Dream - The long white hallway

I had a dream, probably sometime in the fall of 2006, that was relatively normal for the most part (normal for me, that is), but turned very strange toward the end.

Toward the end of the dream, I found that someone had come into my room and taken some things from me. I went searching for them, and came to a store and started looking through it. The store got much bigger as I searched, becoming similar to Wal-Mart. At some point, I came to approximately the middle of the store and a little toward the back. When I went to the left to look down another aisle, one of the aisles that led toward the back, abruptly things changed.

The aisle became hallway-like, and people rose up into the air, tilted until they were more or less horizontal, and floated. I rose up in the air also, but tilted only partly forward. The air itself seemed like a slightly thickened water, like a gelatin that has not yet set. I watched as the other people changed, becoming darker, with their limbs shrinking and becoming just lumpy extensions, their bodies lengthening and even having something of a short, thick tail. In some cases their heads, or the large lumpy things that passed for heads, turned down toward their chests.

The floor was white, as before, but the aisle/hallway had white walls now, instead of just shelves of merchandise. It also now had no ceiling, and gradually, over a long span of time, the people were drifting upward and outward into a blank whiteness. I kept trying to hurry forward, trying to run, but it seemed difficult to do so, and I seemed to mostly hang there in the air. The aisle-turned-hallway lengthened into an indefinite distance, ending in a vague whiteness. I seemed to hang in a timeless space, trying to move forward.

Some time later, it's hard to say how long, but it felt like a great deal of time had passed, I became aware that I was noticeably closer to the end. I could see far away at the end three figures looking like ink drawings. I interpreted the figures to be gods. The central one was turned toward me, but his head was turned to the side and he was looking partly upward. The other two were partly turned out to either side, and were also with heads tilted partly upward. The three had their arms partly raised in different degrees, with their hands in some cases reaching shoulder or chest height. They were massive figures, like something drawn by a Renaissance artist. Their heads and shoulders rose above the walls and they were visible only from the waist up, fading below into the indefinite whiteness of the end of the hallway.

More timeless time passed, and I was closer. The figures were larger, but still looked like ink drawings, and were unchanged in appearance.

Again more time passed, and I was now much closer to the end of the hallway. At some point, all the other people had drifted away into the whiteness, and I was alone. The massive figures, still looking like ink drawings, were unchanged except for the large increase in size brought about by the closeness of them. They began to slowly rise and separate from each other, the drawings still fading away at the waist. As they slowly drifted upward and outward, below them, not far away now, the indefinite whiteness of the end of the tunnel was revealed, unobstructed. It looked large now, in front of me.

I stared at it, my eyes open wide. I was still filled with a sense of timeless peace, but also with a sense of that fading and something else beginning, of something else on the other side, a place where things happened, a place less timeless.

The indefinite whiteness of the end of the hallway was not far away now. I slowly drifted, with a quiet anticipation, toward it.

More posts about posts

Last summer I posted a collection of posts I made to a message board I visit frequently. This is another collection of those posts.

On that message board, new threads crowd out old ones, old in this case meaning oldest last update. Threads can persist for a long time, however, if they are posted to frequently enough so that they stay comfortably away from the bottom of the list.

I help to keep some of the threads going, by posting to them when it seems that a new post might be needed. On threads about writing or poems, I have sometimes posted poems. Most of these poems refer to posts or posting in some manner, and most of them are short, sometimes very short, though a few are fairly long.

This is another collection of some of the poems. They did not originally have titles, but I have given them titles here. The times shown are in Arizona time (MST), not the time on the message board, which uses Eastern time.


I LEAVE THIS POST
5:04 PM 6/10/2006

Around the world,
Across the way,
The sun has made,
Another day.

Within this time,
Within this place,
Within this now,
That we have made.

I leave this post,
For all to see,
Containing these...
My words for thee.



TOO LATE THE POST
12:54 PM 6/28/2006

Too late the post,
And like most,
This thread will disappear.

So do your part,
Straight from the heart,
And place your post right here.



I POSTED A POST
2:04 AM 10/6/2006

I posted a post
Worse than most
Better than some
Much better than none

The post revives
And brings new highs
And for a while
Might bring a smile

If this post won't do
Perhaps one from you
Would be the one
To get it done

And in this way
The thread might stay
And not be a ghost
For want of a post



IN THE RACE
6:55 PM 12/7/2006

I put this post
Upon this place
So that this thread
Stays in the race

So that it lives
Another day
And so more posts
Might find their way

Perhaps a post
From you will come
Posts are needed
As a race is run

Some threads win
And some must go
Let this thread stay
Let the words flow

As time moves on
Let this thread rise
And be a delight
To everyone's eyes

Let posters post
And viewers watch
And be inspired
And ideas hatch

So that this thread
Should never die
And in old age
Be forever spry

I put this post
Upon this place
Let your post come
Come join the race



TIME FOR MORE
12:19 PM 2/26/2007

Time for more
That's for sure
For thoughts in rhyme
Now's the time

Put them here
Have no fear
Do not stall
We welcome all



TIME TO WRITE
11:49 PM 3/22/2007

Heavy or light
Time to write



PUT DOWN A WORD
1:40 AM 8/3/2007

Put down a word
Put down a line
Make a story
Or make a rhyme

Something you know
Or something you feel
Or somewhere you've been
Whether dream or real

Write it here
Don't wait too long
Without new posts
This thread is gone

Write a word
A line, a song
Do your part
Keep this thread young



JUST STOPPING BY
12:38 PM 8/14/2007

Just stopping by
To bring this thread high
To say hello
And make it grow

And as everyone knows
Up it goes
From down below
To the top of the row

I bumped this thread
To keep it fed
And make it high
While stopping by

Visions of other realities

Back in mid-February 2006, I was pretty exhausted and I lay down to sleep for a while. As soon as I closed my eyes, I could see an array of tiny bright shards, all about the same size but in different orientations. They all seemed to be about the same distance from me, and formed a wall that extended an indefinite distance up and to the sides. The bottom had a definite boundary, though. On the lower part of the wall of shards, a blurred line ran across, and below the line was blankness, apparently at a somewhat greater distance. If I remember correctly, I opened my eyes and then closed them again, perhaps more than once, and each time I closed them the vision of the shards came back.


Some hours later, or perhaps the next day, I woke up from a dream (I think that this had been a separate sleep period from the one just mentioned). I closed my eyes again and could immediately see a scene, but it was not from the dream that I had just been having.

In this scene, this vision, another reality seemed to be overlaid onto this one. Everything was dim and half-seen.

Close by, a strange plant, perhaps a couple of feet high, had a very large, multicolored, clothlike leaf that had a slight outward curvature. Large waves, caused by the breeze, slowly moved across it.

In the distance, I could see tall, thin, strange-looking buildings, like part of a city. Not far away were lower buildings with wide paved areas and large planters with vegetation, like some kind of plaza. This apparently extended to, and past, where I was.

In the middle distance, some people were standing apart and talking. Their voices were somewhat distant and distorted, and sounded like they were slightly speeded up. I couldn't understand what was being said.

As before, I think I opened my eyes and closed them a few times, and each time the scene came back. It seemed to be very realistic, although only partly there, like looking at a badly faded picture.

Dream - A warning from a future self

I had a dream in late 2005 in which I was overlayed by a future version of myself, along with some other entities who were along for the ride. The future self may have been me in this life, or me in a future life, or perhaps something else. I don't think it was actually from later in this life, though, because the reason I was given for his coming was that he was there to experience a significant and negative event that was going to occur in my life and that he and the others were there to witness it. That's the long version. What actually happened was that the knowledge and timing of the event were given to me, along with knowledge of who he was and what his and the other's purpose was, just as a knowing, a feeling. I could also feel it as his spirit came down over me, and I could feel the others watching.

In the dream, I was working on the front yard late at night, in the dark. The negative event mentioned above would occur when I went to a vary dark area of the side yard on the left (east) side of the house, near where the back fence begins, and work on a tall bush (or short tree) with lots of skinny narrow branches (in real life, no such plant is there). I believe the event was supposed to occur at 1:45 AM, or something like that (it's been a long time since the dream). The nature of the negative event was given to me, but I'd rather not state it here. You can use your imagination.

The event in question never occurred, at least not yet. Forewarned is forearmed. I hope.

The palms of my hands

I have very few lines on my hands, and none form an M. The lines on my left hand extend greater distances than those on my right, but the pattern on both is similar. Basically, I have a line that runs across and then a shorter line under that. From near the beginning of the shorter line another line branches off and curves downward. At the end of the shorter line, near the upper center of the palm, another line or two curves downward, but these are very faint.

I have a small white scar on the palm of my right hand that I got from pushing on the broken end of a shovel handle decades ago. The dull point of the wood damaged the flesh of my hand, even through the heavy rubber of the glove. On the left hand, on the edge near where the thumb would rest if it was laid against the edge of the hand, I have two small scars, nearly invisible now, from a time even longer ago, from a cactus needle that became embedded under the skin and then infected (for months).

I am right handed, but when I was very young this was less certain. The teacher told my mother that I seemed to use either hand, and recommended that I be trained to use the right hand to avoid problems later on.

Dream - The mall under the ground

Around the end of April 2005, I had a dream in which I was in New York City, on the edge of it, but it wasn't like the real New York at all.

In the dream, the city was very small and constructed mainly of metal, though the metal was mostly painted or otherwise coated, and various other materials, perhaps cardboard or plasterboard, were also used.

In the dream, my mother had wanted to go shopping there, complaining that she seldom got out. I left her in a large store that looked like part of a mall (actually, the whole city seemed to be one big mall), and wandered around the outside of the city. Someone was with me initially, but I don't know who.

Outside, it was uneven ground, with various businesses here and there. They seemed to be laid out in lines, though there really wasn't a road. It was as though they followed along the wall of a cliff, or even the wall of a cavern or a tunnel.

I went into a large store and was looking around. The front of the store was entirely open. At the back, there was a notice, something printed on the wall, about something on the other side of the wall. Someone who was there, someone who was just looking around like me, wanted to try to get to it.

Getting to it meant going through the wall, and I was a little suspicious of this. He went ahead, though, and I watched him fade through the wall.

I decided, then, to try it myself.

On the other side of the wall was a corridor, like a wide hallway, but of varying widths. The floor was not level, but was straight in sections, like sections of flooring laid over uneven and somewhat tilted ground. The edges of the floor, while also straight in short sections, moved in and out like it was following an irregular and somewhat curving tunnel. The floor had an industrial look, being constructed out of what looked like long strips of tire rubber, set into panels. Along the sides of the hall were various small businesses, constructed mostly of metal.

There were a few people walking around, but it wasn't crowded. I walked along the hall, which had a mild downward trend. Eventually, I got to a big open area. It had a large sunken arena off to one side. There were a few people in it, but it seemed to be a time when it wasn't being used for an event.

There were some nearby tables, where people ate food that they bought from the nearby businesses. At one of the tables I found my father and at least part of his family (he divorced and remarried a couple of decades ago), though some of the people with him I didn't know. He looked much thinner than when I saw him last, and he had not shaved for what looked to be a couple of weeks. I talked with him a while and then moved on.

As I walked, the hall became much wider and took on a more conventional look. It also became very crowded. Eventually, I came to the end of it. Two broad escalators were there, one taking people to the surface, where presumably the shopping continued, and the other bringing people down. The hall ended a little ways past the escalators, in kind of a rough, rounded look, but offshoots went to either side.

I went to the right, into a much smaller hallway. and eventually into a short offshoot of that. I went into a business or two and they seemed to be fairly conventional, like convenience stores or drug stores, with heavy concentrations of touristy stuff.

I went back, then, and went into one of the offshoots on the other side of the escalators. There was a small eating place there, along the hallway, with a small counter and stools. A few people were there, and at the far end a small man wearing a brown striped suit and hat sat, slouched over.

One of the people standing by me remarked about the man wearing the suit, that it was out of place because the man was a maintenance worker for the complex. I looked again, but he wasn't wearing the suit anymore, and had gained some weight. He now had on a t-shirt and probably gray workpants. He was sitting down but he was turned sideways to the counter and was leaning over backwards, with his upper body embedded in the wall.

He seemed to be doing some type of maintenance, but I also felt that he was showing me how to get behind the wall. I felt that there was something behind the wall, some other rooms. Small rooms that led off in a series, gradually but swiftly climbing. I could see them dimly in my mind.

The metal wall into which he was embedded had some kind of structure visible, like the panels were stressed and slightly out of place, although I felt that he was somehow faded into the wall as well as going through some secret opening in it.

He somehow emerged from the wall, then, and was sitting up. A small device started to slowly fade in attached to the wall on the left side of him, a short section of wall before the counter started.

I watched the device slowly fade into view, and then I woke up.

My first cars

My first car was a 1955 Cadillac 4-door sedan with a light tan body and a reddish brown roof. It had a forward pointing hood ornament that was a streamlined person, and its front bumper had two huge protrusions on either side of the grill, like rocket nose cones, pointing straight out. On the back, it had stubby fins with wraparound tail lights. This was probably back in 1970 or 1971, and it was a car my father had been using for business. It was kind of an informal gift, and he still ended up using it for business sometimes.

The car was very tall and had a musty smell inside. When driving down the road, sometimes it seemed to bob on all four corners, and it felt very isolated. It felt very stable on dirt roads, though, even when driven fast. It had a bad quirk, in that it sometimes died when idling when the engine was only partially warmed up. The engine ran so quietly, though, that it was difficult to tell when it died, and I sometimes ended up trying to pull into traffic with the engine dead.

An interesting feature was the gas cap hidden under the driver's side tail light. To access the gas cap, you had to push in the small round reflector under the tail light. The tail light would then pop up on a hinge, revealing the gas cap. I remember one young man at a gas station who was going to put gas in the car (this was before self-serve was common) who looked up and down both sides of the car, along the back, behind the license plate, and everywhere he could think of before finally giving up and asking where it was. I got out and demonstrated for him.

I only had that car for a year or two, though it stayed in the family for a long time. It finally ended up sitting for a long time in the carport of my grandmother's house. She didn't mind, because it looked more like someone was home if a car was there. The mailman got in the habit, though, of scraping his bicycle against the car when he delivered the mail, and over time he left a huge scraped area along the side of the car. When my father found out he was really mad, and got the post office to pay for fixing it, though I don't remember now if the money was ever used for that purpose.

I got my next car, and the first one that was really mine, in 1972 or thereabouts. My father knew someone who was trying to sell a 1964 Cadillac Coupe DeVille with a light blue body and white top, and I ended up buying it. It had an internal combustion leak, and had to have water added to the radiator every week or so, sometimes sooner. We eventually put new head gaskets on it, but not for several months, maybe longer.

I really liked the design of the '69 and '70 models, though. They were still fairly new at the time, and I figured it would be quite a while before I could afford one. Then, late in the summer of 1973, my father took me to the local Cadillac dealer to look over what they had. I didn't intend to buy anything, just look.

The used car section had a lot of bright, shiny cars of various colors and ages (though all were fairly new). None of them seemed to be quite right, though, being either the wrong color or wrong model or wrong year. They were all kind of expensive, too, probably being somewhere around $4500 to $5000 even for a 1970 model (new Cadillacs at the time probably went for $8000 or $9000 or so).

My eye kept being drawn back to one car parked at the back, a 1970 Sedan DeVille with gold paint and a white vinyl roof. Unlike the other cars, its paint was already a little faded in some areas, and it didn't seem to have any information posted on it. I wasn't sure if they were trying to sell it or if someone had parked there.

My father went and checked, and they told him that they had just taken the car in and hadn't checked it out yet. They were wanting a little less than $4000 for it, but my father managed to get them down to $3350 or something like that. Thinking back on it, besides them having not checked the car out, the already fading paint and the relatively high mileage (almost 40,000) may also have factored into them lowering the price that much.

I bought the car that night. It was a car I ended up keeping for a long time.

Dream - Getting lost

Somewhere around April 2006, I had a strange dream. The first part of the dream seems to have been some kind of nighttime adventure involving dimly-lit warehouses, and is largely forgotten. The second part of the dream dealt with the afterlife, and remains clear.


At some point in the dream, it was dark, and I was outside, with some buildings behind me and slightly to the left, but not far away. Someone was standing near me, also behind me and slightly to the left. Someone who was unseen and perhaps invisible, and not actually human.

The entity was telling me a secret about what happens after people die. He said that people get caught up in doing a series of tasks. There are always more tasks, and they are drawn in deeper and deeper, until they get lost in them. And I had a picture in my mind of going through a series a small, brightly lit rooms, filled with various things, and doing something there and then being drawn somehow (or told) to go through a door into the next room, and on deeper and deeper into the building. I felt that this was what hell actually was, to get lost in the endless series of tasks.

The unseen entity standing by me said that all a person needed to do to get out of this or to avoid it was to call on Jesus Christ and the person would instantly be removed from it.


Previously, I had been dimly aware of a long building in the distance in front of me. I had now moved somehow, and was standing perhaps 10 or 12 feet in front of it. The building was low and white, and almost endlessly wide. Double doors, like elevator doors, were evenly spaced across the front of the building. There was also a sidewalk that ran in front of the building, and I was standing on or near it, and there was a broad walk that ran from the sidewalk to each of the doors.

A young girl came up beside me, a few feet away to the right. She was thin and perhaps in her late teens. She was wearing what looked like old, inexpensive clothes, some jeans and a jacket or a sweater. I think she also had on a knit cap. She paid no attention to me. She stood looking at the double doors in front of us for a moment, her hands in the pockets of the jacket or sweater.

At some point the doors in front of us slid open, perhaps even before she arrived, and featureless white light poured out. She walked forward into the light and disappeared, evidently feeling that this was expected of her, her face looking a little strained and uncertain. Her eyes were always pointed straight ahead, though, and she never looked at me.


I felt that the building and the light were the traps I had been warned about. I felt certain that the building was not real. I went up to it. The doors were closed now, but there was a big button on the recessed area surrounding the doors that could open the doors again.

I poked at the building sharply a few times with my finger. The building gave slightly and bounced back, and finally seemed to separate slightly at the seams. It appeared to be made of a stiff, paper-thin plastic.

I went back away from the building, slightly past the sidewalk to where a small, gravel path was. Some other people arrived, not all at once. They were of various ages, and were all much shorter than I was. Like the girl, they tended to look thin and poor. Unlike the girl, they seemed to be looking to me for guidance, their faces worried and uncertain.


I led them to the left, along the gravel path, walking with the building at my right. We walked along in the darkness for a long time. Eventually, the path deteriorated, becoming more dirt than gravel, and going through a series of small rises and dips. The path finally ended, fading into the land, just before the building itself ended.

Moving past the corner of the building, we could see it stretch away from us until it was lost in the distance, continuing on indefinitely. Ahead of us, beyond the end of the building, the land sloped down for a ways, and leveled off and then rose again, like the banks of a dry riverbed. Beyond this was a vast barren plain, at a lower level than where we were.


On the edge of the downward slope in front of us was another structure. It was low and at a right angle to the path, and appeared to be partially buried in the dirt. It was also very dark in color, and at least part of it looked like cast iron. The end of it was enclosed, like it contained machinery, and was lower than the rest and more rounded.

I pounded on the enclosed portion for a while, trying to loosen up some seams like I did with the white building. I did manage to make a seam visible, though it remained tightly closed. Some broad, shallow rivet heads, perhaps three inches across, also became more noticeable, and took on a cloudy, waxy look.

The dark structure had a series of rooms that led away to the right, paralleling the end of the white building but a little ways from it. The rooms had the roofs mostly cut away, leaving a smooth overhang along the inside of the walls, an overhang with rounded corners. I also felt that doors existed that could be used to go from room to room.


I led the people through the cut-away roof down into the first room. The room had a sink and various devices and objects hung or attached to the walls. There was also a table. The devices and objects seemed to be simple in nature. Some had mechanisms to operate, and some didn't. There seemed to be nothing, aside from perhaps the lights, that required electricity, though I'm not sure about this. Some of the devices were actually the controls for some very advanced equipment, advanced even beyond what we have today. Even so, the room in general had the feeling of an earlier time about it, and seemed almost like a kitchen, though some items had more of a business nature.

I seemed to know in my mind something of what would be required of us. I could see, in my mind, that a horde of people would be coming, from the direction of the riverbed but at an angle. We had to fight them off as best we could, using the various objects and devices in the room. I saw also, though, that they would overrun us and continue on, but we had to continue to fight them as they went past and over us, at least partly simply to protect ourselves. I knew, too, that this was but one of a series of endless waves of such people. We were to handle just this one wave, though, leaving the others for groups that came after us.

I went to the far wall, then, where a tablet of paper was mounted high near the door. I looked at the pages briefly. Someone then took the tablet down to examine it, but I held it soon after and looked through a lot of the pages. They held instructions for us, printed in large letters, a few lines per page. The paper felt old and soft, and tore easily. I think a page or two may actually have been torn off by me or someone with me.

I became very concerned, then, that we not damage anything, at least as much as was possible. I felt that neatness counted and it was very important to put things back the way they were for the next group, that we had to do this before moving on to the next room and the next task. I tried to emphasize that to the others.

While I was doing this, though, part of my mind was saying to me that I was being led off into the endless tasks, and that all I had to do was call on Jesus Christ and it would all be taken away. I was leading the others astray as well, and failing in my duty, having not told them of what the entity had said.

But still I hesitated, wanting to continue a little more...

The cactus came through

My family moved to New Mexico just before I started second grade, in 1960. We then moved to Arizona early the next year, probably in February or March. While in New Mexico, we sometimes took trips in the car to look at the scenary.

One time when we were driving through the desert, we saw a very small mountain that abruptly rose up out of the flat desert. The mountain, small enough to be called a hill, looked so odd and out of place, surrounded by flat desert, that we stopped to have a better look.

The mountain was covered with rocks and boulders and had lots of plants on it, including several types of cactus. One of the types of cactus was a prickly pear that grew close to the ground, its broad, flat lobes having clusters of long needles.

I walked up on the mountain, along with my father and younger brother. I think my mother stayed further behind, and didn't actually get up on the mountain. I moved by myself among the rocks, away from the others, and was careful not to step on or brush against any of the types of cactus that grew there among the other plants. As I moved forward in my irregular path, I noticed that one of the flat prickly pears was not too far ahead. I kept that in mind as I wandered along between and on the rocks, and I purposely steered to one side to avoid it.

All of a sudden, I looked down and saw cactus needles, long spines, sticking out of the top of one of my thin-soled canvas shoes. I had somehow stepped on the prickly pear, even though I had tried to avoid it. And it was that same prickly pear, for I looked around to try to see if I had somehow stepped on a different one, one that I had been for some reason unaware of. There were no other ones near me. It had to be the same one, though I could not understand how I had managed to do it.

I looked down at the spines coming out of the top of my shoe for what seemed like a long time. There were at least three or four of them, and they were all in the front section of my shoe, probably within two or three inches or so of the front. While I could accept that perhaps one or two of them could have been in front of or between my toes, at least one was so far back that it had to have been very close to and perhaps past the point where my toes joined my foot, and one was so far back that it had to have been through my foot.

I didn't feel any pain, or anything of the spines at all. There was no blood. I didn't know what would happen, though, if I tried to pull my foot off the cactus. Perhaps it would start to hurt, then. Perhaps everything would get very bad. I continued staring at it. I was hesitant to call out to my parents, because I felt kind of stupid for stepping on it, especially when I knew about it and was trying to avoid it.

Finally, because I knew I couldn't stay there forever, and having no other solution, I lifted up my foot and the needles came right out. I still didn't feel anything, and I didn't seem to be injured. The whole thing seems very strange, and I've never understood it.

Dream - Flying with the professor

In May 2005, around the middle of the month, I had another dream about flying.

I had been flying around in the desert by and at some military area, and the military got interested. I got away, but later came back with some people to get some big black SUV that had been left there.

One of the people was a professor type who had come up with the concept of flying, and he wanted to fly back instead of driving, so he went flying off.

I flew after him, even though I was worried about the attention it might bring. Sure enough, we were tracked down by military people, who captured us after we landed. They came into the building and got us.

We were holding little metal things that looked almost like hose clamps that were made of a couple of loops of metal with two bolts at one end. They were supposed to help us fly, but they weren't really necessary. The military wanted to use them to handcuff us to some pipes.

The professor willingly went along, maybe even fastening it on the pipe himself. He looked at me and said that normally he could pass through any metal, but not this metal, of course, because it was a special metal. I think that beyond what it was made of, that it was actually enchanted. I knew, though, that even if he couldn't pass through it, he could undo the bolts with his mind.

I pretended to fasten mine around my wrist and the pipe, but I just bent the loops so that it looked like it was fastened. I thought that it was easier to bend it back and get loose that way, rather than trying to undo the bolts with my mind. The captors didn't seem to notice and left us there, though we expected someone to come back later.

Our intention was to be gone, though, before that happened.

Suddenly, sleep paralysis

I've gone directly into a sleep paralysis state without falling asleep first at least once, but I was lying down at the time, and was extremely tired. It was the middle of the day, though, and I had not intended to actually fall asleep.

It was a strange feeling to have it happen. It seemed that all of a sudden my mind retreated. I could still think, but it was like I withdrew the physical connections and was locked into a small space inside my head. I was still somewhat aware of my body, more aware in some ways than before but less aware in others. I was unable to move at all, though. The only thing I had any control over was my breathing. I kept trying to make myself breath harder and deeper, and I seemed to be actually doing it, but it felt very odd. I seemed to have no direct connection to it. It was like my attempts were being conveyed through some intermediary, and I wasn't getting any feedback except for noting that my body did seem to be breathing deeper and faster. It was almost like giving commands to a sluggish robot that responded slowly, and not right away, but eventually did respond if you kept pushing the buttons.

I kept up the fight, refusing to give up, and finally, all of a sudden, my mind reconnected with my body and I could move. That was a little odd, too. It felt that my mind suddenly reached out and grasped the nerves that led through my body, and, while reaching out, simultaneously retreated. For before, my mind was alone, in a small place by itself, but now it was a small part of something bigger, my body.

Real or not

Perhaps we ourselves are not real, yet still exist.

A probability among other probabilities. A universe built upon an underlying unreality.

What of all the other possible worlds? Is our world more real than theirs?

Is our world more real than the afterlife? The afterlife will still be there when our world is gone.

Nevertheless, this is where we are, now. We have to go with what we have, real or not.

Write101 - The Never-Ending Story

There's something called "The Never-Ending Story" that a person named Jennifer runs. It's a story about the adventures of Dr. Morgenes. In the story, a brief introduction is given and then people are invited to add their own brief continuations to the story. Originally, it started out at her write101.com site, but a couple of years or so ago it was moved to a blog she started, and then given its own blog.

The blog version seems to be at least partially restarted, without carrying on the original story line at the point where it last left off, although she mentions briefly some of the earlier story in her explanations of it. Part of the earlier story is still available, though the blog seems to begin at the end of the first page and not the continuation page (both at write101.com), and ignores all the posts that were added at a different website (now seemingly abandoned; see below).

I've managed to put in a few contributions from time to time, part of them at the previous, now lost, location and part of them at the new location.


Write101.com

The write101 blog: All about writing

The current story location (the blog):
Never-Ending Story

The original story locations at write101.com (which still exist):
The Never-Ending Story
The Never-Ending Story continued


There was also another location, an outside website that was really a guestbook, that the continuation page originally linked to instead of the blog. This other location held 200 posts that continued the story. More posts actually existed, but they were lost because only 200 posts were allowed, and after that earlier ones disappeared.

This other location is apparently entirely gone, now. Trying to access it directly produced a long delay without much happening. (I have all but the earliest posts saved, though.)

The Word Imperfect word definition game

A while back, I came across a blog called Word Imperfect, which is run by a person known as the Word Imp. Each day, the Word Imp puts up a new word and a made-up definition, and readers submit comments with their own made-up, "wacky" definitions of that word. The next day, the Word Imp reveals the real definition and chooses three finalists from the entries submitted. The finalists seem to be chosen on creativity and humor, not for how close they came to the real definition. Readers vote for what they think is the best one, and the next day the Word Imp announces the winner. The only prize is the glory of being chosen.

Normally, large numbers of competing definitions are not submitted (sometimes less than 20), so people have a better chance of winning than they do in contests with huge numbers of entries.

My entries have won or tied a few times, and have also sometimes been nominated and not won. Just being nominated was an honor, and, of course, I appreciated the wins or ties. For those times when I was not a finalist, well, there's always next time.

The link for the site is below. The definitions that people enter can be very creative and are interesting to read, even if you don't enter a definition of your own.

Word Imperfect

Dream - Through the doorway

In the last few months of 2005, and continuing into 2006, I had some dreams about my mother's mother, my grandmother, who has been dead for over 20 years.

In one of the dreams, which occurred in October or November of 2005, I was in a house that was similar in some ways to the one that was on my grandmother's second farm, on the highway three miles from town in rural Missouri. (The first farm was much more isolated.) She moved from the second farm to a house in Arizona (to be near us) almost 40 years ago.

In the dream, I was going through a series of rooms on one side of the house. It was sometime during the day. I was looking at things on little shelves, mostly little glass figurines and knickknacks and such. Some other people were in the rooms, too, perhaps some family members.

After a time I moved more toward the end of the house, and then I had to leave. I walked into a small, not very wide room past my mother, who stood in the doorway with her mouth open and a look of alarm on her face. She looked much younger than she does now.

On the other side of the room, near the doorway to the outside, my grandmother sat on a wooden bench in front of an upright piano. Sitting beside her, on the side near the door and away from me, was my mother's sister, who is still alive. My mother's sister is younger than my mother, but in the dream she looked near her present age, though perhaps not quite that old. My mother's sister was fussing at my grandmother, who sat slumped with her head down and her eyes closed.

As I came up to them, I paused and reached out with my left hand and ran my fingers up and down the keyboard on the side facing me, making up a tune as I went. Then I reached down and hugged my grandmother for a time, to try and comfort her. Then I turned to the doorway and walked out.

Outside, a short walk of flat, irregular stone led to the side of another house. I don't remember actually entering the other house, but I was somehow then inside it. It was very dark in the other house, and nobody seemed to be there, though I felt that some people were coming back at some later time.

I was making my way through small rooms mostly hidden in shadow, with a little light coming through the windows, not much brighter than moonlight (and perhaps dimmer), though before I entered the house it had still been daylight. The walls of the rooms were partly illuminated, and I could dimly see the tops of things. The rooms seemed to be at least partly used for storage. I could see a small, shallow dresser against a wall, and nearby there was a folded metal chair resting against a box or boxes. I could just see the top of the folded chair, and I put my hand out and brushed it with my fingers as I went by.

Dream - The elephant entity

Around the end of December 2005, I had a dream that had an entity in it of a type that I don't normally see.

In the dream, I was driving in the early morning on a divided highway. The road looked like it had just been raining and was shining in the sun. As I came into Arizona from another state, the speed limit dropped to 55. My brother, in another car, went on ahead, still going fast. I was reluctant to go much faster than the speed limit, though, and slowed down.

A pickup truck passed me, and as it did I saw that it had no cab, just a pickup bed with four wheels. A small elephant was sitting in the middle of the bed. Everything was in dark silhouette, though gray rather than black.

As it passed me, it faded, but it was always there as a kind of darkness. It moved on down the highway, becoming more visible at times. I thought that if any state trooper was checking for speeders and saw that, they'd never believe anything else they saw, and I smiled, thinking I could probably go faster and get away with it. I didn't really take advantage of it, though.

I had the feeling that the entity was on my side, helping me, like some kind of guardian angel.

The Journey to 479

The following story is true, but very strange, and features multiple synchronicities and a prophetic dream that predicted an unlikely occurrence years in advance.

In the predicted events, the number 479 was featured prominently. The prediction concerned me personally, and was not about the world at large.

Toward the time of the fulfillment of the prediction, the number kept occurring in different forms, always in events that were related in some way to the prediction itself.

I will mention now that the numbers are miles, and that 479 needs to be multiplied by 1000.

Other things will be included in the main narrative, both as background and as their own little stories, some with their own predictions and/or synchronicities.

And it does need the background information, in order to properly understand and appreciate what happens later. Even so, much of the story will seem very unlikely to many people, and others may think I'm either extremely lucky or surrounded by guardian angels.

I have been lucky, at times, but I think those guardian angels are there, too.


THE JOURNEY BEGINS

In the late spring of 1988 I came into a situation where I had to do a lot of travelling. The car that I used then, a 1970 Cadillac Sedan DeVille, gold with a white vinyl roof, was old and had a lot of miles on it, and had some major problems. It was a car that I had purchased, used, in the late summer of 1973. Though it had made some trips in the past, it was years, now, since it had been taken out of town. There was some doubt as to whether it was up to it at all.

It did it, though, in spite of everything. The travelling, however, though initially thought to be short-term, became extended, and finally became indefinite. I had repairs done from time to time, but the repairs were frequently unsatisfactory, and new problems kept surfacing. The miles seemed to be accumulating at the rate of 50,000 a year or more, and I knew that this couldn't continue.

Over a year later, in the late summer of 1989, I bought an upscale version of an Oldsmobile Delta 88. It was used, a 1987 model, 4-door, dark blue in color, with a little under 22,000 miles on it.

I had originally intended to split the driving between the cars, so that each car accumulated mileage at a more reasonable level. As time went on, though, I more and more drove the newer car

Initially, it was a difficult transition. In spite of the deterioration of the older car, the newer felt like a big step down. It was much smaller and lighter, with a much less powerful engine, and felt much less immune to what the road could give it. It was years before I really felt comfortable in it.

The newer car, the Oldsmobile, had to last, though, in spite of the rate that the miles were now accumulating on it. By the time it was even paid off it would have more miles than the Cadillac did.

I didn't know how well the car would hold up, but in spite of the expected mileage, and in spite of the cars apparent light-weightness, it would have to last. I couldn't afford to buy another car while still paying off this one.

I tried to keep it maintained, and changed the oil frequently, but things happened from time to time. It had an early problem with a sensor, that occasionally caused it to abruptly run very poorly and usually die. If it did die, it had to set for a while to cool off before it could be restarted. The waterpump was replaced several times in the early years, and then never again. Two of the struts went bad, one was leaking and one collapsed. Replacing them didn't cure the bobbing ride, though. Much later, I had air-cushioned struts put on, which stopped the bobbing and improved the feeling of the car immensely. From time to time some of the fuel injectors had to be replaced. Much, much later, I had to have the oil pan replaced, because the threads were becoming stripped where the bolt went in. Lots and lots of oil changes had taken their toll.


JUST IN TIME

Once, over a period of days, it started running worse and worse. Initially, it just sometimes made a little jerk and cough while going up mountains. This became more frequent, and sometimes happened while accelerating on level ground. By the time I got home, it had become very worrisome. Lots of problems in the mountains, and then making it through the city and past all the traffic lights. The problem turned out to be half of the electronic distributor going bad.

Another time, it developed a problem starting when it was cold. The weather was cold at the time, but this hadn't bothered it in the past. Now, I had to let it crank and crank before it started. It also developed problems similar to what had happened when the electronic distributor went bad.

It was a very difficult drive home, but I made it. Going through the city was bad, though, and it was difficult to keep the car running. Once, it died when I tried to accelerate after stopping at a traffic light, and I had some difficulty getting moving again after restarting it.

I did make it home, though. A day or two later, we took it to the dealer. It was night and we were just going to drop it off there. It died in the dealer's driveway and did not restart. It turned out that the problem was a fuel filter that was mostly blocked, and that the strain of trying to pump fuel past the blockage had burned out the electronic fuel pump.

I had driven it all that way, past the deserts and the mountains, almost a thousand miles, maybe even more, and it died in the dealer's driveway.


THE LITTLE REPAIR SHOP

Then one night, when the Oldsmobile had 271,000 miles on it, I stopped at a service station to get gas. Afterwards, the car would not restart, no matter how much I tried. The engine turned over, maybe even a little too fast, but it would not start.

I had it towed to a local repair shop. I was in a small town, far from any big cities. It was left in a dirt lot by the small repair shop, while the mechanics tried to figure out what was wrong with it. Initially, they thought it might be the electronic distributor, but replacing it didn't solve the problem. They did eventually get it running again, but after it was turned off the original problem resurfaced. They thought, then, that it was probably the timing gear and chain. When they took the plate off the front of the engine, the timing gear had most of it's plastic teeth gone, and little bits of plastic were everywhere.

This occurred close to Easter, and I ended up trapped there in the little town for several days. I also ended up going with one of the mechanics to the nearest big city to look for parts. Then I had to wait for them to find time to repair it. Meanwhile, the car sat in the dirt lot, with a cover over the open front of the engine.

One night, I walked over to the local Safeway. It was cold outside and a little foggy. In the parking lot, a small young woman came up to me. She looked up at me and asked if I were an angel.

I am very tall and I was wearing a heavy coat, and at the time my hair was a little longer than normal. The fog and the lights in the parking lot probably contributed to the effect. It also probably helped that she had been drinking.

It seems that she was married, and now they were in a bad financial situation. Evidently the stress was getting to her husband, who sometimes hit her and had once thrown her down some stairs. I noticed that she had at least one of her front teeth missing.

I went with her to a phone outside the Safeway, where she called a friend, and then walked with her to the apartments where she lived. I waited, then, on the sidewalk while she walked up to the apartments. She was quickly lost in the darkness, and I couldn't tell if she made it to where she was going. I finally assumed that she did, lacking any information to the contrary, and left.

As the days passed, I kept checking on my car, and eventually it was fixed. It seemed to have suffered no ill effects from the trauma.


A DREAM OF THINGS TO COME

The recent problems with the timing gear concerned me, though, and I wondered what else might lie ahead.

Then, one night, when the car had 279,000 miles on it, I had a dream.

In the dream, I was told that two major things were going to happen to my car, and that the second one was by far the worst. And the problems would be made much worse by not maintaining the car properly.

The times that the problems would happen were given to me, in terms of mileage intervals. The first would happen 38,000 miles from now, and the second would happen 162,000 miles after that.

At least I believe that those were the figures I was given. I knew them at the time, but the passing of time has made my memory less sure. Even if they are not exactly correct, I know that I realized after I woke up that added together they made exactly 200,000 miles.

And 200,000 miles added to 279,000 miles made 479,000.


THE FIRST THING

479,000 miles is a long way for a car to go. I didn't know if it could actually do it, but there was no way to know for sure until I got there, or failed to make it. Other things were bound to happen along the way, too, even if they weren't major enough to warrant being predicted in the dream.

Time passed, and one time when I was home, my mother borrowed the car for a while. She complained, then, that the brakes weren't working properly. They were too low, and she had to really stretch to push them. I hadn't noticed any problem, but my legs are long and I would not have to stretch in order to reach the pedal, no matter where it was. My mother insisted that something was wrong, though, and didn't want me to go driving off in the car while it was like that.

I knew that the mileage was now somewhere around the mileage of the first prediction, and so I finally relented and left the car to be fixed while I drove the other one. I was mindful, too, that the dream had said that the problem would be made much worse by not performing the proper maintenance.

The dealer said that the brakes were almost entirely gone.

And so the first prediction came to pass, but the damage was minimized by getting the proper maintenance in time. If the maintenance had not been done, the outcome might have been very different, as the dream had warned.


HOW LONG?

One night, when the mileage was in the early 300,000's, I was driving along through the desert, wondering again how long the car would last.

I looked at the odometer and thought of the future. If the car made it to 479,000 miles, how much longer could it go? What mileage could it reach?

I saw the odometer in my mind, with a reading of something like 506 or 507 thousand. I felt that it was true, and that the car could make it that far.

I tried, then, to change it, to make an odometer reading up around 580 or 590 thousand. I couldn't do it, though. The image wouldn't come. I kept trying, and finally forced the image to come, but I knew that it was false.

So the car would make it to the early 500,000's, but for whatever reason would not make it to the upper 500,000's, at least not while I owned it.


ON AND ON

Although I spent many long hours driving, the driving was not the work itself, but a means of getting to the work. Driving was not my job. Combined with the job, though, it meant that I often spent a lot of time with little sleep.

With the passing of time I gained in stature at my job, and also made more money, but the money was not nearly as much as it could have been elsewhere. I kept hoping that something would open up that would let me work closer to home, but it never did. I was hesitant to leave, too, knowing that things would not be the same without me. There was no one there who could do what I did, and never had been. Not even close. I was also able to fix problems that other people couldn't. Sometimes, they couldn't even understand the solutions that I came up with. But they knew that they worked.

It was a lot of stress on me, though. All that driving with little sleep. And sometimes I got cooperation from people, and sometimes I didn't. And sometimes, though well intentioned, they worked against me.

Sometimes, while driving, I wished for it all to be over, to be done. I could accept almost anything, just let it be done. Almost anything.

Almost.


TRANSMISSION TROUBLES

As time passed, the car developed more and more of a problem with the transmission.

Once, long ago, when the car had less than 200,000 miles on it, perhaps around 174,000, I got so tired that I mistakenly shifted it into neutral and then reverse when the car was going around 30 miles an hour. It died, and I pulled off the road. I had just passed through a little town and wondered if I was going to be stuck there. I restarted the engine, though, and drove away.

Everything seemed to work normally, except that the shifts were a little duller and the car didn't seem to roll forward quite so easily; it seemed to slow down faster when I took my foot off the gas. As time passed it seemed to improve, though, and by the mid 200,000's it was not quite so noticeable.

Now, though, in the 300,000's, in extremely cold weather it tended to get lost for a brief time between second and third gears. It acted almost like it was in neutral, except it was a bit more draggy and there was a sound like gears barely touching each other, just hitting on the edges. Sometimes it seemed to help to push on the gas. Though the engine would initially just rev, sometimes it would then suddenly snap into gear. But sometimes it didn't seem to make any difference.

It was never in that state for very long, though, and when the car had warmed up sufficiently it didn't do it at all.

It started doing it more and more often, though, and in milder and milder weather. I often tried to let the car run for a few minutes before trying to go anywhere, rather than risk having it happen.

I eventually found out that adding transmission treatment improved it immensely. It almost felt like new, for a while. For a while.

One time I took the car to a transmission shop, and described the problem. They told me that there was nothing in the transmission that could make it act the way I described. I left it with them so that they could try driving it in the morning, when the engine and transmission were cold. The weather was relatively mild at the time, but it also sometimes happened now in such weather.

They were unable to duplicate the problem, though, so I drove on with it as it was.


THE CRASH

Once, when driving on the freeway through Las Vegas, I noticed a large flat-bed truck ahead of me. It had various things on it, including a bundle of white slabs sitting upright.

As I watched, the bundle came loose, and fell into the road in front of me.

I slammed on the brakes, and stopped in time. I heard a screeching sound behind me, though, and then WHAM!

I looked behind me, and saw that a pickup truck had run into me. It was evidently a commercial vehicle, and it had tall bumper guards on the front, bumper guards that were now somewhat bent. I saw the driver on the phone calling someone, and after a while the police showed up.

It turned out that the white slabs were just styrofoam, and one of the policemen moved it off to the side of the freeway, while complaining about the construction trucks.

The back bumper on my car was pushed way in, with a straight area between where the truck's bumper guards had hit, and sharply angled areas going out to the corners. The trunk lid was also pushed in somewhat.

Everything worked, though. All the doors opened and closed with no problem, and even the trunk lid worked.

The pickup truck driver's insurance company paid for the repairs, and I eventually got the car fixed, though I drove it for a few months like that.


THE LITTLE SHOP, AGAIN

One night, while driving along, I noticed that sometimes the car would react oddly to acceleration. It would have odd little variations in speed. It would seem to briefly bog down and then speed up again.

A couple of hundred miles or so later, I noticed a loud metallic knocking sound when I went by a big truck, like the sound might be reflecting off the truck back at me. I wasn't sure it was actually coming from my car, though. I hoped it wasn't.

In the days that followed, though, it became apparent that it was coming from my car. I finally looked under the hood to see if I could see anything. Everything looked normal, except that one of the big pulleys low on the engine looked like it had something sticking out a little on the side of it.

I took it to a local repair shop, the same shop that had worked on the timing gear years ago.

They fiddled with it for a while, listening to the engine with a stethoscope-like device, apparently thinking that one of the pulleys on the accessories was to blame. They couldn't find anything wrong, though, so they finally took the belt off and started spinning the pulleys by hand, but still couldn't find anything. I mentioned that I saw something earlier sticking out of the big pulley. It was hard to see anything now, though. One of them took the pulley by hand and tried to turn it. There was a loud clank.

So, they jacked the front of the car up and took the pulley off. The center of the pulley was made of rubber, and the rubber was torn in a line all the way around it. Without the rubber holding the rim in place, the rim was banging against the metal stops on the pulley. The pulley also had a device on it to control the engine timing, and with the pulley moving back and forth the timing kept changing.

One of the mechanics, looking at the damaged pulley, said that he had never seen that happen.

He said that I could probably drive it that way for a long time around town, but he wouldn't try to go anywhere with it like that. I knew that I had already driven it for hundreds of miles that way, maybe even for over a thousand, and thought for a while about the possibility of driving it home.

I knew, though, that if I made it home it would have around 407,900 miles on it. That sounded a little too much like 479,000. I was also mindful about the dream warning about the maintenance.

So, in the end, I had them repair it. And as before, we had to travel to the big city to get a replacement part for it.

It was done much quicker than the timing gear repair was, though.


THE CADILLAC BECOMES UNAVAILABLE

As I said earlier, I had intended to split the driving between the 1970 Cadillac and the 1987 Oldsmobile. As time went on, though, I more often drove the Oldsmobile and seldom drove the Cadillac.

Eventually, I stopped driving the Cadillac at all, except for emissions testing. There was just too much wrong with it, and repairs too often didn't seem to last for very long. At times, it seemed to be falling apart in front of my eyes. Sometimes, it did so literally.

So it sat there at home, with 255,000 miles on it, and I had no spare car anymore.

Much of the time when something happened, though, I seemed to be trapped in other places, either waiting for the Oldsmobile to be fixed or driving around in a rental car.

Sometimes I was able to borrow my mother's car, a car she did not have when this all started. Oddly enough (or not), it was an Oldsmobile Delta 88 also, a 1989 model, two years newer than mine. It was a much less upscale model, though. It was purchased for her by my sister, and it was already well-used and had over 100,000 miles on it. It was colored gold and had a slightly modernized, slightly more powerful version of the engine that my car had.

It also had problems of its own.


A PREMONITION OF DISASTER

My Oldsmobile was now well into the 400,000's, and the predicted mileage was now not so impossibly far away. I still had quite aways to go, though.

I started to feel a sense of foreboding, though. It continued over a period of several days, and I finally started praying, to "let this cup pass from me." That whatever it was would not happen.

One night, I stopped at a post office to use the phone. When I returned to the car, it would not start. The engine turned over, but nothing happened.

I had it towed to the local car dealer. They found out that the electronic fuel pump had burned out (again).

I felt that my prayers had been answered. Far better to have it happen in a town, than out in the middle of nowhere.


A SYNCHRONICITY OF NUMBERS

As the car approached the midpoint of the 400,000's, it developed a problem going up hills. The engine was getting too hot, and there seemed to be a film on the inside of the windshield. I had noticed, for years, that an orange dust seemed to form on the inside of the windshield when I used the defroster. I felt that the heater had probably been leaking a little, and it was now definitely time to get something done about it.

When I finally arrived at a radiator repair shop, the car had 447,799 miles on it.


AN END IN SIGHT

Meanwhile, things were deteriorating at work. I had big projects ahead of me, but it seemed unlikely that I would have sufficient support to easily complete them. Perhaps not even enough to satisfactorily complete them at all.

My car was costing me a lot of money, too, as well as time away from work. It seemed likely that I would need to get another car to continue.

But I didn't want to go through that again.

At some point I asked myself how long this would continue. And the answer came, that everything would be resolved in the late summer. That there was a feeling of peace associated with it.

If only I could hang on until then.


THE SCREECHING NOISE

Over a period of several months, I had become increasing concerned about a noise I sometimes heard, usually when I heard it reflected off of buildings. It was a kind of faint screeching-grinding noise, and I only rarely heard it, but I suspected it was there more often than I knew.

I finally took it to a car dealer and told them about the problem. I was worried that it might be something like the alternator bearings going bad. The person at the car dealer couldn't hear anything, though, and refused to replace it unless they found something wrong with it, in spite of the mileage. He was going to have his mechanic look at it, though.

They never found anything wrong with it, so I picked the car up and continued to drive it as it was.


THE SECOND THING

Time passed. It was spring, now. My car had 479,000 miles on it, in fact it was halfway to the next thousand. I had recently changed my schedule a little, which resulted in me being other places when particular mileages occurred.

The sun had set, and I was driving up a small mountain. I noticed, then, a lot of screechy, static-like noise. I thought at first that it might be poor reception on the radio, but when I turned the radio off the noise continued.

Then, a burst of sparks came flying out from under the back of the car, and flew away like fireflies in the dusk before disappearing. I reached the top of the mountain and started going down the other side. More bursts of sparks came out. The alternator light came on, and I started trying to find some place to pull over. I found a little place, just big enough for my car, and pulled over into it just as the car died.

I got a flashlight out of the trunk and opened up the hood. A huge wall of smoke came up and quickly dissipated. I peered down at the engine and saw a tiny fire in the alternator. I blew on it a few times, until it finally went out.

It was dark, now, and I was on the side of a mountain, maybe 30 miles or so from the nearest town, though there were farms and residences and businesses that weren't quite that far. Perhaps I could find a phone that was only 20 - 25 miles away. There was also a phone booth at the bottom of the mountain, but I had never tried it and I didn't know if it worked.

I decided to try to walk to the phone at the bottom of the mountain, and if it didn't work, to just keep on walking. Perhaps someone would pick me up along the way. It was cold, but I had on a heavy coat. It was very dark, too, so I used the flashlight when I walked, both to see where I was going and to alert passing cars that I was there.

It seemed to be very slow going down the mountain. It was very dark, so I couldn't see much around me, and it didn't seem like I was making much progress, even though I knew that I must be. Sometimes a car would pass going the other way, but there wasn't much traffic.

Finally, a car passed me and then came back. It turned out to be someone who knew me. He was on his way to work, on a late shift, and thought he had recognized me and my car.

So he picked me up, and took me with him on his way to work. When I told him what had happened and what I was doing, he stared at me and finally said that the last time he was at the phone booth someone had cut the wire. Later, he took me to the town.

The next day I had the car towed to the local car dealer, where they replaced the alternator, and, I think, the battery.

And time moved on.


JOURNEY'S END

In the late summer, everything seemed to come together, like events and people were puppets being pulled on a string. I was at a turning point, where major decisions had to be made. My life would change, no matter what decision I would make. I made the one that I always knew that I would. I resigned. My car was a few thousand miles away from 500,000.

Many years have passed since then. Both cars are gone. The Cadillac was sold with 255,000 miles on it, and the Oldsmobile was sold with 508,000 miles on it.

And everything happened as predicted.

And this is where the story ends.

The broken baby brush

The earliest memory that I can set something of an actual date to (but only approximately) occurred when I was apparently only one and two-thirds to one and three-quarters years old. I remember that it seemed like I had done a lot of things, and had many memories. Almost all of them are gone now, though.

This particular memory was of something important to me. I was able to give it an approximate date because it contained a reference that would force it to be within a particular time period.

I have a younger brother, who was born less than a year and a half after me. When the incident occurred, he was a baby who couldn't do much except lay there and wave his arms and legs and grab at stuff.

On this particular day, my mother was cleaning the house, and she moved the crib around as she cleaned so that she could keep an eye on the baby. She had moved the crib to a very small room with lots of openings (we later determined that the only room this could be was a short hallway with bedrooms on either side, a bathroom at one end, and an opening to the dining room at the other end). The baby kept fussing and my mother kept putting things in his crib for him to find. He would eventually come across them and grab them and then be surprised and distracted for a while. He would lose interest fairly quickly, though, and wave his arms and legs again and fling whatever he was holding out of the crib.

My mother was running out of things to give him and she finally gave him his little baby hair brush (we each had a comb and brush set, but in different colors; his was blue and mine was yellow). He found the brush and was distracted for a while, and then flung it out with great force. It hit the floor and the handle broke off.

I worried and worried about it. I wanted it to be fixed. My mother told me that it wasn't the type of material that could really be glued, and that even if it could be glued, it wouldn't be like new, you could still see where it had been broken. She put the pieces together to show me. She said that she would have to go to town and buy him a new one. I didn't want a new one, though, because it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't really be his brush. My mother said, "He's too young! He doesn't care!"

I already knew that, though. I knew he didn't care right now. He was just a little baby and didn't know what he was doing. I said, "But when he gets older, and does know, he won't have his brush, because he broke it when he was a baby."

It seemed terribly tragic and I didn't know how to fix it.

A record at school

When I was in grade school, one day we were working on some kind of projects or something, something that didn't involve the more usual requirement of constantly being seated at your desk. This was probably somewhere around 1964 to 1966.

The teacher had brought her record player to school, and she played some records during class. The records seemed to be collections of hits by various artists. One of the songs was by some singing group that I didn't know (I'm not sure I actually recognized any of the other artists, either). This group sang about a young man who was going off to war, from the viewpoint of his girlfriend. She offered to dress up as a soldier and go with him, but he kept refusing, until in the end where he finally agreed.

I liked the song so much that I finally went up and asked the teacher who was singing it. She said it was Peter, Paul and Mary.

I believe the name of the song was "The Cruel War." The song was on one of their early albums.

I began collecting their albums, bit by bit. I eventually accumulated all of their albums that I know of, up to the time of their temporary breakup. I have some of their later ones, too, but not all of them.

The cat that wasn't fooled

My sister loves cats. Years and years ago, she had a black cat with white feet and white on its face. My sister used to hide around a corner inside the house and jump out at the cat and grab it when it came walking around the corner. They loved each other, and it was all in good fun.

One time it paid her back and waited and pounced on her when she came around the corner.


One time the cat came into my room, which it didn't normally do. It walked slowly across the floor. I lay on my bed, watching it. When it got to about the middle of the room, I hissed loudly, pretending to be another cat.

The cat jumped up in the air with its back arched, then landed and continued walking slowly forward, with a small smile on its face. It never did turn and look at me.

I guess it knew I was harmless.

Posts about posts

In a message board I visit frequently, new threads crowd out old ones, old in this case meaning oldest last update. In spite of this, threads can persist for a long time, even years, if they are posted to frequently enough so that they stay comfortably away from the bottom of the list.

On this message board, there are some threads that I help to keep going, by posting to them when it seems that a new post might be needed. When I can, I try to post something more than just a "stopping by" or "time for more" type post, because I feel too many of these will make the thread less enjoyable to read and may end up driving people away who would otherwise read it.

And so I try to find something to say, hopefuly something that has some relevance to the thread's subject or at least what has been talked about somewhere in it. Sometimes a post must be made, though, that has very little connection to what has been said before. Sometimes the inspiration does not come that would allow anything else, or perhaps time does not permit too much thought upon the matter, or the subject may be such that what would directly relate to it, at least in posts that I could make, has already been said. Nevertheless, a post of something must be made, and so a post of something is made, because the alternative is to lose the thread.

In some threads relating to writing or poems, I have sometimes posted poems to keep the threads going. Most of these poems refer to posts or posting in some manner, and most of them are short, sometimes very short, though a few are fairly long. I have posted a few of the shorter poems below, and I will post some of the others at a later time. The poems did not originally have titles, but I have given them titles here, in case for some reason they should need to be referred to again. The times shown are in Arizona time (MST), not the time on the message board, which uses Eastern time.


ALL I HAVE
9:52 AM 11/24/2005

I thought that I might make a post,
But this is all I have,
And though it's not as good as most,
It's a temporary salve.

Perhaps another post will come,
From me or someone else,
Until that time I leave this rhyme,
For someone like yourself.



TALKING TO MYSELF
6:08 AM 3/2/2006

A time has passed,
With no one else,
And so I continue talking,
To myself.

And so I leave this thought,
Upon this day,
Lest this thread,
Should go away.



I POST THIS POST
3:11 PM 4/13/2006

I post this post,
Upon this place,
I leave it here,
With all due haste.

And if you'd post,
Instead of me,
Perhaps a better
Post you'd see.



WHAT STILL COULD BE
3:14 AM 5/16/2006

Another post
Put in the air,
And for a time
It lingers there.

A reminder of
What still could be,
For you could make
A post like me.

Dream - Footsteps, mine and others

Earlier in "The girl with the disappearing face" dream that I talked about in June (the dream where an alien that looked like a human woman was left with just eyes and parts of her face hanging in the air after a series of flashes), an interesting thing happened.

In the dream, previous to the part that I talked about in the post, I had gone upstairs and there was a long room with a wooden floor, which had some smaller rooms with carpeted floors connected to it. My footsteps on the wooden stairs were quite noticeable, and also in smaller, wooden-floored rooms.

When I was walking on the floor of the long room, however, the footsteps changed and became much louder and with more of an echo effect. I stepped off into one of the carpeted rooms, and my footsteps became absolutely silent. I could also feel the cushion effect of the carpet under my feet. I stepped back onto the wooden floor and the loud footsteps returned. I put a foot back on the carpet and the foot made no sound.

I nodded approvingly at the special effects.


I have noticed the loud, reverberant footsteps before. I mentioned them earlier in another post, the "Flying with a leprechaun" dream, where in part of the dream a person coming down wooden stairs caused a leprechaun to hurriedly move down the stairs to get out of the person's way.

It seems to me that these sounds, or ones like them, are also associated with near out-of-body states. Of course, other strange sounds can also occur at such times.

Dream - The pale spider-like thing

Sometime in 2004, probably in the fall, I fell asleep sitting at my computer and had a strange dream.

I dreamed that there were several presences around me, generally of small size and mostly either hidden or invisible. One of them was somewhere under the desk near my feet. Others were off to either side of me and at least one was several feet off the ground and a little behind me. They all seemed to be watching me.

The most disturbing one I could actually see, though only in my mind, because it was directly under my chair.

It was a large, pale, spider-like thing. It was flat and round and perhaps 15 inches across. It was upside down and an enormous amount of legs radiated like spokes from its center. The legs were somewhat flattened down and in disarray, like something had pushed down on it. It still seemed to be alive, though, and aware of me. I felt like it was waiting for something, perhaps some event or signal, or maybe something that I might do.

Time passed, and I became more aware of the other entities, while keeping an eye on the spider-like thing under my chair (at least a mental eye; I wasn't physically in a position to see it).

As more time passed, the scariness of the situation receded somewhat, and some amusement crept in. I felt some amusement from the entities, also.

Time continued to pass, and eventually I woke up.

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.