Nicholas Dreams

Failed pitch, temporary Astronaut and Obama’s extraterrestrial theories

I had been agonizing over a pitch we were doing for my friends commercial. I was waiting on Bobo’s animation treatment to see what were going to present. I was walking through an enormous bureaucratic complex. The halls were covered in dark wood with incredibly high ceilings.
As I proceded down a long hallway it opened up into an enormous, semi-circular auditorium with all the seats filled. Bobo was on stage giving his pitch on our project from behind a podium. In the audience were a number of government dignitaries including Barack Obama. My friend Leon was seated at the edge of a back row. It suddenly occurred to me that it was Leon’s piece we were pitching for.
I leaned against a wall to observe. The lights lowered and the curtains peeled back. What followed was an absurd visual orgy of animation. Bobo had taken the product we were designing around and had integrated it into an extravaganza of CG acrobatics. Lasers, fight scenes, exploding planets etc.
I was delighted by its thematic scope but realized immediately that he had completely overshot the mark and that it was going to offend every one of Leons aesthetic sensibilities.
As the lights came back up Leon wandered over to me with his hands in his pockets. He furrowed his brow and very apologetically said there was no way he could work with us considering where he saw the project going. I shook hands with him and gave me my assurance there were no hard feelings.
I went to tell Bobo the bad news when I realized my name was being called over the loudspeaker. Apparently I had been elected to be an astronaut for a day. I walked up to the podium suddenly attired in a tight-fitting bodysuit.
The podium was suddenly replaced by one of those old-school conical space probes they used for the first earth orbits. I sat inside to moderate fanfare (there were only a hundred people or do in the auditorium). I launched immediately through the ceiling and without much intermediate experience was immediately floating in zero gravity. I remember only having a quick moment to absorb all the cosmic beauty when I rapidly descended back into the auditorium.
I stepped out of the space probe into an empty auditorium. No more audience, just janitors sweeping up and putting the chairs back into place. Someone notified that as an astronaut for a day I had been granted an audience with Mr. Obama. I was directed towards his office and I immediately proceeded towards it.
As I knocked on the door I realized I had a rolling suitcase with me and I was still dressed in my absurd proto-astronaut outfit.

He opened the door with an enormous, pleasant smile on his face and beckoned me into the room.  He was tall and slender with amazing poise.  The room was surprisingly nothing like one would expect the presidents office to be like.

It was long and dark and filled with an absurd assortment of stuff.  Almost like a cliched room of curiousities where one would find suits of armor and various weaponry in glass cases.  His desk was crammed in the back corner behind a pile of boxes.  I wheeled my suitcase into the room to be closer to his desk.  He shut the door behind me and began shuffling about moving boxes here and there, unfolding and reading random documents.

I began unpacking my bag systematically to get to some garments on the bottom.  Normally when I have suitcase dreams I am quite aware of revealing my undergarments to passerbys but in Obama’s case I was utterly un-selfconscious.

So, I began changing out of my astronaut costume and back into normal attire.  I had all of my clothes neatly arranged in stacks on the floor.  As I was changing I began asking Obama what it was like being President and if there was anything of note he wanted to tell me.

He said, ” You know, one of the great things about being President of the United States is that I finally have confirmation that aliens exist.”  I remember holding a stack of underwear in my arms when he said this.    I pressed him for informtion.  I got right up in his face and implored him for more.  He wagged his finger at me and said, ” Let’s just say that we built a very powerful computer to say hello in every conceivable fashion and we finally got a response.”

3 Giant White Goats and Etheric Daggers

I was living on a farm in northern England. In fact it belonged to me. I was venturing outside in the late afternoon to check on my livestock. My proudest animals were a trio of enormous white goats with voluminous fur and enormous spiraling horns. It was an overcast day and drizzling. I was wearing Wellingtons and accompanied by my friend Lisa and a little scruffy farm mutt.
My dog was being a bit disobedient and I was chastising him for not staying near me. Lisa was complaining about her love life and I was impatient to see my goats. He scurried underneath a fence and I ran after him. We chased him across a field and lost him in some trees. I had to enter my neighbors farmhouse to get to the other side of a field to track him down. As soon as I entered the house I was greeted by my ex-girlfriend Justine and several of her friends. We basically bumped into eachother in a doorway.
We were chest to chest in the the door attempting to squeeze by each other with as little physical contact as possible. She said something saracastic about the situation to which I retorted angrily. Her friends greeted me with open disdain. I was incredibly irritated by their whole vibe so I began arguing with them vehemently. I stepped fully into the room fuming with indignation as they begin haranguing me about a whole complex of issues. There was an enormous round, wooden, farm table with a beautiful meal laid out. Big ceramic crocks of milk, coarse loaves of bread, a platter of meats and cheeses, a veritable harvest feast. I grabbed the edge of the table and overturned the whole affair spraying the girls with food. I stormed out of the house laughing and ranting angrily at them over my shoulder.
I stepped outside into a massive meadow that gradually sloped up and ended at the edge of a beautiful city street. It looked like a stretch of townhouses in Chicago or San Francisco but more european. I was barefoot and making my way up the hill to a set of stairs that exited the park. There were three women behind me on the stairwell. They were all attractive and well dressed and it turned out we were all headed to the same bar at the top of the street. We stopped for a moment on the stairwell to meet eachother. I sat down for second to check my feet as they were quite dirty. They offered me some sort of fancy supplement to help me with my journey.
As soon as we kept walking I lost track of them and was walking on the outskirts of what seemed to be some sort of industrial area. It reminded me of a stretch of interstate near Philadelphia. I walked by an old TV set. On it was playing a video of a shamanic battle between two characters. I was friends with one of them who in my mind was the protagonist. He had just scored a major coup against the man pictured on screen. Somehow he had managed to lodge an etheric dagger in the mans midsection and his opponent was currently doubled over in pain, clutching his abdomen and coughing up yellow bile. I was friends with the winner of the battle but as it was happening psychically he was not pictured in the video feed.
The man who lost, I realized, lived around the corner and I wanted to go check on him even though he was clearly a dubious black shaman of no consequence. I entered his shanty-like room underneath the interstate. There were two other guys in there. One huge black guy with dreadlocks and another Hispanic man eating cereal. The black man was wearing one of my T-Shirts, which I notified him of promptly. I poked around the missing shamans belongings for a moment looking for a talisman to steal.

Confused Patricide in a Suspended Japanese Inn

My brother, father and I were being held captive in a small room. I was aware that the surroundings were distinctly Japanese. In fact we were imprisoned in an incredibly spare traditional inn, replete with tatami, sliding screen doors and dark wood everywhere.
My father was being held captive by an enormous giant of a man who resembled an mongoloid, obese, Bruce Willis. He was kneeling behind my father, holding his head in a sleeper hold. He kept on threatening to snap his neck but seemed intent on keeping us in suspense.
My brother and I were pacing in circles around them, they were in the middle of the room kneeling on the tatami. As we circled around them we became increasingly agitated that the giant was actually going to carry out his threat. I decided to take matters into my own hands.
I grabbed an enormous kitchen knife and clambered up his back. I proceeded to cut deeply into his neck until I felt his body go slack.  As I climbed down from his body and surveyed the gory scene I realized that somehow his body had merged with my father’s and I had inadvertently committed patricide.  My little brother began crying profusely and as I attempted to comfort him he began shaking violently.  He gradually shrank in size and became an infant version of himself.  I picked him and threw him over my shoulder and wrapped him in blankets.

An enormous siren went off throughout the building I was in and I realized I had triggered some sort of alarm system.  I threw the door open and began running around the inn carrying my little brother.  Eventually I came out onto an open, wooden terrace.  I was faced with an enormous industrial scene.

The inn itself was suspended from the underside of an enormous bridge.  Underneath us, sprawling in every direction was a gigantic refinery.  There were miles of pipes, concrete buildings and smokestacks belching exhaust and flames.  There was an elaborate system of suspended, concrete walkways coming off of the inn in many directions.  I could see small platoons of security guards in the distance attempt to get closer to us.  I began running carrying my brother all the while.  I chose paths at random hoping that they would lead us down to street level.  I kept on looking over my shoulder to ensure that the security guards were still at a safe distance.

Finally we exited at the bottom of an enormous concrete ramp and we were at a basic intersection.  It looked like any number of grubby, harsh street corners in Brooklyn, underneath the BQE and overrun with traffic.  I attempted to flag down a taxi.  Finally, in a astate of exhaustion I sat down on the curb, put my “baby” brother down on the sidewalk and began crying spasmodiaclly.

Ceilingless Cathedral

This dream was of such a cliched Anglo-Saxon nature it was almost comical.
I was inside a massive forest, attired quite simply as a traveling knight. I distinctly remember wearing a layered outfit. Chainmail, a tunic with a  leather belt, a cloak and an array of weapons on top of everything My head was uncovered and I was holding a sword, hilt up, blade down.
I emerged from a wall of trees and in front of me stretched a massive structure. It was very long and narrow and made of stone. It resembled an unnaturally long ceilingless Bavarian inn with multiple, tall, slender, A-frame, vertical extrusions along the edges. These triangular faces were primarily constructed of stained glass and they were radiating multi-colored beams into the interior of the space. The floorspace was incredibly long and composed of enormous, wooden floorboards. It gave me the impression of being one enormous nave. I could faintly recognize rows of figures lined up along the floor.
There was a small stone stairwell protruding off of one corner immediately in front of me. I felt amnesiac, like the space was familiar to me but I had forgotten it existed or even that it was located here in the first place. I knew that I was expected to enter the space but couldn’t remember why.
As I stepped up onto the upper level I was greeted by an incredibly long nave-like floorspace. There were no furnishings, just a continuous line of people arranged in two lines facing inward. I was beckoned forward and I began slowly making my way down the central aisle.
I was immediately welcomed with warmth and congratulation. To such an extent that the assembled group felt as if they ought to be family. It was predominantly bearded men garbed as if they were knights or other Arthurian era dignitaries.  I proceeded down the aisle created by two long lines of people.  Gradually as I walked farther in between them it became more and more obvious that I was being intensely welcomed home.  They began patting me on the back and laughing at my bewilderment.  I began laughing when I realized it was real and there was nothing malevolent or false about their behavior.  I needing to stop to catch my breath as I was overwhelmed by the wave of approval and positive energy coming from them.

Backwards racecar driving, ignorant mafia and anger blueberries

This dream is another foggy one but had some nice distinctive qualities.  It was riddled with a fair amount of anger and rejection issues.  I was championing a set of odd causes, anyway, moving on.

I remember driving across an enormous bridge in reverse.  I had a whole car full of people and we were clearly trying to escape something.  The bridge was packed with other attempting to evacuate.  I was actually really enjoying the free-wheeling apocalyptic free-for-all that was the exodus.  I was behind the wheel of what felt like a 60’s era, white, Toyota Corolla hatchback.  It felt really beefed up and like it had way more horsepower than was appropriate.  Strangely, in the car with me and my friends were some Mexicans who were were clearly attempting to make a border crossing and somehow gotten planted in my car.  They clutched each other as we careened around traffic.  As we approached the center of the bridge I threw the wheel in one direction and began driving in reverse, looking over my shoulder and firing a really ornate .45 handgun out the window.  I remember it had amazing engraving and inlay in the handle and I had loaded it earlier that day as I intended on taking revenge on someone.  I realized, as I was driving backwards, that I ought to expend all my ammo in advance to ensure  I didn’t hurt anyone.

Fast forward in dream-time.  I am inside an enormous, loft-like boardroom of sorts.  It has high ceilings, black-iron windows, and beautiful, luminescent, warm wood floors.  There is a huge table in the middle of it and seated around it are a bizarre array of what I can only assume were crime-bosses.  They weren’t of the generic Italian, Chinese, Russian variety.  They were attractively dressed, in their 20’s and 30’s, of both genders and most of them had really good hair.  They might have been a group of mafia-esque designers and creative types but I couldn’t be sure.  There was a heated discussion raging about the fate of one of our members who was not present.  It was clear that I was considered one of their number, in that I was clearly a mob boss or at least a consigliere.

As the group debate progressed it became evident that there was a lack of faith in our absent colleague who was evidently female and was considered to be a liability.  I for some reason felt very loyal towards her and fiercely protective and had a sudden impression that she was going to be “rubbed out” as a result of this meeting.

It was also the case that once we left the room there was going to be some sort of hand-to-hand gang war against some other group and we were busy discussing how to arm ourselves with random weapons.  I had a handful of nails clenched in rows between my fingers.  There were several enormous bowls of freshly washed, plump blueberries in front of several of the members.  I became very agitated about the decision to eliminate our mutual friend.  I began angrily brandishing my nail-hands at various members.  I walked around the table several times, grabbing people at random by the hair and holding the nails at their necks.  I remember screaming that if I heard she was injured at any point I would not hesitate to murder or maim my colleagues in the heat of battle when they least expected it.

I would periodically jam huge handfuls of blueberries in my mouth while I was ranting.  I specifically remember examining the bowl for big fat plump ones while holding a handful of someone’s hair in my hands.  I woke up surprisingly agitated and totally confused by all the anger bubbling inside me.

Pastoral vacation turned voluntary vampire nightmare

This was from a couple months ago, stuck in my mind with extraordinary clarity.  I was on vacation with my family.  We had rented a huge mansion in New Hampshire or Vermont.  It was in a strange neighborhood with an array of other huge, beautiful homes.  It felt like an enormous Quaker village the way the homes were all clustered together.  It felt like a pedestrian neighborhood that was almost totally devoid of paved roads.  There were enormous, beautiful oak trees interspersed throughout.  It was quite idyllic.  I remember arriving at the house with my family (mom, dad and brother).  My brother and I rushed through the house eagerly checking out all the rooms.  The house was totally unfurnished and the rooms were all beautiful and sparse, with hardwood floors, wood paneling and sunbeams pouring in through the windows.

There were other affluent families living in the neighborhood and everyone was getting set up for their vacation time.  There was this very sweet, almost idyllic moment where we were unpacking things from the car and we all sat in front of the house, staring up at it contentedly.

As soon as the evening came closer we began to realize that something was amiss.  It immediately became bitter cold and some of the neighbors began complaining at the utter lack of supplies in their houses.  There was no food, no furniture, and seemingly no lights or anything.  Night fell suddenly and we realized that something was terribly wrong.  I began to hearing muffled screams around the neighborhood and I beckoned my family to run inside and hide in the upstairs.

As I stood in the kitchen of the house I heard a scrambling noise from behind the basement door.  I swung open the door and from out of the darkness I saw a horde of hairless, toothed, vampire-like ghouls rushing up the stairs, climbing the walls and hissing at me.  Strangely I was not in the least bit afraid as I realized I had total psychic dominion over dream-space and could do whatever I wanted with it.  I began vaporizing my antagonists mentally en masse.  They would vanish in a little puff if I pleased or I could pin them against walls at my will.  I shut the door behind me and erected an impregnable wall of brick in front of it.  It dawned on me that the screams all around me came from all the surrounding houses and that every home must have had demons in the basement.

As the realization that the ghouls were roaming the neighborhood dawned on me, true panic set in.  I sat down in meditation and visualized barriers all around the house to protect my family and then raced out into the night to see what was happening.  Just as I feared, people were being maimed and devoured all around me.  I could see the hairless Nosferatu-esque people dragging their victims around, under their homes, feasting on them out in the open and generally causing violent mayhem.  I did my best to destroy as many a I could see but I realized that I couldn’t help everybody simultaneously.

I realized, even lucidly within the dream, that there was some absurd overlap with some recent horror movies.  The thematic and situational closeness to I am Legend and 40 Days of Night were impossible to ignore and it actually helped me take the violence slightly less seriously.  Still I was incredibly dismayed by the violence and I was determined to prevent it.  I spent the remainder of the evening patrolling the grounds and boarding up houses with my mind.

The next day I remember being emotionally exhausted.  Strangely there was no carnage in sight and it almost felt like we might return to a relative state of normalcy.  As nighttime approached again I could tell my family was not looking forward to being trapped inside and having to contend with the sound of murder in the streets.  I promised them I would find a solution to preserve the sanctity of our home and that of our neighbors.  As the night wore on I followed the same bizarre rhythm of psychically boarding up our house, trapping the ghouls in the basement and then traipsing around the neighborhood trying to save everyone.  It quickly became tedious and emotionally draining.

The next day as I was taking down barriers from our house I noticed a strange character next to our house.  He was sunbathing in a beach chair, of the long, chaise-lounge variety, wearing red boy shorts and red-rimmed Ray-Bans.  He was skinny, incredibly pale and his hairline was greying.  He looked up at me through his sun-glasses and began speaking to me in incredibly familiar terms.

He was British, very sarcastic and possibly gay.  He proceeded to tell me that he had an even more omniscient level of psychic control over the scenario and that he knew everything that had been happening to me and could tell that I wasn’t going to be able to psychically endure for much longer as it was obviously draining me.  He said only he could offer me an exit immediately but I would have to accept that everyone (including my family) would be left behind and devoured in the most heartless and demeaning fashion.  He immediately gestured to our parking lot with a casual wave.

To those who don’t know me that well, in high school I was briefly in the possession of a wonderful and bizarre model of 80’s muscle car called the Buick Grand National.  It was enormous, boxy, hideous and could defeat about 98% of the cars on the road in a drag race with ease.  Parked on the flat bed of a car-trailer was a mint condition version of the car.  The engine was running, the windows were down and it was literally  sparkling with little light blings.  Almost without hesitating I told him to go fuck himself and that I had no intention of abandoning anyone.  As soon as the words were out of my mouth an enormous oak tree fell on the car, crushing it dramatically.  The trailer was driven on off the property dragging the tree behind it.

My British “friend” chuckled to himself, leaned back into his chair and wished me a sarcastic “good luck”.  I think he added something about how it was going to be a longtime until I achieved anywhere near enough psychic aptitude to govern this many simultaneous phenomena.

At the time, I thought he was the king of the vampires.  A day or so later, after having the dream, I realized he was an outside “visitor” who was merely chiming in to chastise me for my circular habits and doggedly wasteful self-sacrifice.

Creepy Commercial Corridor and Spontaneous Hindu Statuary Fed By My Tears

The chronology is fuzzy, didn’t catch this one early enough but it is still fresh in my mind.  I was hanging out with a large belligerent, dark-skinned man.  Sometimes he was black and sometimes he was Indian (Hindu specifically).  We were living in some sort of multi-tiered structure.  It resembled a really high end shopping mall of sorts.  There were escalators and balconies and most of the walls were steel and glass.  We lived on the mezzanine in modern, harem style luxury.  We were perpetually going on shopping trips in the space and elsewhere to look for odd items.  Some of my responsibilities were to vet new displays and retailers.  Make sure they were doing their job and had the right kind of merchandise represented.  Sometimes people would install totally inappropriate windows displays and I had to call the out.

I had this one interaction with this creepy, little person.  They weren’t quite a midget or a dwarf.  Just like a totally miniature human.  He was clearly male but also had a disturbingly androgynous quality.  To top it all off he was mentally retarded on some fashion.  It was really difficult to put my finger on how or why exactly.  He had long, almost hipstery, rocker hair.  He had been given a small nook off of the main promenade to sell knives and other semi-violent implements.  To get to his particular retail space, one had to climb a ladder into a small room.  It had one enormous opening that faced out over the main shopping gallery and one could see the contents of his room from most vantage points in the mall.  He had this incredibly inappropriate poster and wall-painting that depicted people getting stabbed and flayed with his knives as his main promotional material.  I made an incredibly diplomatic attempt to persuade him to take down the artwork as I was sure it would not only fail persuade people to purchase his goods but would probably offend most of our patrons.  He reacted very angrily and couldn’t see how or why it was an unsuccessful campaign.  In a moment of exasperation I ripped down all the adverts and threw them down the ladder onto the floor underneath.  He began stuttering and stammering angrily and brandished one of his blades to come at me.  He was incredibly easy to disarm and I kicked him out of the building in a fit of anger.

For the rest of the dream I was always aware of the threat of being stabbed in the thigh by this disgruntled midget and was extremely paranoid throughout.  I went back down to the mezzanine to confer with my partner/boss, the large dark-skinned man.  He was reclining on some enormous chaise lounge, absentmindedly mentioning girls I ought to devote my attention to.  Extolling their various virtues and haranguing me for not taking advantage of any of them.  At that point he suggested we go on some sort of extended car-ride or road trip to get our hands on some frsh tires.  He told me to go into the basement to fetch some provisions for the trip.  At that moment, a female friend of mine (from waking life) appeared on the scene.  She was dressed for cold weather, looking very elegant and beautiful.  She is one of the people in my life that I have always been deeply attracted to but never have been able to stomach her lack of existential control in life.  We descended down an escalator arm in arm to go to what I presume was the garage.  On the way down the escalator I was happily nuzzling in her neck and beginning to warm to her intensely.  As soon as we got to the bottom my dark friend shouted to me to come back up the stairs.  At this point I completely lost my temper and began berating him for his lack of sensitivity and total personal abandonment of all proper managerial abilities.  He was beginning to get all worked up for his rebuttal when he looked above my head with surprise.

An enormous wooden block was falling towards us attached to a parachute.  It landed softly at my feet and lay horizontal on the ground in front of me.  It was an enormous, door-size, wooden carving of a Hindu deity in profile.  It resembled Hanuman or Shiva Nataraj in a running position.  My dark friend began shouting orders at us to get it upright and store it properly.  I began chanting mantram under my breath and crying profusely.  As my tears fell on the sculpture my tears began flowing through the various furrows of the carving. As the tears began spreading from the center everywhere channel they flowed through began turning gold. As more and more of the outlines and details of the sculpture began turning gold the deity began animating slowly.  It smiled broadly and looked at me from the corner of my eye and began running in great leaps and bounds across an enormous mountainous landscape.  All of the anxiety and perturbation that had been pursuing me through the dream instantly vanished as I realized that this particular deity energy was always communing with me and always psychically available.

Shaman family wars in a train yard

So, there was a whole chunk of dream before this but this is the part that stuck in my mind.

I was walking along a riverbank, it was really gravelly, and there was an enormous grey blue mountain behind me.  I realized I was following this older white dude.  He was wearing old jeans and a plaid shirt tucked in.  Must have been in his forties or fifties, nothing particularly remarkable about him.  He was examining the river looking for a place to cross.  The whole environment reminded me of New Mexico in the late afternoon.  We crossed the river into a massive, defunct train yard.  There must have been like 40 lengths of train track, each one with a series of open, cargo cars linked up and stationary.  We walked in between the cars until we found one with another middle-aged dude in his forties.  He was standing on top of a yellow mattress inside a car with his hands upheld.  His eyes were closed and he was rapidly intoning syllables under his breath.

My companion yelled “Clarence!  You better put a stop to that, there’s no use harnessing all that death energy if you don’t plan on doing anything productive with it.”  The other fellow, Clarence, opened his eyes, lowered his arms and looked down at us with irritation.  My companion, I should say, my mentor (never did get his name) proceeded to amble off to go look for herbs or something in the gravel.  Clarence invited me up into the train car.  I can’t remember the exact details of the conversation but he proceeded to list off to me the various benefits of practicing black magic.  How you could easily manipulate people with your mind, use your eye power to win arguments, harness rogue death energies near towns to control the weather etc.  He was obviously very smart and accomplished but had a real creepy vibe.  His teeth were gray and his skin had a wan, jaundiced quality about it.  He seemed very intent on making me his assistant as he said he could tell I had the right alchemy of ego and aptitude to make a good black magician.

My mentor guy came back and scolded me for giving Clarence a chance to fill my head with his terrible insights.  We all decided to go home together. It was now I realized that they were enemies but distant cousins at the same time.  We walked around the central building, that I suppose had been the dispatch office when the train yard was functioning.  Behind it was an enormous mansion that looked like it belonged on of a hilltop in a bad horror movie.  Once we got inside we were welcomed by an entire household of family members and guests.  I was led upstairs to a study with a computer (luckily they had internet access).  I tried checking my email for a second until the room began filling up with people.  I met a beautiful cousin, Clarence’s two sons (who looked at me with hate in their eyes), an old alcoholic uncle and a whole mess of strange people.  Clarence came upstairs and kept on whispering random powers I could attain if I hung out with him more.  Finally I had enough and decided to go home.

The next day (or whatever it was) somehow I made my way back to the train yard.  My mentor was seated in the back of a train car with a blanket around him deep in some sort of meditative state.  He invited me to sit next to him and began telling me how Clarence was attempting to stage some coup so he could have maximum access to the various geomantic energies that animated the area we were in.  Unfortunately he was using some very aggressive tactics and it was screwing up the psychic balance of the entire mountain range.  He wanted me to do some psychic probing to say where Clarence was hanging out and what kind of techniques he was using.  All of a sudden I noticed this weird slimy, pink, oblong creature flying around my head.  It was essentially a miniature, pink dolphin and it was flitting about my head.  My mentor screamed, “Catch it! It belongs to Clarence, it’s his spy!”  I grabbed the little bastard and smashed it in my hand.  Somehow, an enormous grimoire of infernal and magical creatures.  I turned to the page for the little being I just obliterated, it had some arcane name like “Amoxiryops” or something.  Evidently it was a oily, flying, legless salamander one could excrete from one’s wrist once every lunar cycle.  You could send it into the world to be your remote spy.

We decided to head back to the house to get situated and determine our next strategy for challenging Clarence’s schemes.  When we got home, Clarence was upstairs browsing the internet innocently.  As we walked in he looked up at me and winked in a conspiratorial manner.  He pulled me aside and congratulated me on catching his agent.  He made some comment under his breath about how I was made of exactly the right mettle for his line of work.  At that point I noticed some of the family members carrying a corpse under a white sheet down the hallway.  Evidently, the alcoholic uncle had expired in his sleep of mysterious circumstances.  Clarence’s sons were walking back to the city and offered to escort me.

At this point, all I wanted to do was to go home to my studio and work and as we approached my studio the two sons expressed surprise when I pointed out my studio.  “That’s funny,” one of them said,” we live right above you,” as we walked into the front door together. “Stop by anytime, I’m sure dad would be happy to see you.”

X-Games in a loft and New York gone terribly wrong

This was the last dream of my night.  I was walking through the city (NYC) with my mother in the late afternoon.  We were in the meatpacking district in some such semi-quiet area with big industrial buildings.  The streets were empty so we could walk freely in the middle of the street and be totally fine.  I remember walking by some gas stations with a whole series of empty taxis parked with their doors open.  It was beautiful, balmy night and dusk was falling.  An older, tall, skinny black man stepped out from the shadows and sidled up to us.  In hushed tones he made sure to let us know that New York was no longer as safe as it used to be.  It essentially boiled down to the face that after night fell the city would be populated by predatory types.  Not zombies or anything like that, just angry, disgruntled, idle city folk with nothing better to do than prey on us.  He suggested we find someplace indoors to wait out the night.

As we were searching for somewhere to take shelter we noticed this upscale boutique with a gigantic glass storefront.  There looked like there was some sort fashion shoot going on inside and we walked in to see if we could get any hors d’ouevres.  When we got in we were welcomed by a whole room of obnoziously swank people.  They insisted we go upstairs for the private party where we wouldn’t be anywhere near as endangered by the external malevolence of the city.

The upstairs was like a strange, gothic mega-loft.  The floors were a dark, reddish wood and the middle of the room had several sets of bleachers and a long buffet table.  As we got to the top of the stairs I realized that no one was standing on the floor.  Everyone was standing on top of the bleachers or even on top of the buffet table.  There was also this massive swinging steel surface on cables in the same central, furnished area.  As soon as they realized we were present they beckoned us to stand on top of the furniture with them.  I stood up on the bleachers and realized I recognized a bunch of people at the party, they were all semi-familiar faces from NYC and were all wearing varying types of black, evening wear.  A whistle blew somewhere and people began diving into the floor like a swimming pool.  Strangely the floor became a watery substance of sorts.  It still retained the surface texture, color and opacity of wood paneling but was actually made of water, to the extent that waves were moving outward and people were splashing around in it.  A confusing, and very elaborate game of sharks and minnows ensued where we frantically swam in circles around each other attempting to tap the various sides of the furnishings (which were happily static and normal on the floor as if nothing was out of the ordinary).  Somebody won the game somehow and gradually everyone lifted themselves out of the “water”.   I finished off the dream snacking on canapes and attempting to make conversation with some girl in a long, black, sheer eveing dress.

Bolivian defection and downy rats of alternating sizes

So, I am running up a ski slope on foot.  It’s a beautiful, crisp day and I am moving along at an amazing clip.  I notice an entire retinue of cars behind me and there is a young blond girl on a bicycle at the vanguard of traffic.  There are semi’s and SUV’s and she is going slightly faster than them.  In fact they seem like they are struggling to keep up.  It happens to be on a ski slope on the edge of the mountain, so on one side is a sheer drop-off and on the other a sharp incline.  We finally make it to our destination, which just happens to be her apartment.  I’m hiding from her, waiting to see where she enters.  All of a sudden I storm in behind her with an accomplice and slam the door shut.  We scream at her accusingly, “We know you are planning on defecting from Bolivia.”  My companion has the shady quality of a G-man, some sort of government operative.  He grabs her blouse and tears her shirt off.  She is standing there afraid and defiant in slacks and a bra.  She pleads with us not to tell anyone as she can’t stand life in Bolivia anymore.

At this point I notice her apartment is totally unfurnished and actually only consists of a screened-in sun deck with wood paneling.  I ask her, very graciously, if there is anything she might be able to offer us as incentive to not expose her plan.  She suggests we take her most prized possessions which consists of three plump, English-speaking, white rats in alternating sizes.  There is a very small one, like the size of a baby mouse, a medium sized one, similar to a New York rat, and an enormous one, like the size of a house cat.  I put them in an unmarked, white shoebox and take my leave.

Suddenly I am on a sidewalk next to a rather fancy little hipster bistro in somewhere I would presume if NYC.  There are attractive, well-dressed people sitting at tables chatting and drinking wine.  I go to sit down and place the rats on the ground.  One of the people at an adjacent table sees one of the rats sticking his nose out and decides to scream and lift the top off.  By this point I am quite emotionally attached to them and am horrified at the prospect of any of them being injured by the judgmental and unenlightened patrons.  Total chaos ensues as everyone attempts to get out of the way and alternately smash the poor little buggers under foot.  I, meanwhile, am using my baseball hat (which I’ve taken to wearing recently again, in real life) to attempt to scoop up my darling rats.  I manage to get the smallest one in my hat but when I pull him out I realize he is terribly mangled and has bled to death on the pavement.  I lose my temper and begin shoving the very same well-dressed people out of the way in attempt to salvage my last two.  I find them cowering in a hedge at eye-level while a pair of malevolent, gay, hipsters take it upon themselves to berate them for being rodents.  I get in an enormous shouting match with one of the guys, threaten to push his teeth in and gather up my last two mice and storm off.