It began late one night, in Chicago I believe, or an imaginary city much like it, with Errthum and I, out on the town after some heavy alcohol consumption. Errthum was all tipsy and hyper and giggly. We were in a large square room, beige and neutral-looking, a private room of some kind though we weren't at either of our homes. Errthum was recalling something he'd seen during his sojourn in Europe, and attempted to dance and recreate some show he'd seen overseas. All righty, I told him, you've had a few too many. It's time to get you home. Ensuring that he was properly dressed, I took him to the train and accompanied him out to another region of the far-flung city to his apartment. Now it was quite late; he said I could sleep there for the night, since the trains had just stopped running (at 2am, he specified). No no, I said, you need not worry. I'll make arrangements. I went outside, into a rather nightly black urban streetscape, full of high, wet red brick walls, occasional puddles--it had been raining, I suspect--unlit lampposts, pavement. But no cars or other pedestrians. I walked into my trusty time machine--a TARDIS, the console room that seen from 'The Five Doctors' onwards in Doctor Who--and dematerialised off homewards, with lots of wheezing, groaning sounds, thrusting time rotors full of twinkling light, and so forth. Here is where the true joy of this dream became apparent: sound! My golly goshums, I don't think I've ever had a dream in which certain sounds hit me with such vitality. It was even better than hearing CD-quality sound in real life, I think, completely stereophonic, surround-soundtastic, resonant, harmonic, all sorts of adjectives I don't know used to describe sound quality. Total assplosion of soundstacy. I parked my TARDIS back downtown, to try and get some studying done. I found my mother in what seemed to be a cathedral tower, tall, square, of rather cheap-looking beige stone, a tower turned sideways, horizontal rather than vertical, but at the same time above ground level. I sat with her and started some Latin; then the little balcony we were in started shooting forwards down the tower, hit the end, and inched its way back up to do it again and again, a bit like those 'Tower of Terror' rides at amusement parks. It was most distracting. I asked Mum about it; apparently, my sister was working the controls, and there was little chance I could get her to stop. Dammit. So I packed up my Latin and left the horizontal tower, going down to the lower level, which was a bar. I sat on a padded, semicircular ledge by one of the front windows, since nobody else seemed to be about, and studied there, in a large, inky chamber with red carpet. Then the bar patrons arrived, looking rather menacing, with leather jackets, chains, polyester, domestic beer. They were planning to get funky, in the dancetastic sense of the word, and chased me off. I felt quite menaced, and decided to hurry home, down nightscaped alleys between looming concrete blocks, across rain-dampened concrete, over the shingled roof of an inconvenient church--I didn't feel like going around it, so I leapt up and scurried across the rather pleasant striated brown slablets; I do love wood--past some people who stared, at last onto a residential street lined with vague, indistinct dwellings exhaling a faint red glow over the scene, past equally indistinct people on porches, and at last to my own house. The really fun part came next. Errthum and I went out again, you see, the next night, or some nights later perhaps. We were on a strip of bardom downtown. There was a gay bar next to a straight bar, and we were going to the straight bar, because I don't much like gay ones. It was a hopping night inside, lots of people in light colours, spotlights and suchlike in various colours sweeping over them, moving to funky beats and such. Errthum and I did stop briefly at the gay joint next door, where a competition of sorts was going on, one of those things bars occasionally have, involving fancy dress and miming along to pop music for the title of Mr Filthy Bar Whore 2001 or somesuch thing. It was a small room, walls and floors faintly green, like a faded pool table. There was a stage in the middle-ish, which was being set up, and a dozen or so well-dressed homosexuals lounging around waiting for their turns. Some were wearing zoot suits. Errthum encouraged me to go out, flirt, work my magic, and seduce one of the fine gents, if any caught my eye, and as it happens one did, a tall, ethereal blond chap off to one side with red, red lips, looking a bit, though not overly so, like Billy's roommate Hans, or a gent I had seen at Panchero's the night before. But I'd never have a chance with him, I sighed. I'm just not glamourous enough to win a potential Mr Filthy Bar Whore. Aha! The lightbulb of genius clicked on over Eric's head, figuratively, blinding me with its six million watts of utter cleverness. If he's out of my league, then all we have to do to get him into it...is to make sure I win the Mr Filthy Bar Whore competition. That's crazy talk, I said, but he took me next door back to the grooving dance bar and in the space of five minutes had assembled a complete motion picture production team, had me kitted out in a really swell green suit, and had turned me into a David Bowie impersonator. I didn't quite have Bowie's face, but close, sort of a cross between his and mine, if you can picture that, which is unlikely. And I was definitely blond. Then, the moment of truth! We strode in to the competition, I took to the stage, grabbed that microphone and rocked out. I opened my mouth, and out came David Bowie's 'Changes' in glorious, bowel-shaking, full frontal sextasy, sound just like mom used to make, as it were, sound wanging every square inch of one's body with its longitudinal pulsation, in perfect Bowie-voice, sound almost more tactile than touch, with the full band backing me up, I might add. The crowd went wild, out of nowhere a film credit appeared: 'Produced by (some strange name starting with M, which was I think Eric's name in this dream).' But, alas, before I could get my schwerve on with the ethereal one, I had to accept my prize, which included a large chunk of money, and a tiara, and a bouquet of roses, out on a balcony--by now morning had broken--overlooking a grey, damp parking lot filled with cheering masses. I gave my cash prize to Errthum's mother, who looked like she should look like a famous film starlet, since she'd funded the massively expensive rush job to make me a star, and thence I embarked on a whirlwind career in business, buying up things and, with Eric still with me, amassing a monstrous business empire the likes of which the town had seldom before seen. I think I bought a hotel, one with light tan walls and umber carpet, featureless white doors, wait staff rolling carts topped with silver covers. We were going for a near-monopoly on steak, buying up every steak restaurant we could find, to harness the awesome power of meat. There was one we wouldn't touch, though, the one owned by the Mob and used by them as a meeting-place for plotting their dirty deeds. It was on the second floor of a building, with a railed (in wrought iron) walk exposed to the air leading to its door across the roof of the first storey; all the structures on that upper level were narrow and tall and pointy up top, boasting eccentric stone frontings, balconies, more railings, bright lights, great big illuminated letters over their doors announcing the establishments' names. The Mob's looked a bit like a watered-down castle. Eric was off somewhere else when I was called by the Mob for a meeting. They were led by a short, round- and red-faced Italian-American of little girth, who accused me of attempting to violate their territory while his goons in navy blue suits closed in. Not at all, I assured him, a bit concerned. I've never tried to buy your restaurant, nor do I even plan to do any such thing, cross my heart, Scout's honour. But he didn't believe me. O, why didn't he believe me? Eric showed up, shocked and horrified, just as they were making their move. The boss pulled out a tombstone about a foot high, fluted and scrolled at the ends, engraved with a silly name starting with T (my own, presumably), and '1955'. What's all this? Eric asked. Why, 'tis my death! And the goons grabbed me, and hurled me from the walkway, to fall, fall, fall and smash to the pavement far below, broken and dying. Though I didn't feel any of that, fortunately; as soon as I began to fall, I felt a warm, sort of fuzzy tingling through my body, like a cocoon of some sort, and though I'd been greviously injured I wasn't worried, for, since I had a TARDIS at my disposal, why shouldn't I be able to regenerate just like my favourite television hero, Doctor Who? Bless the BBC for such a swell idea! There was strange and eerie light; all the crowd gathered 'round gasped. Something strange and mysterious happened. I returned to life, my body fully restored, and I leapt up in joy, for I had regenerated into David Bowie! Suddenly, music poured from nowhere, and I once again launched into 'Changes' in that same glorious totally-immersing orgasmophonic way, which I thought was rather appropriate.

I was down in the Ped Mall, heading west along it from Linn Street, on a springish day, with crowds of people doing their crowdy things in slacks and shirts and whatnot, with a surprising number of red balloons about. There seemed to be some commotion next to the old Mind Matters toy store, just 'round the corner onto the Dubuque Street branch of said Ped Mall. I investigated; a pair of collegiate men, dressed in baggy, shapeless white, were juggling pin cushions resembling hearty red tomatoes. The cushions did indeed have pins in them, some of them sticking out from the undersides of the cushions, to my eternal dismay. Not only did they juggle these things, but from time to time catch them in their mouths--pointy pins and all--and then spit them out and up to keep juggling. Eek, I thought, having a strong dislike for sharp pointy objects piercing flesh. At least they didn't seem to bleed; I suspect there was a trick to it. I walked onwards, a look of horrified shock (or shocked horror) upon my face, until, where the alley cuts through, I bumped into Arlen Lawson from No Shame Theatre. He was sitting on a bicycle with no wheels. I think he may have been wearing a long-sleeved red shirt. I described what I'd seen; Arlen then took a pin out of his pocket, tossed it up into the air, caught it in his mouth, then swallowed it, then coughed it up to go arcing gracefully a few feet into the air before he caught it again (with his hand). There must have been a trick to it, I thought. Speaking of tricks, that brought us to sex. Sex with dogs. 'You haven't made it,' I told him, 'until you've made it with a dog.' I could tell I was joking, because I was speaking in a funny voice. Funnier than my normal one, that is. 'How about dwarves?' he asked. 'Have you ever made it with a dwarf?' 'Well, I don't quite know; do I count?' I replied. 'You're a bit tall to be a dwarf.' If you can have short humans, I told him, why not tall dwarves, obviously thinking of dwarves in the Tolkienien sense rather than the midgetoid. 'Assuming you are a dwarf,' Arlen said to me, 'would you do it with me?'

On a film set resembling the bridge behind the Iowa Memorial Union, looking northwest at it. Heavenly light pours in from the upper left (southwest). The bridge is, however, made of stone. The light is thick, almost tangible, almost obscuring more than illuminating. Like custard. Someone yells cut, and the light fades. The whole sky turns a featureless grey. Eating with Bryan--we're offered vegetarian meat, and are happy. I'd been urging him to get a vegetable. All the food looked like little smoked sausages. A gay son returns to the mansion where his father lives, and meets the Gay Envoy, mistakenly calling him the Gay Ambassador at first, who gets a little name tag granting him diplomatic status. A tank stalks the corridors, growing...

Wile E. Coyote was chasing the Roadrunner yet again. They were on an urban street. The Roadrunner crept up behind Wile E. and meep-meeped; the Coyote jumped up in alarm, smashed his head into an overhand, and was accordionified. He gives up on the Roadrunner in disgust and decided to just go to a restaurant already. He walks into the Restaurant of Last Resort, serving things only the truly desperate would ever dream of eating. It is dark, intimate, romantic, fancy. He walks past a silver tray six feet long, with a huge uncut cock, garnished, upon it. A woman invites the Coyote to join her at her table, flirting with him...Romance blossoms as they wait for their dinner to arrive.

A big disaster is impending. We must flee! Fortunately, Lehmer had a plan to save us. He leads us to a biggish house, one wing of which he was renting. Big, blocky, brown. When we're all in, it breaks off from the rest of the house and floats away down a little stream with high, rocky banks; it is springtime, hardy grasses taking root on the tops of the banks, a bright sun, pleasant temperature, clear water. Only we don't float very quickly, because the wing is made all of stone. We're on deck (the roof?), floating towards a shelter Lehmer had prepared, talking about topological groups. Lehmer jumps into the stream and is treading water beside us, but doesn't get wet. I'm trying to persuade him to take his clothes off, but my alarm clock interrupts before I can succeed.

Running towards the top of a high building, chased by someone resembling my sister who was trying to stop me. In a yellowish hall with catwalks of metal mesh and a platform of the same painted red, she gets ahead of me, cutting me off. I see an industrial handle on the ceiling, reach up and pull it. A staircase, also of red-painted metal, slinks down between us. I run up before she can get around it.

The Emperor Mel Brooks was addressing his former, rebellious subjects outside the same building, to regain their loyalty. He wins three supporters and insults a professor who leads the rebels. His three rush to the roof, where they grapple with their foes and fall off the edge rather embarassingly.

I was in San Francisco with Graham of London, en route somewhere else...I'd never been there, and was being guided along by him...We were walking along a high street perhaps near the sea-front, huge buildings lining it, towering over us, in the strangest shapes...On the one side, huge _things_ were putting in, like crosses between ships and buildings, sailing on gosh only knows what, made of burnished metals in reds or coppers, which gave the queerest impressions of looking like _faces_, like great metal heads hundreds of feet high putting into harbour at the side of the street...It was rather unsettling, really.

Walking to a set theory class, 22M:104, from wherever my family was living in a new town. My route changed every time I travelled the grey streets, always on dreary, cloud-covered, damp days. In set theory were mainly high school girls, but also a man of my own age, rather attractive, Josh S.'s boy toy. Events had the feel of ritual and endless repetition: I'd slip through a gap in one wall to an open, brightly-lit space where a rock concert was taking place, like Gabe's Oasis only not a dark and fetid pit. (So not like Gabe's at all.) I'd see the boy toy there, sometimes with Josh making out lasciviously in the crowd; eventually I'd slip back into class, collect my backpack from my desk in the back where I'd left it--the back wall wasn't permanent, little more than a glorified cubicle partition--sit awhile, then go home and do it all again. I sat in a different desk each time, but never near the boy toy. Then, something changes. I slip through the gap to the concert, and see the boy toy there alone. He sees me. Sexy music, grinding music, plays as he comes over and we start dirty dancing, grinding--crotch to crotch, his crotch to my butt--writhing like cobras while the crowd cheers us. He wanted to get it on, as if you couldn't tell. In class, I sit behind him and sexual chemistry combusts between us. Then Josh shows up to claim his catamite. Oops. I hope I'm not found out...But I still want the lad for myself. I think they wanted to draw me into some form of kinky threesome.

Sitting in a classroom or hall in a high school, lined with long tables, working on something. Before me I had wooden, vaguely African dolls with long noses and legs apart, and I was fitting great rows of them together, back to back at first, but then, when I grew bored, with the nose of one between the legs of the next. But I sensed a great evil, a wrongness. The dolls transformed while I wasn't looking into dice, most, maybe all, showing sixes. It was an omen, and so I called for equipment, a microphone and a boom box, other things, and patched it all together and used it to open a channel to the force I had perceived. It was not a dark entity, however, but the rogue psychokinetic talent of two of the high school's students. Ouside, there was an assembly in progress, the black-robed band sitting on folding chairs, cheerleaders and athletes off at one side, perhaps on a stage. An electric halo surrounded them and my equipment. Voices, a boy and a girl, pained, their inner monologues, how much they wanted to get a certain scholarship, get into a certain college, get this or that boy or girl, how successful and popular they were--a cheerleader and an athlete--and how their parents were driving them. The pressure to succeed was burning them up, releasing this psychic disturbance as they self-destructed, begging for pity and humanity to the assembled crowd. Heeding their call, the band stood and began to play; a carnival atmosphere took hold, with dancing, playing, and celebration, all for love without pressure. Then the two, the boy and the girl whose supernatural power had been running amok, died. 'It's over,' I declaimed, though nobody heard me. I advanced, grim-faced (could actually feel my face settling into a grim, downturned, even lined expression), slowly, in a robe, bearing a staff, to the bodies, which were encircled by people in Renaissance Faire-style gowns of muted purples, blues, reds and yellows. Grace from Riverside Theatre was one of them. 'Step aside,' I commanded them. They said nobody would pass and defile the bodies. Angrily I commanded them again, for I can come to minister to the dead, as was my power and ancestral duty. (Perhaps I was a necromancer.) They refused, so I used my power to move them. I could compel them to step aside under their own power, or I could push them aside with eldritch forces I called up with a gesture. I knelt by the bodies, stood, and brought them levitating with me. They looked unviolated, rather peaceful, with no signs that they'd burned themselves up inside.

I was flying home down a street in the late evening, in early fall I think, when it was still warm, and everything was sepia or honey-tinted with dying light. I flew at low altitude, about head-height, not too fast...I happened upon a side street, and, just for kicks, banked down it...It led me along a packed dirt driveway to a parking lot by a large apartment building, in which Semi-Evil Gay Josh lived. I could see his silhouette in one window. I laughed about him to myself, as I frequently do, and glided in an arc around the building off homewards, when I was hailed from the apartment. A female friend of his had spotted me, and wanted me to come in. She had some notion that he and I should actually talk to each other, sort things out, dispel lingering bad feelings, and all that. I swooped up to their landing--I'm not sure how they got in and out, their front door seemed to open directly onto midair, and I was the only one who could fly, in addition to a bunch of other handy little supernatural abilities, like a total control over certain types of cloth; I had only to touch the corner of a blanket in their apartment and I could make it dance and origamify itself in midair. I could also call down lightning from the sky; as I was on my way home again from this stop--but I'm getting ahead of myself!--I spread my fingers and stared up at the ruddy sky, and ten tiny rivulets of electricity flowed down to my fingertips and oscillated there for a time, like vibrating strings on some violin. Anyhow, once I arrived in their apartment, Semi-Evil Gay Josh--who was smaller than he is in real life, more svelte, with dyed-blond hair--was terribly embarassed and kept looking away at the floor, walls, not me. As things were going so awkwardly, I decided to fix something as a distraction. He had a....thing. A glass thing. A flat, round base, with a stalk sticking up in the middle, which bends to the horizontal after a foot or so and ends in a large plastic eye. Part of the base had been broken off, so I set to putting it right. I had only to put the pieces where they belonged and apply my power, and it would heat up and fuse back together. While I was fusing, the glass, previously transparent, turned all sorts of colours, like rock strata in a painted desert. It took a bit of fiddling...I slid this one piece back and forth a few times before I found its spot...Other breaks kept happening...In the end I got it all back together, and the colours vanished, but I'd heated it all up a little too much, and the glass started to droop and run. The stalk with its eye listed down a bit, and a foreskin of glass ran down its shaft to cover the eye. I grasped this glass sheath and gently tugged it back along the stalk, exposing the eye again, and sure enough it cooled and hardened again. It was ever so phallic. Finally I did have a talk with Josh...I was surprised to find that he actually liked me. There was something about my work for a Norwegian subway security firm involving the colour yellow...But that's irrelevant, I'm sure. Everything turned out peachy and sweet...I flew off eventually homewards in high spirits, going for altitude, swooping and looping through the air, and as I often do in flying dreams felt the rush of the air against me, cool, sweet, almost divine, surely the air off Mount Olympus...I started waking up a few times, but I always managed to stop myself and keep flying.

I duelled a man of about my height and build, a little fellow with a delightful body, beautifully contoured and soft and hard in all the proper places. We were firing electric shocks at each other through the ground, stomping a foot on the pavement to release a charge which went zinging through the earth to jolt the other. One of the jolts was so large that it blew all of our clothes off; it was probably my fault. While doing this we wandered about, from pavement to gas stations then onto grass, beside a whitewashed brick building, on a bright but cloudy day that cast no shadows. I tried to shock him again there on the grass, but it didn't work. He said the grass must be an insulator. So, since I couldn't electrocute him, I decided to make out with him instead. I stepped closer and closer to him, perhaps to shock him again, he thought, then reached out and pulled us together, and we started to kiss and touch. He had a very pleasant bottom, very round and pert. He had to go, but I kept pulling him back...I was very hard for him to resist. He went absolutely wild when I stroked the inner side of his buttock and our tongues met...

Jackson Doran and two others were convicted of murder and sentenced to imprisonment by the Theatre Department. Scary Italian Film Professor was there, as one of the magistrates. I came one day to visit the poor wretches; their cell in Theatre Prison had a sliding but solid door. I went to take Mr Doran out for a walk, outdoors, through the trails crisscrossing the dirty snowcapped hills, etched out by tire tracks, beneath a dark dark sky though I could see all clearly. He was sullen, and took off running down the trails, not to escape from prison but just to escape from me. As I said, he was sullen. Very much like the character Alan Strang he'd played in _Equus_. I attempted to bond with the lad, win his trust; I told him kindly that I'd been in Theatre Prison once myself. I had an ulterior motive: he belonged to a flying society, a group of people who stuck their arms out and walked around making airplane noises, and I wanted to find out why Jackson in particular was so important to this group and its leader...