I wander to the arcade in my bathrobe and nightgown. I had major surgery less than three weeks ago; let’s just say I had organs removed. Tonight is my first night without pain pills. Well, I haven’t had my narcotic pain pill in nine hours. That counts.

I play one game that is supposed to unlock the door to the arcade. I suppose that they set it up so that if you can’t pass it, you can’t get in because you have no business playing video games. I can’t win. It’s some luge simulation and I can’t even jump on the luge like I’m supposed to — aren’t I supposed to be already lying down on my back?

Speaking of lying down on my back, I had one of those episodes earlier. I woke up flat on the floor and crawled back into bed. It took me a minute to remember which bedroom I had chosen for my headquarters tonight. The lights in my room are going dim. My cat had hogged all the blankets when I had gotten back; I’m still nervous, unsure if Amy would try to knead where it’s sore with her paws, desperate to show love to the girl who doesn’t feel much anymore. I was also worried about Amy’s health (as well I should, since she really would 28 this year in human years, not cat years), as she seemed to be going a bit deaf in one ear.

Anyway, after losing the luge game, I tear off the LCD display and begin to throw it down. “I will destroy you!” The three fifteen-year-old boys are headed up to get in and manage to get the display away from me before I destroy property.

In the parking lot, a woman is trying to convince a man with myopia to rent her car from her. He needs to get to Florida.

Outside, in three different drive-in-looking areas, the arcade has set up coin-operated Dance Dance Revolution practice areas. Behind you is a giant green screen, but you can watch your image projected along with what you’re supposed to do on the side of the building, sort of an Eye Toy DDR. All three bays are in use.

I’m noticing it’s my high school reunion tonight. I call Mom. She’s driving in the pasture — actually, she’s wardriving in the pasture, circling at the top of the hill in Howard, trying to get a good signal. She’s checking her eBay.

“My God, you’re wired tonight. Can you calm down once in a while?”

“Well, I wasn’t really expecting this. I thought it was going to be in Kansas City.”

“Why would your high school reunion be in Kansas City if you didn’t go to high school in Kansas City?”

“That’s the way they are, Mom. Jeez. So they’re all going to meet over in a church by the old school.”

“Oh.” Mom’s distracted. In the mental-telepathy-connection I used to contact her, not by phone, I can see with her eyes, the pasture fence spinning as she tries to get a signal. Finally, she finds success. She’s pulled up a response from a college athletic director who has gotten modded down to -3. “Crap. He says the check’s in the mail. What can I do?”

“Demand a proof of delivery, or at least an estimated delivery date. I don’t know, Mom. People get modded down for lots of things.”

I’m walking around the DDR people, trying not to get hit. There are lots of familiar faces, but there’s no one I see with whom I want to spend any time talking. I then see Katie E. lying on the ground. “I know how it is. I just had parts removed.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“How did you pay for it? Oh, right, insurance. So if we had all stayed working when we left high school, we might all have health insurance.” She gets a dreamy look in her eyes and then shuts them.

Zach and Tom are nearby. Somehow it comes up that I’ve been in pain for a long time. Someone’s talking about how they can’t take aspirin without getting a buzz. I laugh, but not too deeply.

“You can take Lortab and Valium together and still function just fine at work. Personally, work only noticed a difference when I wasn’t on painkillers. That’s when I lost the ability to string a sentence together, started slurring my words, and could no longer function.”

“Listen to you babble,” my mother pipes up over the telepathic connection.

Their jaws drop. “And how do you think now?” Mom asks.

“Well, I wrote on Monday, but my heart wasn’t in it and it was a little hard. But I also had an assignment. I’m doing quite well, thank you very much.”

“So you’re driving to Kansas City tonight?”

“No, I thought I had to at one point, but I’m just going a couple of miles. A few people might follow me home.”

“Well, that doesn’t surprise me.”

Then I ran out of fun people to shock and awe, so I headed home. All the kids were playing this new MMORPG that was available on their cellphones and pornographic. It was certain to be a hit, but I could care less.

Caryn came into my office, waving my job description around, and she said, “You better be prepared to come down and explain what the hell you did here.”

I was with Beck. He started singing and I clung to him, then we ended up doing lines from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. I was screaming “What a dump!”; Beck was playing Richard Burton’s role.

I was involved in an incredibly complicated Technicolor Hitchcock film. I owned three large dogs and was close friends with an alcoholic elderly woman. When she was found murdered, I went with Mom and Dad to her home. The cops put my dogs in three-ring binders, then bags, and closed them up, saying that they could still breathe. Dad came down a hallway and said, “You don’t want to go in there.” I checked the binder and my dogs weren’t there. I went out on the deck and saw my parents standing around the elderly woman’s body. My dogs were barking. There was much more intrigue and confusion to the whole thing, perhaps an uncomfortable dinner party, but I can’t remember it.

In my dream last night, I accidentally ended up with Abe Vigoda’s dead body in my house and he had been beheaded. I didn’t do it. I carried his head over to my scanner and started to scan in a side view of his head; I thought about using it at the end of a web page as a design element. Then I realized that perhaps photographs of beheaded celebrities, particularly when their remains were still within my home, would not be a good thing to post on the web. My mother came over, wearing a 1950s Donna Reed dress, and wanted to go shopping for socks. The phone rang, she answered it, and it was for her: “Who would call you? It’s not as if you’re on the phone all that often and I’m already here, so it couldn’t be me calling.” I attempted to explain that I don’t particularly like talking on the phone just for kicks since I have to do it all day long. She hopped on the counter and chatted away like Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, not “sounding just like Natalie Wood, I swear,” as she claimed on the phone. I thought about telling Mom my problem–that nasty beheading incident–but I didn’t. I was wearing a green skirt and a blazer, white tights that were bunched at the knees, and uncomfortable shoes, but we had to leave that instant for some reason. So we went to lunch in the “Riverside area.” I told Mom the story of when Kathleen and I spent the night there and, since both Curtis and Fillmore streets were likely to flood, we had to eat at this little cafe. All of the items on the menu were standard: hamburger, roast beef, etc.

I was spending the night in a house in Fancy Acres, as Jake would say. I was tempted to go around and take pictures of everyone as they slept.

Last night I continued the obsessive movie watching that has thrilled me so these past weeks. Yesterday’s movies were the last half-hour of Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (that I had fallen asleep to the night before), Brief Encounter, Les Diaboliques (a French film that I stayed awake through), and most of Pierrot le fou. I finished Pierrot le fou this morning while remembering my dreams.

All three variations were based on Brief Encounter at least in theme. Variation one involved Matt calling me from Japan and asking me to move with him to Okinawa. Variation two was a close friend moving away. I told this friend, “I can’t believe you’re leaving me.” I knew that leaving wasn’t the right word, so I hesistated, then added, “Well, not leaving me, but at the very least abandoning me.” Variation three was the most interesting one. Our preschool program director, though married with children, fell in love with a roller-skating teenager and the two of them were going to run off together. He was in the oil business, and they were headed to the Persian Gulf, I think. It might have been Okinawa or Iwo Jima, but that doesn’t make as much sense. Rebecca and her lover would simply roller-skate around the city park, hand in hand, while I had to look after three very sunburnt preschoolers. Stephanie came up behind me and asked where I find a new director. I said I didn’t know, that I was having problems grasping it all, and that it was so unlike her. Then I got that filmic narration voice in my head and starting making grand statements about love and romance. “Oh, if she follows her heart, all the rest will fall into place.” The roller-skater reminded me of an old friend, so I was nostalgic already, and watching Rebecca roller-skate continuously in circles was both uplifting and heartwrenching. Tres melodramatique.

I also dreamt that I was an invalid. I had a terrible sinus condition (I even woke up in the middle of this dream and did notice my stuffy nose, although it was much more exaggerated in the dream) and was unable to do much of anything.

Personally, I’m just a little disturbed that it took me this long to have interesting dreams again, especially considering the amount of cinema that I’ve taken in recently.

In some smallish room, Mom was half-asleep in a chair. Linden came in and went to another room to sleep. An woman in her mid-forties came in and went to Linden’s room to sleep, gushing that he could “recite Shakespeare, no, Chaucer, even in his sleep.” Some guy from NPR came in: he was about eighteen, with a mohawk, piercing, and Black Flag t-shirt (it wasn’t Jeff). He settled on a fainting couch. I didn’t leave because of him, but I knew I had to leave right then. I had been on the phone with Mari, although I called her Zorak, and just left the phone dangling when her mom started screaming at her dad.

I went downstairs, which was a high-dollar department store. I walked past the four people in the basement and went straight to the fancy porcelain dolls and tin movie posters. One of the dolls was a 8.5″ fashion doll with slots cut in her so she could identify clothing. She would say, “I want my flip-flops” and you’d put her flip-flops on, then she’d say “thank you.” She randomly barked orders about pieces of clothing to put on or take off. Not wanting to be bossed around, I glanced at one of the movie posters. When I found one that I “recognized,” I saw the opening scenes of a movie starring “Beulah” or “Bertha” or “Beatrice”–I can’t remember which. It was a woman who looked quite a bit like my aunt Marie screaming as the camera zooms in closer. Her face is lit by rotating police lights (red-blue-white). The film is in black and white except for the colored lights.

When I look away, I’m surrounded by a lot of high school people. Jon was twirling around. Someone said to me, “he’s always been much too skinny.” I said, “Would you believe there was a time when I was that thin?” Then I spotted Josh, and I ran towards him to give him a hug. “I love you for eighth grade,” the last time we were in a class together. He started crying and said, “I don’t know why I’m crying, but I am.” I walked through the crowds of people, chanting, “I have three secrets. I know what Olga is getting her husband for his birthday . . .” and I can’t remember the other two.

I found a set of photo albums and started browsing through them. There were several of a carnival. Dawn and someone else babysat needy Asian children for National Honors Society community service hours: it had a very Dorthea Lange quality to it. Charlie was shown wearing a full cowboy outfit; the backdrop was a map of New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas. The name “Lamar, New Mexico” was bolder than any other word.

Sitting with Karrie, Erika, and Olivia, they pulled out a Diet Dr Pepper can with which I had won a decorating contest. Since my design was chosen, they had printed it up on several cans. I had done this in middle school (c. 1990) and had based my words on the theme “Louisiana Democrats for John McCain.”

Two quick nightmares (probably induced by Lortab):

I call the Center and either Rebecca or Katie answer. They murmur into the phone the typical greeting, then add “or whatever.” I want to talk to Matt, but my mouth is unable to open.

I am asleep on the marble dining room table. Mom is throwing a dinner party, but I’m too near unconsciousness to move. I hear the doorbell and know that people will soon be staring at me as if I’m some buffet item. I hear footsteps on the linoleum. I want to tell them I’ll move, but I’m unable to speak.

You can always tell when I get a LOT of sleep, and that happened last night. I went to bed at about 1:30 am and woke up at 1:21 pm when the phone rang. I also woke up at 7:00 am, but I went right back to sleep. Even now, almost 3.5 hours later, I really just want to go back to bed.

I was both watching the Oscars. I was very confused, because I knew it wasn’t time for the Oscars. Yet I still watched. At one point near the beginning, I was onstage. I was upset because I couldn’t draw a box around me by rubbing my hands together and pretending to draw a box. My hands had bubble solution on them, so I wasn’t completely insane. It had worked earlier. Instead the bubbles just burst and were not editable. Christopher Walken followed me onstage (I was now offstage, watching it all on television) ad said that there would be “some humor, some singing, and some old-tyme musical theatre acts.” There were about eight pages worth of awards to hand out. I had the pages in front of me and they were for very odd things, like best use of a wa-wa pedal (or however you spell it) in a theme song (which went to a Wayans brothers’ movie). The best love song by a teenager for another teenager came from a guy named “Tyrell,” a white kid with deep chestnut eyes. The awards show played a clip from whatever movie it came from: as Tyrell sang, the love of his life, a female soccer player in a yellow jersey, was running in a meadow. She got up to accept the award for Tyrell, and she had her hair in two ponytails with big knots at the tops, somewhat like they do in Sailor Moon. Her best friend, a Japanese teenager, was sitting across the aisle, and they hugged and shrieked together. Then the awards production showed a clip from the Asian girl’s movie: it basically involved her sitting on a boat, very dramatically, much like early on in The Piano. Then the show moved on to some animal theme, and we watched a clip from someone like Tom Green singing a love song to a dolphin. I noticed we had only covered about one page worth of awards (they had paragraph-long descriptions for each winner) and we were an hour into the program. I knew it would take forever to give out all the awards.

Then I was ‘at work,’ but not where I usually work, watching the awards show. I began talking about how I had given scholarships to this semester with Howard, and we thought about putting their names in our newsletter. I had given $200 to a home-schooled student who was unlike most of them. In the dream at that point, I knew her name. I think it was Mia now, but I knew for sure then. Mia had won the scholarship by passionately defending Dar Williams in an essay. So Mia took that $200 and joined the ultra-secret, ultra-powerful, ultra-exclusive “Boys R Us” club. They tried to block her, but couldn’t since she could now pay the membership fee. Jon ran the club and started it for personal profit. He wrote out her check for her and made her sign it. The figure on the check was originally $700, then $100, and finally $200. With her generous membership fee, she was now an officer. Mia told Jon that I’d take over the website since I had five years of experience and would be vice-president of all of her committees. I took both of Jon’s hands and held them in mine. “This doesn’t change the state of our personal relations. Oh wait, there weren’t any.” I then giggled evilly, dropped his hands, and hugged Mia. I had no idea she’d completely destroy the Boys R Us club.

I then drove home from my parents’ house (in my dream) and walked around my apartment complex. I noticed eight cars that were up on blocks and their back wheels stolen. I was glad I had stayed at my parents’ house instead of coming home. I was amazed at how quiet it was though, and I took a walk since it was so peaceful. I knew it was early on a Sunday morning, and I was wearing a trenchcoat as I meandered down the street. Then I saw Holly fighting with the school’s network, trying to get into her room. “Tell me about the whole scholarship thing. I hear Jon’s determined to kill you.” I told her the whole story about Mia, although I couldn’t remember Mia’s name. I told her that I could in “the dream,” and we both knew the whole Boys R Us coup was a dream. We agreed it was a pretty funny dream.

Kathleen and I went to play slot machines, only they were more like those gift-dispensing machines at grocery stores. We played a game that was similar to Plinko from The Price is Right. Kathleen spent five dollars, and I spent one dollar playing the various games. I was much slower than she was: it always seemed that someone was in my way when I wanted to use the machine. I got gifts from another machine; someone had won trashy toys, but didn’t bother collecting them. There were four things: a rubber superball, a glow-in-the-dark butterfly, a statue of a prince, and a glow-in-the-dark salt shaker in the shape of a bird that hopped a little bit. I kept the salt shaker and gave the butterfly to Kathleen. “Don’t spill it,” she said. I, of course, did spill a little, but I just wiped it off with my hand and pretended it never happened. I then left Kathleen to finish her gaming, and I put a quarter in a different machine to play a trivia game. Three players would line up at the trio of machines and shout out answers to basic questions, then the first person to answer a follow-up question won. “Name an animal,” prompted the announcer. “Cat,” shouted the first person. “Frog,” I said, wanting to be the one who said cat. “Moose,” the third person said. “What is missing from the series?” asked the announcer, and the third person said, “Scuba gear!” That was the right answer, and since I couldn’t make sense out of anything anymore, I pressed the coin return button and got my quarter back. I also got an additional $1 in quarters and a bunch of CD-Roms: Spiderman Cartoon Maker (”I can always use another copy, I suppose,” I thought), Spiderman Summer Update, Windows 1.0.0 (”WARNING: This is highly unstable release” it said on the CD), “Chapters 1-3″ of Final Fantasy III (”free version”), and a few shareware games. I was happy, Kathleen had spent her limit, and we left. As we left, two secretary-types with big 1987 hair, were getting prizes from machines.

Since I’m almost feeling better again (except for a nagging sore throat which is unrelated to being sick, but probably related to the treatment), I think that last night made up for a lot of lost time dreaming. I had an incredibly busy dreaming night last night in my eleven hours of sleep. (I’d still be sleeping if I didn’t have to go to work today.)

Let the long, complicated dreams begin! These are in two sections: the first is from 11:30 pm - 5:30 am (when I woke up and wrote them down) and part two is 5:30 am - 10:30 am.

—part one—

I was in a zoo with Johnny Depp and a Top Gun-era Tom Cruise. They didn’t really know I was there, but I was. I thought it was very weird that Tom Cruise was there, but I hoped he would play his part successfully. They were both wearing lemon yellow jumpsuits; Johnny looked very nice in his, and I thought to myself “Awww, I got Johnny to wear yellow.” I don’t know why I was so touched by it, but I was. We were walking towards a barn, and we paused for a journalist and photographer to cross our path. We got to the barn, but more importantly, we got to the downed air conditioning duct that was lying on the ground outside. We were supposed to kill a man there, but someone had beat us to it. The guy was dismembered, “torn limb from limb like a dog does to a Ken doll.” Every joint was broken or snapped apart. The journalist came back and opened the air conditioning duct with a laser pen, and we actually saw the remains of the body then. We moved on to the fish hatchery, near the front of the zoo. We went in and opened a car trunk to do something. When we opened it, the smell was horrid and bugs swarmed around us, biting any exposed flesh. We turned to go, but a guy with a gun stopped us. He said he was holding us up because someone held him up. He didn’t really want to harm us, but he felt we were all trapped there together. He wouldn’t let us leave the door without him, and for someone reason, we had to call someone’s attention to where we were in order to leave. We went to the custodian’s cart and pressed the red “help” button. We were patched through to the front offices of the zoo. We went to speak, but a mechanical Indian voice spoke for us automatically as a function of the help button.”I am seeking to find my way out of the park,” said the voice, sounding exactly like Apu from The Simpsons. The racist help desk clerk said, “You’re lost. Consult the map.” It was of no help since we were presumed to be Indian. I punched in code 555, not knowing what would happen. I just said, “I think the fish hatchery is on fire or something.” We left, running out the back door, and we saw fire trucks coming from outside the zoo. We got into a late 1970s model Oldsmobile (me in the back, with the gunman) and waited for the fire trucks.

At an all-girl elementary school, a statute of Hunter S. Thompson greeted students at the entrance. A fourth grader there killed Hunter S. Thompson by shooting Jello pudding mix directly into his veins, thus turning his blood into pudding until it no longer could be pumped through his circulatory system. (Another guy was killed by his own urine, but we couldn’t figure out how that happened. Johnny Depp seemed to think that something else was injected into his liver.) “Wow,” I thought, possibly from the backseat of the car, “Some girl’s going to be really upset that Hunter S. Thompson is dead.” We (no longer Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise, but two females) debated about which of two obese girls would be the one who would turn into a hysterical mess when Hunter S. Thompson’s murder was announced. The two females decided it would be one girl, but I chose the other, known simply as “Fat Doris” after years of teasing. The other girl, I commented, “just wants little girl piano fingers,” meaning, I think, that she would only be upset if someone like Andrew Lloyd Webber was murdered. After someone in the school hallway laughed and twiddled their fingers in delight of my analysis (this was just a single image; I was never in the school, but I saw this anyway), we all looked on the front lawn as Fat Doris attempted to run and hug the statue. There were two girls trying to put Fat Doris in handcuffs. I then looked at the two females who had said that it would be the “little girl piano fingers” obese girl that would be upset, and the two females shrank down to three feet tall and shared one wheelchair: “We were going to win web awards, but I think we’re of a pretty small stature,” they said in unison just like the twin Japanese girls from Mothra.

Some female friends and I were friends with Jennifer Lopez. J-Lo had two baby girls and four bathrooms; she had to use three of the bathrooms to get ready to go out. She was dating Johnny Knoxville, and I had fun making up headlines for the tabloids: “J-Lo leaves one jackass for another ‘Jackass,’” referring to P. Diddy, of course. J-Lo had Melanie Griffith-brand underwear. We kept discussing going to a diner an hour north of J-Lo’s house. We finally got there (after J-Lo took forever getting ready) and found an abandoned bowling alley/lounge. Our dinner was catered, and I helped bring in broccoli and something else. I accidentally sat the broccoli in whipped cream instead of the ranch dressing. The chef joked, “Most of what we’re eating could be stored in the desk drawer of the average dieter.”

I was on a photo shoot with Matt’s mom (Ellen) and sister (Barb). I was wearing a pink boa, Mardi Gras beads, a silver wig, and other fru-fru things. There was a buffet at the shoot and I got a soft sugar cookie with one-inch-high frosting, chocolate chips, and cookie dough nuggets: as I selected one, I said, “Normally I’m not hungry, but I just can’t resist” like I was in some stupid commercial. Back at the table, Barb was about ready to eat all the cheese dip. I said, “I didn’t see the cheese fries or else I wouldn’t have gotten the cheese dip too.”

The post office had 3-D (or holographic) stamps that morphed from three flying falcons to a fencepost and back again. I wondered if they were self-incriminating, but I have no idea what I meant by that.

—part two—

Matt and I went shopping for a hot tub for my deck. I really just wanted one to use my inner tube in with jets that would make me spin in circles. We went to a store with lots of different types of chairs, and I started to look at hammocks. Matt told the salesman, “We bought replacement seats for the Suburban here, so we know our way around. Thanks anyway.”

I went to my grandparents to see how the “exhibit change” was going. I guess they had some sort of amateur zoo. I peeked under one tarp and saw a large rectangular trampoline. There was a raccoon staring at me from a cage slightly beyond the trampoline and I thought about how cute raccoons jumping on a trampoline would be. I peeked under a different tarp, and it was a circular trampoline. I figured that they got rid of the black bear they had. As a pet, they had a bobcat they called “Wildcat.” Grandpa told me that they would be happy to keep my hot tub or hammock there if I wanted to. Grandpa walked into the house, drinking straight from a bottle of Wild Turkey. Grandma (who died in August) walked by, drinking an bottle of something else. Then Dad walked by, and he was drinking Southern Comfort straight. I was thirsty, so I followed them into the house to get a Diet Coke. They only had alcohol or A&W Diet Sweet Ale. I decided to pass.

I was at a roller rink, and since I can’t roller skate, I went over to the DJ booth and went through their CDs. They had a whole bunch of Japanese import Cartoon Network CDs on sale for $9.99. I couldn’t really tell what was on any of them since they had no pictures except for the Cartoon Network logo, except for one with Hello Kitty and one called “Powerpuff Girls Radio Hits.” All of the covers were hot pink with light pink Japanese characters.

I went to the doctor, and they were going to weigh me since one of the medicines they put me on usually made people gain a lot of weight. I said that that probably wouldn’t be a problem since I don’t get hungry or eat much anymore. I got on the scales and the nurse just kept saying, “This is impossible” and refusing to weigh me.

I was housesitting for someone, and I took the two days’ worth of mail downstairs to sort. I had turned off all the lights because I didn’t want anyone to know I was there and invite themselves over. While sorting the mail (there was quite a few people that lived there), I heard noises. I went upstairs, sneaking, trying not to be noticed, and Jake was throwing a party on one of the decks. It was a subdued party, mostly just people sitting around and talking. I opened the door and stuck my head out and told Jake “hi” so that he knew I knew they were there. Then I went back inside and hid in the back bathroom for no reason.