors. The people went into it, and I followed them to the doorway of the shed and looked inside. The knowledge was then given to me that this was death, and that once people came into the shed they could never leave. In fact, since I was under the roof of the shed, I couldn't leave either. So I reached up with my hand and pulled on the lip of the roof of the shed.

I walked back to the house, then, pulling on the roof of the shed, which extended over me and continued to cover me, expanding like a telescope does. I reached the doors to the house and went through, the roof of the shed passing through things with no trouble.

I tried to call out and talk to some people I saw, but they didn't seem to see or hear me, though they seemed to sense something. I managed to pull the roof some more and got closer to some people and tried again. This time they seemed to hear me, at least some, and talked back, but when they turned to me, their eyes didn't seem to focus on me, like they couldn't quite see me and didn't quite know where I was. I was definitely getting on the end of my tether, though. I could feel the shed pulling at me, and finally retreated back to it.

I went all the way back and into the shed, which had quite a few other people in it, more than just the few that I had originally seen. After a while more people came, in groups, through the doorway and more groups faded in through the walls. The shed had a sunken floor, which was becoming much more sunken, and people were several layers deep. Some groups of people continued to stand, though, even with layers of people on top of them, as the weight didn't seem to be very much.


Then, suddenly, the shed, or at least it's interior, was going down like an elevator. After going down several stories, it deposited the people in a large underground area already full of people, all of which seemed to be having a good time. There were tables and bars and open areas. Everything seemed to be crudely constructed out of wood. The people seemed to be wearing some type of medieval clothing, for the most part, although the people at the house had been dressed more normally. I had noticed earlier that the people in the shed had tended to wear medieval-type clothes, though, some of them almost looking like pirates.

Some of the people here were drinking and some were talking and some were fighting each other, sometimes with weapons. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. I sat or stood at a small table/bar and a friendly man with a small beard talked to me for a while, though I think he may have partially or mainly talked with his mind.

He said that pretty much anything was allowed here, but it was possible to get too extreme. In the rare cases where somebody did do something too extreme, they were sent a few stories further down the elevator, and their soul was then dissolved. I could see in my mind the soul dissolving and spreading out and soaking into the earth.

He also said that a lot of the people didn't know that they were dead yet, and when they found out it could take some adjusting.

After a while I saw my mother come into the room, not from the elevator but from some other rooms that extended from the side. This underground area apparently had rooms and offshoots that went on for a great distance. She was much younger than when I had seen her last, and she didn't seem to notice me, though she wasn't really looking much in my direction. She seemed to be having a good time, but then she got a little frown on her face, and I felt that she had just found out that she was dead. She moved quickly off in a direction that was away from me, talking to people and wearing a little smile but still frowning.

I followed, trying to catch up with her. A lot of people were in the way, though, and I lost sight of her. A few people were on a small wooden platform, acting as entertainers, and the area was particularly crowded. I asked various people if they had seen her, finally even giving her name to them, but no one seemed to know anything.

I continued to go where I thought or hoped she had gone, and I came around a little corner and another small group of entertainers were in a raised area in a recess. They had some kind of musical instruments and were singing. They even seemed to have microphones. The one on the far end looked like Lurch from the Addams Family, except that he was made up to look like Frankenstein's Monster, with green skin and huge red cuts that were crudely stitched together. He looked at me and smiled as he sang.

Someone, maybe him or maybe someone else, it just seemed to hang in the air without a source, was saying, "You know, there might be a way out." Somehow, it was indicated to me that I should continue on off to the side and then go forward through some rooms. The area in question looked much dimmer than the area I had come from, which was brightly lit, though I didn't think about it at the time.

I started to go in the direction that was somehow given to me and all of a sudden I was outside, and alive again. I was in a wide open space that seemed to have a lot of low clouds and even some fog, in a body that was unfamiliar to me, a short young person, but still an adult.

The hidden spider

An odd thing happened perhaps 10 or 12 years ago.

I was getting ready to brush my teeth and looked at the tube of toothpaste laying on the counter. It was squeezed quite a bit in the middle, so I decided to move some of the toothpaste from the back toward the front. Instead of picking the tube up, I just pushed at it, probably using my thumb, until the back half of the tube was fairly flattened out and the toothpaste was mostly at the front.

When I picked the tube up, I found a partly crushed spider underneath it.

If I had just picked the tube up like I normally would have done, instead of pushing at it where it lay, the spider, uncrushed and alive, would have most likely been where my fingers would have gone.

Dream - In the Matrix

Almost four months ago, I had a strange dream that had some Matrix-like elements.

In the dream, a series of minor adventures occurred. I kept worrying about a cloud, though, that was off to my left at an angle. It was a dark cloud, almost black, and it had two eyes and two stick-like arms that extended down from it, bent, dividing at the ends into two stick-like fingers or claws. The cloud was pointed out to me by someone in the dream, and I was reminded of it occasionally as the dream progressed.

It was supposed to be approaching me, though it was actually pointed to the side and not right at me, and I never actually saw it move. When I looked at it from time-to-time, it did seem sometimes that it had gotten closer. It seemed to be something dangerous, although I'm not certain in what way, and sometimes I seemed to feel a hunger from it. I was concerned about the cloud coming, but I knew that there was no way to avoid it, that its arrival was only a matter of time. There was nothing I could do, other than to try and keep it in mind.

A time finally came, then, when the cloud was much closer, and then, suddenly, it was everywhere and I was inside it.

Everything felt different inside the cloud. There was a quietness, and it felt like the world had changed, and I think that somehow the world had changed, at least the part that was in there with me. My surroundings did not seem to be the same, and I appeared to be alone. The light was softer and maybe a little dimmer, but only a few wisps of gray cloud material were actually visible, smoke-like, at least nearby. There seemed to be a feeling of greater density around the border, which was quite a distance off. A figure was walking toward me along a broad area to the left, an area lit with soft light.

The figure came up beside me and a voice said, in my mind, that reality was not as we thought it was. That we placed construct on top of construct.

And I looked to a large area in front of me and to the right. It was filled with people and things. And the people and things started to disappear, several at a time, until, finally, reality itself disappeared. In its place was a vast flat plane, softly lit and soft-edged, colored like dark honey. At widely separated distances, tall, thin spikes went up, like sudden jiggles on a seismograph, and near the spikes were other people or entities, one-to-a-spike.

Beside me, on my left and slightly in front, a tall spike or spire went up. I felt that it actually came down, though, and embedded itself in the plane, the flat surface around me. The spike seemed to have a very thin sliver of a second spike associated with it, that did not extend upwards very far. The main spike was not actually circular in cross-section, but was significantly extended front-to-back, like a small wall that went up and up. And up. It extended a vast distance and then connected to a dark flat object sticking out far, far above me.

The object was another plane of existence, but one that had a leading edge on it. The edge was irregular and had a major rounded area in the center and lesser lobes to each side, much like the dark cloud had looked, at least in outline. The spike or spire or narrow wall went up and joined it on the bottom of the plane near the front, looking almost like the keel on a boat.

My awareness moved closer to the dark plane, and I could see small figures on it, looking down in different directions. I moved closer and I could see that they were short and somewhat thick, with rounded stomachs. They were human in appearance but were blue in color, a slightly grayed and darkened blue. They seemed to be dressed in pants and short, open vests, looking almost like pirates, though genies is an alternate explanation. I felt that one of them was the leader, the one that was looking most in my direction, or at least in the direction of my body. His head was bald on top, with very short, dark hair on the sides. He seemed to be directing the others in some way. They all seemed to be intent on something and very business-like in what they were doing.

I felt that they were concerned with watching over me in some way, protecting me, like guardian angels might do.

Blood poisoning

When I was perhaps five or six years old, and living in a small town in Missouri, a neighbor who lived a few houses down from us moved to another state, either Arkansas or Alabama. The neighbors had a young boy, somewhat younger than I was and closer to my brother's age. My brother and I used to play with him.

Sometime after they moved, my parents drove down there to visit them, in order that my brother and I could play with him again. We spent a few days there, staying at their house.

One day, while playing out in the yard in my bare feet, I stepped on something. I looked and a thorn was sticking into my heel. I took it out and continued playing. My heel bothered me later, though, and a red line eventually started to form. My parents said that it was an infection that I got from the thorn, blood poisoning. My parents decided to drive us home and see a doctor there, though, because we didn't know any doctors where we were.

On the long drive home I kept looking at my heel. The red line kept getting longer and was going partway up my leg.

Eventually, we made it home and found a doctor, who gave me a tetanus shot.

My mother says that the doctor told her that a few more hours and it would have been too late.

My father and the Air Force

In the early 1950s the draft was in effect, so my father joined the Air Force so he wouldn't be drafted and risk end up being a foot soldier in the Army. We moved from Missouri to Texas for a while, then to either St. Louis or Kansas City, I don't remember which. I was just a baby, then, so this is something that was told to me. My mother didn't like the big city (and she really hated Texas), so she eventually moved back to her parents' farm and my father visited us when he was on leave.

My father had to be in the Air Force for quite a while. I think it was four years of active duty and then four years of reserve, where he might be called back again. I remember one time on the farm when he came home on leave, watching him in his uniform as he walked, grinning, across the yard.

I was glad when he finally finished his active duty and could stay with us.

I remember watching him, later, probably sometime in the mid to late 1950s, as he used a razor blade to cut the stitches holding his Air Force emblems to his uniforms. He was going to use the uniforms as work clothes. We lived in town at the time.

While in the Air Force, he had become a sergeant of some kind. One of the things he did was teach classes in something. He was given a gift of appreciation by the people he had taught or been otherwise associated with, I'm not sure which. It was in the form of a dark blue toy truck with a long flatbed holding an airplane, with lots of cotton behind it representing clouds. There was also a banner on it saying something about that it was in appreciation for his services to such-and-such number such-and-such division or unit or squadron. Something like that. We kept it for a long time. We moved several times over the years, though, and one time, decades later, we discovered when we took it out that bugs had gotten into it and made a mess of it. After looking at it, we reluctantly decided to throw it away.

I wish now that we had kept it.

Paper airplanes

When I was little, maybe five or six, I went to Sunday School for a while with my little brother. One time, while we were waiting for the teacher to come back, some other kids started making paper airplanes and tossing them. I was fascinated by it. I had never seen such a thing, and got one of the kids to show me how it was done. After that, I knew how to make paper airplanes.

Somewhere, in some kind of school or schools, I also learned how to make paper boats and paper Pilgrim hats. That was later, though.

My mother tries to teach me about God

When I was little, perhaps four or five, my mother tried to teach me about God. She talked about him always being there even if I couldn't see Him. I said, "Where? Where?" and stuck my arms out and started waving my hands, like I was trying to feel Him. She tried to tell me that I couldn't feel him either, but I kept doing it.

She started to get a little mad at me. She was saying, "Ohhh..." in an irritated voice, and thought that I might be just playing and not serious. She kept trying for a while, but finally gave up and said that she would have to tell me when I got older. I understood perfectly well what she meant, though. I was just being difficult.

I'm sure, though, that she had been telling me Bible stories for years, so I had had a significant amount of exposure to the subject already.

Crackers and butter

When I was very little, I used to really like saltine crackers with butter between them. It wasn't actually butter, it was margarine, but we called it butter. I remember one time I ate an enormous number of them, so much that my mother started worrying about me getting sick from it. I also tried eating the margarine plain, since it tasted so good with the crackers, but surprisingly it didn't taste good by itself. I had trouble understanding why, but I had to accept it.

I don't know what brand margarine we used back then. Now, we mostly use Blue Bonnet, but we also used Parkay and Shedd's Spread for a while. For a little while I tried using one of those brands that were supposed to be good for you, but even though it was in a tub it was very hard and tore the bread up when I tried to spread it. It was expensive for margarine, too.

My mother says that in the old days margarine used to be white and came with a powder that you had to mix with it to give it some color.

Perfume

My mother's sister, my aunt, wears perfume. When I was very little, I thought it smelled very harsh and almost overpowering. I could hardly breathe, or hardly stand to breathe, when she was near.

I mentioned the problem to my mother, but she didn't see anything wrong with how it smelled. She thought it might be because I smelled things differently when I was little, and would change as I grew older.

As the years passed, the smell grew less harsh and more bearable. Finally, the harshness was gone entirely and the scent of the perfume was sweet and much fainter.

I guess my mother was right.

Snakes

In the early to mid 1950s, we lived on my mother's parents' farm in Missouri. My mother said that sometimes an old farmhand named Charley used to show her snakes he had killed while mowing the yard. I think he thought that she would be more interested in the snakes than she actually was.

A few years after that, the menfolk helped my younger brother and me build a 'fort' with logs. It was in a field, and wasn't very tall, maybe three or four feet high, but was wide and long enough to have some room inside. The next year, we wanted to use it again, but it had tall grass around it and in it, and the adults were afraid of snakes being in it and wouldn't let us use it anymore.

My father used to say that he was chased by a snake called a blue racer. He didn't like snakes, perhaps because of that experience.

When I was little, I used to say that I had had three snake dreams. I think that in at least one or two of them, the dream was mostly about something else and the snake only appeared in a small part of it, perhaps towards the end. I don't remember much about the dreams now, though.

Dream - The cloud came down

Early in February of 2005 I had a strange dream. My mother was showing me some books and papers from a few decades ago, from when I was in the 7th or 8th grade. There was a book with a plain, dark blue cover, and it had a few extra pages at the beginning with a paragraph or two on them. Whoever added the pages seemed to be intending to speak directly to me. My mother found another copy of the book that didn't have the extra pages.

I also found a paper where some kind of board game had been drawn, apparently by me. Then I walked along over a small bridge in the dark, and turned around and walked back, going down through the dry river bed and then back up. As I neared the road again, there was a slight rise of dry ground, and in the light that shown from somewhere I saw that sections had been marked on the path, like heavy dotted lines drawn across it. I realized that I was living the board game. There were also instructions written on the path, things I was supposed to do if I stepped in particular areas. I saw a dinosaur, somewhat larger than a man, perhaps somewhat like Tyrannosaurus rex or maybe even Godzilla, come from the bushes on the left and then retreat backwards, as if showing what was supposed to happen if I stepped in a certain area. A man came from the right and then retreated, also. I pretty much ignored the writing on the path, deciding that I didn't have time to go through this. I moved quickly across the marked segments and onto the road, where I met someone else, but I don't remember who.

After a while I ended up at a book store. I spent a lot of time looking over some books there. They had a section where I found another copy of the old book. This one had some damage inside; the first few pages were crinkled and folded over along the edge, and appeared to have suffered water damage, because they were soft and not smooth anymore. Someone had carefully hand-printed in mixed upper and lower case a long message or statement on the first two or three pages.

In the middle upper-third of the first page a blank area had been left, with the words going around it on either side. In the middle of the blank area, an address label had been placed. The address label was silver with black lettering, and had my name and address on it.

There were other books there too, in that section, including tall, magazine-size paperbacks perhaps 3/4 of an inch thick, that appeared to be tutorials, as for math, etc. These books were also old, and appeared to be well thumbed through, with lots of grime along the edges.

I came back a little later and the shelves in that area were mostly bare, with the books (and some old magazines) dumped in boxes. It seems that they were getting rid of them; they were going to throw them away. I looked through some of it; it generally looked pretty ratty, but I wanted it anyway. If I actually bought them though, they still wanted full price even though they were in bad shape and were going to be thrown away. A man who worked there kept coming up to me and urging me to buy them, with a very earnest expression on his face. I hated to pay full price for old, damaged books that they were planning to throw away. I also didn't want to steal them, because that would be wrong, even if they were going to be thrown away shortly.

The dream changed to something else, and it seems that there was an intermediate part that I don't remember. I was in a strange house in the desert, though. It seemed to be in an isolated area, perhaps central or northern Nevada. The house was big, with big rooms and long windows facing the outside. The house was single story and seemed to be made of concrete, with a flat roof. I was there with my mother, talking to her.

As we walked, moving to a different part of the house, I looked out the windows and saw the outside. It was late in the day, and some strange clouds were in the sky. The clouds were dark, especially in a segmented arc that went across them. The clouds also had an orange tinge. I tried to get my mother to look at the clouds, telling her how bad they looked, but she seemed distracted and kept on talking. I was finally able to get her attention, though. The clouds started emitting a series of brilliant flashes, sometimes completely blinding and sometimes just partially so. It wasn't lightning, it was the cloud itself flashing. Particularly the dark segmented area that went in an arc.

Then the cloud turned a variety of colors and the whole cloud was formed of segments joined together, and was very close and low. As I kept looking from the cloud to my mother and back again, it seemed that almost each time I saw the cloud it was different. Now the segments had colored flags hanging from them, advertising different things. I tried to point this out to my mother, but it was hard to get her attention. When I looked back at the cloud, all the flags had fallen off except one red one with white letters, saying "Drink Coca-Cola", and it was hanging from one corner. Then it fell, too, and the color of the cloud was light gray with an orange tint again. The cloud material seemed to almost be boiling in place.

The cloud was very low now, and very, very close. The segments that formed the arc were roughly square-shaped, and now had other segments going back on radial lines, like I was seeing a portion of a disc. From where the middle of the disc would be, a column of cloud started pouring down. It was light gray with an orange tint, like the rest of it, and slowly spread out where it hit the ground. The cloud was moving toward me, taking the column with it. There was an uncovered concrete patio outside, with a long picnic table on it with one end facing me. I saw the cloud column start to move along the top of the picnic table, with the bottom of the column spreading out on the table top.

I was filled with a real urgency, that we had to get away somehow, that we had to hide, that it was coming for us. I could also hear a Navy plane going by very low, and maybe caught a glimpse of it, and heard it crash somewhere nearby. I tried to tell my mother that we had to get away from the cloud, that we had to hide from it, that we had to stop it from getting us, and she finally realized what I was saying.

We started going deeper into the house, with me leading the way, going to the left, down a broad hallway. As we went, the path was slightly downward, because the rooms became partially recessed into the ground. My mother stopped at a place in the hallway where a type of cupboard was. It had a large, painted, plywood door on its side, opening upwards, set a few feet up in the wall. My mother climbed onto the long shelf behind it, and lay partly curled up on her side. The door didn't want to quite close all the way, because her knees and elbows were sticking out. I tried to convince her that that might not be the best place, but she wanted to stay there.

I moved on and looked into a large room that had a long row of windows facing the outside. That wasn't hidden enough, so I looked in the next room, which was at the end of the building at one side. It was dark, and was sunken several feet into the ground and was completely lined with tall heavy bookcases filled with books. I knew that it had a long row of windows high in the wall, but they were completely covered by the bookcases. I thought that it might be a good place to hide in, but I also worried that if the cloud came, I wouldn't be able to escape, since there was only one way out.

I was also worried about the front entrance to the house. Was it locked? It seemed that it might not be. Was it even shut securely? I had a picture in my mind of the two glass doors, with one of them slightly ajar.

I looked back toward the front, up the broad, sloping hallway, and saw a slight orange haze in the air. And there was the pilot from the plane, standing at the other end of the house. He threw a toy football at me. I caught it, and it had a rubber-like surface, not very tightly inflated. It had seams, or what were intended to be seams, running from back to front and another around the middle. Each segment formed by the seams was of a different color. One was white, one was dark blue, another was a dark gray-green, I think one was black, and there were other colors, too. I looked to throw it back to him, but he was gone. There was just the darkness and the haze.

I threw it anyway, toward a corner where I thought that he might be, but somehow I had it back again. I started to move forward, to look for him.

All of a sudden he was there, stepping into a doorway right beside me. I was really startled, and somewhat scared. He stood there, leaning forward slightly, with a malicious grin on his face. He had a lot of soot on him, and he had something dark smeared around his eyes, which were too large and far too pale. His face was slightly roundish, and he looked like he might be partly Hispanic. He was wearing a green uniform with straps around the legs, wrapping the material to him so that it was almost form-fitting. He had straps crossing his chest, too, but I think they were really too small to be ammo belts.

I tried desperately to get him to call the base, to tell them of our situation. He didn't seem to care that much about it, and was sarcastic and basically acting like a wiseguy. I finally got him to use a very large, blocky, black phone that was hanging on the wall. It had an old-fashioned dial on it, the kind with a ring of holes that you put a finger in and turn, except that it was huge and had extra holes so you could stick several fingers in at once.

He finally took the receiver off, put it to his head and stuck his fingers in the dial and started turning it. However, he started talking immediately, like it was a direct connection. His fingers turned the dial while he was talking, and a loud clicking, ratcheting sound filled the air, along with a loud phone-ringing sound that varied in intensity and timing. He talked loudly, I think maybe in almost a sing-song voice, acting like it really didn't matter.

I saw in my mind's eye a person on the other end with a headset, sitting and listening. He was wearing a light-colored military uniform, with at least one person on each side of him. The other people were perhaps standing. The person taking the call was frowning and trying to make sense of what was being said. He kept saying "What?" or something similar. The Navy pilot, or whatever he was, wasn't really making any sense, and I could tell that he wasn't really concerned about making any sense either, that it was deliberate.

And the dream ends there.