We were in a barren place of shifting sands. Vehicles of various sizes kept appearing near us. Some of them had recently broken down. Some of them were sand-swallowed husks that had been there for decades. A friend of mine kept saying, “SIRI, stop crashing cars.” Was he implying that an artificial intelligence was causing these wrecks to appear? 

We took shelter in an old resort hotel. There were small things on the walls like miniature tumbleweeds. They looked like they might be seed-pods from trees or something. They weren’t any larger than a billiard ball. My friend called them “wood louses” or something similar, even though they didn’t look like insects. He said he couldn’t stay there, and he kept gesturing at the car seat he was carrying, implying that he had young children who would be in danger from these things. I hadn’t thought of them as dangerous, but as soon as I did they began to multiply. Soon they were in every room, attaching themselves to my clothes as I walked around. 

I ran out into the desert, where the wind caused ripples in the sand that moved like waves. I couldn’t escape the wood louses. One of them made its way onto my shoulder near the base of my neck and bit me. It wasn't a wood louse, it was THAT GODDAMN FUCKING HOMICIDAL INSECT. I awoke suddenly and leaped out of bed with my neck muscle vibrating. This is the response I always have. 

I can’t help but wonder: Are these dream worlds actually the real world? Are they using insects to inject us with some kind of substance that hypnotizes us into thinking this “waking world” is real? What’s all this about artificial intelligence? Is it a Matrix situation? My ear canals are itching like crazy. Is it because of the ear plugs I’m wearing, or is this a side-effect?

We were wandering around some version of Ann Arbor. I had a special type of scope you could look into that would allow you to see the landscape before human civilization came along. It was just like being lost in the woods. That’s a pretty clear metaphor for the fact that we’re all essentially lost in the woods despite being surrounded by modern life, right? Sometimes dreams are so on-the-nose. 

I tried to remember if I still lived in Ann Arbor or if I’d moved back to Denver — or if I’d moved back to Denver and then back to Ann Arbor. I have this dream all the time. Why would I move back to Michigan? I hated it so much. But nothing that has happened to me since then feels real. 

The version of Ann Arbor I dream about moving back to never looks like the real place. I tried to picture the apartment I was currently living in, but I couldn’t remember for sure. I could picture a variety of apartments — some of which were actual ones I’ve lived in in either Ann Arbor or Denver and some of which seemed familiar but were clearly imaginary. The one that felt the most recent was one of the imaginary ones. I knew it wasn’t real. 

I thought as hard as I could but couldn’t see the place I lived. Then I woke up, and I was like, “Oh yeah, this is where I live now.” It also felt completely unreal. My current apartment is one of the imaginary ones, because nothing that has happened to me since I left Michigan has been real. 

This is what it must feel like to be a ghost or a wandering spirit. You can never quite remember the details of your life, and everything feels like it could be a dream. No wonder people are so terrified of ghosts — either being one or meeting one. It’s the worst possible feeling. Any spirit that became lost like that would surely go insane and would do anything to come back to “reality.” They would steal someone’s life in a heartbeat. I would do it.

My dad played a show of songs based on a folk singer’s interpretation of lost biblical stories. Then he figure skated a whole routine with costumes and flips and everything. But all we cared about was that the music was too loud, because we were trying to play a board game of some kind.

We took a trip to the Moon. Apparently someone had figured out how to grow things there, because there were trees everywhere. It looked like a grey, rain-soaked logging town. There were ramshackle houses set close to each other with small grassy yards. It looked like a poor neighborhood about two steps away from a trailer park. This was all on the Moon.

HAPPY 50TH TO THE DREAM ARCHIVE!

I was making lunch at work. The nature of my job was unclear. I made a delicious banana shake of some kind. My dad needed help preparing for a board meeting. We walked through an indoor mall, and salesmen kept telling him he looked stressed-out and that they could help him. He refused. 

My dad gave me three posters. The smallest one showed blurry shapes. The next one was larger and clearer. The biggest one showed an aerial shot of a housing subdivision by a lake. The lake looked metallic and polluted. The text across the top read: Now do you get it? Shady Acres, California...

My dad was worried about the consequences of decisions he’d made on the project. He compared it to a previous scandal that had involved 20 lobsters. A woman named Jill Herring had complained, but no one had listened to her.