This one's for Werner Erhard

I was so delighted to be reading an old est manual that I found in my dad's house. The brutal, painful, but true! secrets of the now-defunct est training were finally revealed in print form, instead of just being echoed verbally day after day, and year after year, by my ever-so-enlightened parents.

(This would only happen in a dream, as est/Landmark Forum were/are vehement about not letting anyone taking material out of their seminars. (Please see my college seminar paper on est, published...oh wait, damn, it's not published....yet.))

This one's for Douglas Coupland

I walked into a giant Walgreens in New Jersey and was so overwhelmed by the number and amount of products for sale that I completely forgot why I was there. I noticed that several people were leaving with large bottles of lotion that had "Helen" written in large letters across the label. I found the shelf of "Helen" brand cleaning products just down the way from the entrance. Included were "Helen" brand lotion, soaps, and most peculiarly, "Helen" brand eyeglass-cleaning towelettes.

Destroying the palm trees to save the banks

As many of these dreams do, this one started with a small number of biplanes flying over San Francisco. Then, the bombing began. The biplanes dropped small bombs all over the city, and to those of us on the ground, it looked like they were preferentially bombing palm trees lining the city streets.

Later, the news related that George Bush, peace-lover that he is, had dropped large numbers of bombs in many American cities throughout the day for unclear reasons. The newscasters' running theory was that he was trying to destroy areas around America's cities' largest banks to protect them against future terrorist attacks.

(Another in a series of dreams about Bush bombing places for no reason, and another reason why I should not have watched so much of that painful and horrible presidential press conference yesterday.)

Another candidate for most boring dream ever

I was at work, and there were some mislabeled specimens in specimen processing. The lab technologists were getting mad and I was supposed to sort out all the mislabeled specimens and get everything organized.

(Not only is this boring, this actually happened to me twice yesterday while I was awake. Dreaming about the situation only made it more boring than it already was.)

In which the author, after spending much of the night pondering her life goals and shopping for sleepwear online, falls asleep and lucidly dreams

My friend Jamie finally joined the world of online dating. To show her openness to different kind of relationships, she listed her romantic inclinations as "men, women, and esoterica."

Jamie and I went to the movies, and ran into Jim Garman, who I hadn't seen for years and years. He was despondent over just seeing a depressing movie called 'The Secret Life of Bees' and was less excited than I thought he'd be to see me. Some other event then happened involving Natasha Rudd, a girl from my high school, doing a performance for a church, stealing seven dollars from the church children, and trying to hide it. We then reunited with Jim.

Jamie rode along with Jim on the way home from the theater, and I followed them in my car since my stuff was at her house. I lost them on the road, and when I tried to turn around to follow another route to find them, I drove by a man standing on his porch who started laughing at my lack of direction. I did another U-turn, and ended up driving my car into a pool.

I was embarrassed at this mistake, but miraculously was able to drag my car out of the water by picking it up with one hand. I left it to air-dry and started walking down some steep steps to Jamie's house. Then, I realized I had lost the keys I had just had a few minutes ago. I realized I was wearing a skimpy bikini-like outfit that I didn't remember putting on. Things started feeling a little strange, like that 2NU song "Ponderous."

I then arrived at an apartment complex, perplexed. I decided that I must be dreaming, because too many things didn't make sense. In addition to the bizarreness above, it was a bright, sunny day, but I knew it was the middle of the night.

I was walking along a second-story outdoor pathway and ran into some fishing lines that had two hooks hanging from them in the middle of the walk. I got pissed that someone would leave hooks haphazardly hanging, waiting to injure someone, but then realized that I could use these fishing lines as a test. If I could somehow tangle myself up in them in some sort of bizarre way, this would prove that I was dreaming. I desperately wanted to wake up.

Just then, I was saved by the bell. The bell being, of course, the call pager, with a call from the blood bank bringing me back to the all-too-real world of patients with cancer on chemotherapy that need my approval to receive platelets.

Everything is catching yes everything is catching on fire

We were in Israel, a bunch of us, for a summer camp/barbeque/party in a large, open field. We were about to start eating when someone noticed a small brush fire near a corner of the camp. There were firemen already battling the flames but we decided to evacuate anyway.

I frantically grabbed my stuff from where it was sitting in the grass (stuff which now blurs with memories of another dream from years ago, where I was grabbing my stuff that was sinking in Indian marshlands while a few hundred yards away, an outdoor production of Avenue Q was underway.) But by the time I had gotten everything together, the flames were spreading like the field was coated in gasoline and there was no escape.

The Indians are coming!

1) There was a shot in the new Woody Allen movie where the camera slowly zoomed in on the face of the lone Indian character as he stared at the camera. It was clear that this scene was supposed to show self-consciously that there weren't usually any Indian people in Woody Allen movies. (I was quickly notified upon sharing this dream that there were some Indians in Everyone Says I Love You.)

2) Another gem from Sharat:
I had a dream Sunday in which you were prominently recognized on the back sports page of the YDN under the headline "New star, in house" it noted (in paragraph two, oddly) that "Developmental psychology medical student [erythema] dispatched Anu Patel 6-3, 6-1 hailing the rise of a new star for the home team." I kept thinking: Damn, is there anything that [erythema] *can't* do well?

3) Farhad showed me this huge tome that supposedly had been written about him, but when I looked more closely, it was actually a board game. The board game came in a large square box with "Farhad Manjoo" printed on the top. Farhad was kind of bummed out that it wasn't a book, but I thought it was equally cool to have had a board game, rather than a book, made in your honor.

After watching The Fly, wherein Jeff Goldblum starts sprouting nasty fly hairs on his back, which was really not nearly as bad as what happened later

I was at a bachelorette party for my old roommate Katrina. Many white yuppie men were standing around playing pool, all with their button-down shirts untucked and strangely unwrinkled, like they had never been tucked in in the first place.

Lara's boyfriend Scott and I were looking at some sort of inanimate object that was covered with a sparse slick of what looked like human hair. He said, "That's kind of a Brian Wilson look", referring to the hairdo on the object, and I, bemused and quite surprised, exclaimed, "That's exactly what I was going to say!"

27 boxcars all of them have your face

I was working at a carnival. Someone told me that the presence of 27 snakes in one of the carnival acts indicated that we would have at least 27 more days of audience members coming to see the carnival before we would have to close down for lack of funding.

(The carnival in this dream was directly lifted from Geek Love, a strange little novel by Katherine Dunn, a book which, as a reviewer states, should indeed carry some sort of warning for readers, indicating that some of the characters and images--an albino hunchback dwarf, a human fish boy, etc., and these are some of the more palatable ones, could be carried on in the waking life and the subconscious of readers for months, even those who are in the field of pathology and have seen some crazy shit.)