16 June 1999: I was examining my teeth in a mirror. One of the incisors looked very loose, as though it was about to fall out. It was hanging down at an angle. I pried up my upper lip to take a look at my gums; there were two gaping square holes piercing them, right above my canines! There were fleshy knobby protruberances sticking up into the holes from beneath...

27 December 1999: A man with a rather large knife had removed the top of my skull, and wanted to carve my brain into a piece of postmodern sculpture, I think of a swan. Somewhat less keen on the idea than he was, I snuck off down the hall, trying to hold the top of my head on, but I'm afraid he tracked me.

6 February 2000: Graham Crowden was my grandfather, and was leading us (who were we? Who knows?) on an inspirational journey into an idyllic green countryside, where we all felt uplifted and cleansed by his defiance of death...I also dreamed that I was going on a secret physics mission into North Africa (?) as part of a commando team, along with a French physics major a year ahead of me who took a shine to me. We were being snuck into North Africa gradually...The first stop was a safe house in a Midwestern residential neighborhood, a two-story powder-blue wood-sided house, where a kindly family would provide us with food and hide us under the floorboards. But I think we got there late and they'd run out of room, so we were afraid we were going to wind up missing the mission as we'd been separated from the group...The Frenchman was thin, somewhat dark of skin, almost Moroccan or Arabian, with black somewhat untidy short hair and I think a goatee, very white teeth...Blue eyes. We ran into each other outside (presumably) the physics building, though it didn't look at all like the U of Iowa's. It was long, and brick, and stood beside a paved road...

13 February 2000: I was in the back seat of a car that Bryan was stuffing full of balloons as part of a drug-smuggling operation, both long, phallic air-filled ones and great big blobby water balloons as big as my chest. The water balloons were mostly in the back--it was a hatchback car--on the ledge behind me. How this ties into drug smuggling I really couldn't say, but I recall boxes and boxes of things like matches or incense somewhere nearby.

25 February 2000: I was being forced to go to baseball games by a relative who'd gotten me tickets and was threatening to do bad things to me if I didn't go. I climbed up the back of a tier of ratty wooden bleachers, with chipping blue paint, to sit on the top bleach, between two athletic-type men. I never recall seeing a baseball diamond or a game or anything of the sort. The two men I was sitting between were friends, it seemed, as they started passing this naughty magazine--old and crinkled, its pages curling at the corners, featuring pictures of naked men--back and forth across me, trying to keep any of the other spectators from seeing...

26 February 2000: Many, many fragments. I was being drafted into a war, stuffed in a bus heading north along 28th Street in Council Bluffs, just passing Avenue A; scientists were all being drafted to carry out war-related experiments. I protested that I was a theoretician, not an experimentalist, but they didn't listen. I was plotting my escape; just let them take me to their bellicose lab, I thought, and I can cook up a nifty futuristic ray-gun or a teleporter or something to blast my way to freedom and blind them all with science...In still another fragment, I was complaining about the 'last' Star Trek movie starring the original cast, which I'd seen on video; it was all blood and killing, nothing but mindless violence. Quite distasteful. Elsewhere, I was at the supermarket with my parents. We were in the car and pulling out, when we realised Sara wasn't with us. We had to re-park and go back in to collect her. She was at the back in the produce section, buying individual onion rings from a bin next to the corn. She was ringing each ring through the laser scanner at the register there, fifty cents each; I bought two myself, and when I bit into one it turned into bacon. The clerk thought it needed more salt. Isn't that curious?

7 April 2000: So many dream fragments that they interfered with my ability to remember them. I walked downtown across rolling prairie hills to get my bicycle and then pedalled to the grocery store, but wasn't able to slow down in time to turn onto Court Street as I usually do, and so had to take the next one...It led me out into a rural area and eventually into a town called Liberty, where the road was bordered on my left by a chain-link fence, behind which stood a row of large dirty red warehouses or containers...

22 April 2000: I ran into my physics professor in a supermarket, in the produce section. He was pushing a shopping cart along, clad in his usual red jumper and the white turtleneck that makes him look like a reject from Star Trek: The Next Generation. We met in front of some leafy greens; he was a chimp. He looked just as he does in real life, but somehow, with that unerring dream-logic, I knew he was a chimp. The chimp-Skiff was asking me for sexual secrets he could use when pleasuring his wife...

8 June 2000: My evil relatives were holed up in a nuclear weapons storage facility, and a little black witch woman told me I had a Destiny to storm in and thwart them. The two of us raced up a hill to confront them while gobbling like turkies. Then I was in London, visiting a Mr S*; he lived in a rather interesting square dark brick building, one side of which slanted rather peculiarly, with big white trim around the windows. He'd just been sacked because of radicalism with regards to a novel he'd just published. He had a wife and children. Or something like that. They lived with him, but I don't think he was a heterosexual. But they were still his, somehow. Mrs S* had no cornflakes, so provided me with a breakfast of...some sort of exotic fibrey grainy thingies. We were all trying to jolly Mr S* up from his publicational woes. There was another dream about my visiting the University after much time had passed, getting lost in Currier in my Russian coat while youngsters roller-bladed after me, winding up in some girls' kitchen, then eventually getting to Rienow where I visited Scheck of all people...In another dream, Davros was being painted black, and people were holed up in my garage making little hot-air balloons out of crisp packets to thwart his naughty schemes.

15 July 2000: I dreamt about inhabiting an estate that was a former amusement park of sorts, but it's so difficult to pull anything coherent out of it. Imagery overload. I do recall a boy walking naked down the dirt path leading through the woods that ran past my estate, with only a piece of tissue wrapped around the end of his thingy. I recall engaging in a strenuous anti-poaching campaign to protect endangered Australian wildlife, and bringing to justice just such a poacher to free the wombat he'd captured. I then took the wombat over to an endangered Australian wildlife vending machine and fed him into the 'Wombat' slot. The wombat was a central mass of shaggy brown fur with a long bare tail and four anonymous limbs, with of course a little triangular head at the front.

21 September 2000: A nude and soaped-up David Bowie seducing me in the bathtub, and an evil mastermind who loved to sink battleships who owned a bag of either powedered evil or pancake mix, I'm not sure. Just open, add water, reseal, shake, and viola! Instant chaos. Oh yes, and I was waiting for someone to blow the world up. It was a big event, due to be televised on all the networks. Unfortunately it was a bit of an anticlimax, and I was hoping they'd do it again another time with a bit more elan.

8 October 2000: Dessicated, grey and brittle corpses were being used as telephones. I had to smash one with my umbrella to prevent my enemies using it to learn things I did not want them to know yet. I think I was setting a trap.

24 October 2000: My cashier at the grocery store was dragged underwater (the floor of the supermarket, which was outdoors, turned into water) by one or more squid, who then consumed him while I fumed at the register.

30 October 2000: A band of guerrillas declared war on Truman Capote, who fought them off with laser beams he emitted from his eyes.

20 December 2000: I was part of a band of werewolves. I was trying to take over as pack leader. The whole pack was wandering around the grounds of a large structure, a palace maybe, or a car park. I, feeling full of animal power, was loping around, rounding up the ranking pack members, a chubby twentysomething woman with an office job, some others. I would stretch and roar and flex like a wolf, loping and snarling, trying to win control through this show of strength.

I was the King of England. I was hoping to make a speech during a session of Parliament, held in a very small conference room with mainly old Seventies wire-framed office furniture. I was only the King, though, so they kept me more or less off to one side and treated me like a particularly significant table lamp. I went for a Royal stroll afterwards, through the snow-infested streets of Iowa City, looking to assert my kingliness by having buildings closed for the evening or the day reopened just for me.

28 December 2000: Dolphins had a fetish for swans, and indeed for the entire crow family. Italian fishermen used this to their advantage in fishing, by throwing swans at the fish. In an alien restaurant...Someone ordered the top slice of an alien's head, a purple disk with a funny little square antenna growing from it, on a bed of mashed potatoes, with a brown sauce.

17 March 2001: I could see Mars. It was a distinct red disk in the sky. I could even make out the haze of atmosphere around it. It was larger than a full moon. There was some confusion whether Mars was in our atmosphere, or we were in Mars's...

11 June 2001: There was something about spiders disguised as people in 1948, and the invention, in secret, of calculators for them, which were also shaped like spiders, legs in the air, carapaced, like dead tarantulas...I didn't much care for this, because I hate spiders. Then there were two researchers at some kind of installation hidden in a forest; one becomes too frustrated with their current work, complaining that it will get them no further in finding lost children, and runs off into the forest to do so himself. The other follows. They come across some old ladies and harmless sorts living in the woods, and, being weary, ask for food. The forest folk then lead them to a clearing, rectangular in shape, where they start unlimbering all sorts of rented plastic shop fronts and a plastic shoe-shine boy and whatnot, and make the clearing look like a really tacky town square. One old lady plays on an organ. There was another, involving someone wandering into a secret tower in a royal palace, the lair of noncorporeal vampire spirit entities, who lived in a mirror and in a quartz nodule set in a plate...The room was decorated baroquely with all manner of gold and silver ornaments and doodads. He smashed the mirror with a paperweight repeatedly; it fractured, but refused to shatter until after many blows. Then he did the same to the quartz. The vampires were defeated...Then a companion of this man showed up, and the first gent pointed out to him a lamb painted on one wall. That, he said, was the young prince. The monkey looking in the door was Al Capone, who's lost his wedding ring...

30 June 2001: There was a house, with Grace and Bonnie running 'round it, and outside there was a stage, some seven feet high or so set up, and under the stage, some vertically challenged woods. Lurking in the woods like some elf from the Old World, at the head of his feasting table strewn with grapes, melons, squash, was the strange and potent entity known as...David Bowie. I believe he had a pair of large, curling, striped ram's horns growing from his head. Maybe it was just a hat. You must admit, he has the face for wood elfdom.

4 July 2001: There was a gourd, or something gourdlike, a very odd reddish colour, vaguely gourd-shaped but very convoluted, twisting, almost like a Klein bottle or some other construct from esoteric topology...A drinking vessel? There was another, similar gourd nested inside it, which was offered to me. I refused, claiming to have had my fill. It looked like the narrow end of the gourd did in fact bend back and connect up with the fat end somewhere...

7 August 2001: Something about being in China, and riding trams, and also a little valley of some sort, in a little notch in some mountains, with a river running down the centre, trees, a stretch of beach...Or something.

3 December 2001: 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.

10 December 2001: 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.

10 December 2001: 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.

15 December 2001: 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...

2 February 2002: I was making out with a fellow ninja samurai warrior person in tunnels beneath my alcoholic cocaine-addict gambling aunt's house that connected with a Space Age chapel and the University's steam tunnels.

4 February 2002: A strange creature, brown, with a long neck, tail, thin limbs, was crawling out of a lake after an accident. It was very old and sometimes hoped for death and the next life.

5 February 2002: Surjective Surprise Vampires.

7 February 2002: I am Dieron's heir, and only I can activate the relic he left behind, a stone or gem or crystal or orb...

8 February 2002: I was in a huge building, winding through beigy-yellow hallways and stair wells, when I met a rather hot gentleman named Jason and go with him up on the roof--one roof, at least, the lower one, of a stepped skyscraper--where we get naked and make out. Then vertigo kicked in; I asked how high we were, and he replied that it was the 75th storey. Though the roof was quite sizeable, more surface area than my apartment, it began to feel as if it were barely big enough for the two of us and as if it were made of metal mesh, though I was careful not to look down. I suggested we go back indoors.

9 February 2002: There was a firefight. Confrontation. Two sides taking cover, pulling out energy weapons, behind crates or furniture, perhaps, in a cluttered space, interior, a room, a warehouse? One side is in theory my ally...But I will have none of this. As soon as I hear what's happening, violence being morally untenable under any circumstances, I come storming in furiously, commanding everyone to cease, put down their weapons...But they've disappeared. All of them. I start angrily pondering where they would be, so I can deal with this...I sounded just like Sylvester McCoy...Then something about bicycling, on a road running downhill to a little thumb of land sticking out into a lake, pondering what would happen if I let my bike speed downhill all the way and sail off to sink beneath the lake. It happened in the dream, but only as a thought my dream-self was contemplating.

1 March 2002: Hot Jewish Student Council jock stud of ambiguous sexuality.

4 May 2002: I was visiting New York City after a long absence, canoeing with a female friend through that part of the city whose streets were canals, with little smaller subcanals running alongside them just for canoes like mine. It was overcast; the canals were very shallow, with no real banks, and were lined on both sides by tasteful suburban houses of the more expensive sort. Then, much to my displeasure, a car came driving past on the main canal, kicking up quite a spray. A new city ordinance allowed it. I was furious. They'd spoil the whole area.

Early May 2002: I dreamt I was pinning someone to a wall with bolts of electricity I shot from my hands. They made an interesting hissing noise. Oh! So did the meteorites...That same night, I think it was, I dreamt I was laying on my back on a bed, looking up through the ceiling at the night sky, where I saw, or thought I saw, meteorites, huge and colourful ones, great big blobs of white and blue and red bumbling across the sky like errant bees, throwing off little tails and coronae, and hissing or popping as they went. That was nice. I like that image. I must use it somewhere.

4 June 2002: It was my birthday, or somesuch similar thing, at any rate a party was being thrown for me. Scott's mother and grandparents were there. And Scott, obviously. I think they were harping on him to give me something. I think I was in a tuxedo. And I think we both tried to walk through a narrow gap between two tables at once, and got stuck. It was a silly dream, and it segued into the overthrow and arrest of a Margaret-Thatcher-esque Iron Lady with grey hair piled high atop her pinched, aristocratic English face; as she was being led off to justice, she transformed into the Bad Dale (that's Special Agent Dale Cooper to you, after he'd been in the Black Lodge and been taken over by BOB) and jumped through a skylight...That part, Scott wasn't in quite so much.

10 June 2002: Rail journey from west to east across the Middle East, with Steve T. Then I played a little Civilisation 3, went to the bathroom and saw a man with a miniature Kalashnikov. I did not approve. Then I wrote some dream-prose.

11 June 2002: In a gym for a photo shoot, all very beige. Won't take my clothes off even when the photographers try to help--I see this all in the third person--so they make me use the trapieze instead. I go flying back and forth, trying to drag my heels across the floor at the lowest point of my arc to slow down, can't do it, hit the wall and bounce right off very elastically. Then I saw an animation like a Final Fantasy VI battle of evil jugglers juggling balls of fire defeating my troops. Oh well.

21 June 2002: I was house-sitting for Samuel Johnson, a house called Isenkill (Isengard+Stonykill), a big three-storey wooden house with flaking white paint. I'd chosen one room on the uppermost storey as my own. It had a great view, but of what?

21 June 2002: Hunted through Pseudo-Omaha by some villain's trained hawk. I could fly; I think in fact I was a small bird of some kind, a sparrow, or a grackle. Flying did involve flapping something. Up over the roof of my parents' house, down a highway, past Interstate signs, in spurts, flying, perching, flying again, never in any real danger...

Late June 2002: Grace Brothers Department Store was located in a tall, dowdy old brick warehouse, like something from Omaha's Old Market before the rattier old buildings were fixed up or demolished, spattered still with traces of orange paint lettering, a sort of shorter annex poking out from the side of the main tower. The Ladies' and Gentlemen's Departments were on the eighty-seventh floor.

27 June 2002: I was walking somewhere (possibly in London, though it looked nothing like it) on a bright sunny day (go figure), being asked for directions by a tall young man with curly brown hair, a round little nose, prominent cheekbones and dark eyes, somewhat tanned. Strong, manly, yet tender face. Terribly gay-frat-boy-ish, I'm afraid. On a campus, I think we were, on sidewalks between Hancher-esque buildings...He asks me for directions to something, then tags along with me when I go, across a pedestrian bridge spanning a river, talking eagerly, like a big puppy...Heading homewards, was I? Bushes by the sidewalks, no roads.

4 August 2002: I was recording a dream that I'd dreamt I had; I was writing it down in my composition book. It had involved being hunted by a woman dressed as a Victorian explorer; I made particular note of her hat, a rigid, bowl-like hat with a little bump on the crest and a ring of similar ones, along with little air holes, around the rim, with a narrow brim. Also her rifle, with which she was hunting me. I wasn't so keen on that.

29 August 2002: An archaeologist named Bernice Summerfield was telling me about how she'd been pregnant 36 times in her 32 years of life, and Zack was encouraging me to have a kid of my own now. Zack had a secret to tell me, but I woke up just as he was opening his mouth.

5 September 2002: Rusty was there! We were entering a dark and cluttered room, lit by indirect sunlight, everything looking faintly blue. We were just inside the doorway, with a third person whom I don't recall. There was a little round table standing just in the corner. Something on this table reminded us of William Shatner, so we both spontaneously burst out singing

Star Trekkin' across the universe
On the Starship Enterprise under Captain Kirk
Star Trekkin' across the universe
Boldly going forward 'cause we can't find reverse

The third person was not entertained. But who needs them, anyhow? Rusty was tall, with short, faintly curly dark hair, wearing a black woolen turtleneck sweater.

6 September 2002: I was showing my new workgroup hub to Richard and asking him if he knew how to make it go, at a coffee table in a vaguely Moroccan-seeming living room, red and full of arabesques. He was, unsurprisingly, very animated.

17 September 2002: I went into a Czech pub for a meal with two other people, and their menu featured dishes made with six eggs. Also, on another occasion, a party of some sort was going on in a very ill-defined and shadowy house. My father was passing out presents that various persons had got for various other persons. There was one from Zack to me, wrapped up in dark green paper, but I can't recall what was in it. Also trains.

5 October 2002: I was speaking in a Scottish accent and held captive in my childhood bedroom, until I wriggled out a window to run down the street and meet up with my army of Redcoats opposed to whoever it was who'd been confining me, though what exactly a Scottish Jacobite was doing leading Redcoats is beyond me in my conscious state.

5 October 2002: I was walking down an urban street, very crowded and concrete, grey, and saw a car flit past me, which I recognised as Scott's. He spotted me, too, and pulled over at the corner so I could hop in. His vehicle was, in a word, silly. A bit like this car, actually, only rusty orange instead of blue, and looking a bit more like a duck made of corrigated sheet metal. But not too much more. Cracking vinyl seats; I had words of warning and advice for him, though what they were I can't recall.

29 January 2003: I'd found myself to be John Belushi as Jake Blues, who was going by the nickname of 'Barnacle Bill' or somesuch thing; Elwood and I had just done something nefarious, and were on our way out; as the dream began I was walking down some poured concrete stairs towards the street, which is when it hit me that, boy, it really feels like I'm going down some stairs! I swear on my honour that it was utterly indistinguishable from the experience of being John Belushi walking down concrete stairs to a street while conscious.

5 February 2003: I had one of the Rings of Power, and was crawling on my hands and knees across a convenience-store parking lot borne down by a great weight of years. There was lots of gravel, a very visceral, vivid sensation of stingy pointy rocks digging into my palms.

21 February 2003: I was walking through downtown Budapest at night with a young Johan Paulik. Well-lit streets, low and harmless buildings, small-towney. But so quiet! Where is everyone? Johan told me downtown Budapest was dying, everyone packing it in. But what of the beer, I asked? The Central European beer? Alas, he told me. But one beer remains. Oh, the pain...I was heartbroken.

25 March 2003: I'd just sat an exam in the hopes of getting into the House of Lords, in a big, dark, stepped auditorium off of a dark, long hall of rich reddish wood and carpet, with stairs leading off at either end...Some other folks were there, too, taking the same exam. We asked one another how we'd done. I was embarassed to admit I'd done much better than they had, and then something or other happened, and I became an Ascendant, gaining vast supernatural power thereby.

30 March 2003: A sort of war broke out, or something. There was a surprise attack, by someone, on someone else, somewhere. Panic ensued, no-one being quite sure what to do. I was wearing a scarf, so naturally I found myself at the heart of the matter, dancing around a map spread out on a tabletop outdoors in the evening, marking on it in pen, directing via radio a naval battle our forces were engaged in far, far away (Alaska?).

5 June 2003: I was flying and calling down lightning from the clouds, as part of a duel with John Goodman, who was playing the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who was also flying and calling down lightning. We swooped around a metal, mesh catwalk or bridge, running from somewhere to elsewhere; it was dark, the sky full of thunderheads. I could feel my stomach dropping as I dodged and swooped, and a positive tingle when I was struck by lightning...

X June 2003: I was being installed as military governor of an occupied, unified Korea. Naturally, I plotted to acquire nuclear weapons, set myself up as emperor, and rule the world.

XX June 2003: Some woman was explaining her new model of the unconscious mind to me, claiming that it was actually a Dedekind domain. I hate Dedekind domains. Even if this model should be accurate, I asked her, what clarity would anyone gain from thinking of the mind thus?

18 June 2003: I was in a lightsabre duel with the Master (played by Anthony Ainley) over which of us would get to be in charge when we merged into one person...Also I threw fireballs at people. I'm not sure which people.