A freshwater lake full of boats. Boats full of chessplayers! Our company owns the boats; we build patented systems for stabilizing small craft, and test them by sending them out across the lake with chessboards. If the owners lose a piece, we recalibrate the stabilizers, but even on rough days we rarely need to now. I bike along shore near the main chess flotilla and call "Any pieces overboard?" "No" they all answer, as always.

But they do report a new problem. A stranger's been hopping from boat to boat, challenging our chessplayers--and he plays to win, not to test the stabilizers. He's just challenged our champion, a tall frizzy-blonde girl with a wide beautiful smile. He dares her to play a high-stakes game in which the board will be the whole lake and the pieces will be the boats and their crews. To capture, boats will ram each other, or people will wrestle till they throw the enemy overboard.

She accepts--for everyone. I worry players could drown.

I board the boat where the two of them face off and issue their commands. The stranger is creepy--to my inner eye, he feels devilish.

He pulls out a knife and threatens two women! One's our chess champion, the other's Kari, a cheerful, sensual girl. I intervene, afraid of him but willing to fight to stop him from stabbing them or tossing them overboard.

Long tense maneuvering. The stakes, it turns out, are worse than death: our souls. He is a devil. He's out to seduce or bully the women into joining him, and out to provoke me to try and kill him when he hasn't quite threatened explicitly enough to justify a legal verdict of self-defense: then I'll go to Hell for murder. I protest that using force and magic to send us to hell can't be legal. If devils were allowed to kill or enslave humans directly we'd be extinct by now. I suspect all his threats are bluffs meant to provoke fear and hasty reactions.

We disembark and walk on a path by the shore, out onto a stone jetty. I worry--the two women are getting casual toward the devil. I warn them "He's seducing you." Kari laughs at me, says she's a Satanic witch or a succubus herself--and always was. Just pretending to be nice. I don't know if it's true or he's clouded her memory, but she's sure she's always been a bad girl into sex, sin, and selfishness. Her friend agrees: "We're into Satan, so why don't you leave?"

Shaken, I do. But I look back. He's turned away from me; one of the women has legs wrapped around his waist, riding him. She's a foot higher than she would be with a man; apparently he's manifested a giant phallus, a couple of feet tall, and even with a satanically enhanced vagina she can't fit him all in yet. I feel empty, defeated. Nothing to offer them next to super-sex, magical powers, the fun of being wicked and threatening people. More than that; I wonder if it's true and they were devils all along, laughing secretly at me while I was risking myself to protect them.

So much for automatic stabilizers...

MORNING NOTES

• Boats = saw a sailboat race today. Rough waves, a few spills.
• Stabilizers = my goal's not to move forward, but just not 'rock the boat.' The stress of conflict can make me physically ill, so I often back down in fights.
• Chess = a chess-program just beat the human world champion.
• Chess competition = dating, the game of love?
• Devil = my own repressed ambition and sexual hunger.
• Game = by the Exploratorium lagoon, two girls wrestled, threatened to throw each other in.
• Being thrown in = being pulled by own appetites into sexual/social swim.
• Devil = I just read A Stone Gone Mad by Jacquelyn Park. Emily has a crush on her big sister’s best friend Mattie. Sweet. They make love once--I get so turned on I have to masturbate. They get caught. This is circa 1950, so both families hush it up, treat them as insane, with almost gleeful hatred. Banished to boarding school & compulsory therapy. Later Emily escapes to college, but her friends, housemates, even her own sisters call her evil. A little reminder how nasty people can get. Big city? Even lesbian bars are full of macho posturing, kept women, and cold selfish games. Ugly times, and the dream echoed the tone.
• Boat girls mock me = the straight girls I saw today? Based on their big dumb posturing boyfriends, I'll never be what normal women want.

Since ancient times, dream experts have said even the most nightmarish dreams to help. "God turn us every dreme to good." But where's the good word here?

The only positive message I can see here is: "You like Kari but she'd be bad for you. We aren't suggesting anyone to walk toward, because right now, in your life, NO ONE is right. They're ALL into games you can't or won't play. Cut your losses. Walk away." A message I couldn't hear if I hadn't just been shocked out of the American cult of positivity.

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