The context shifts and discontinuities in the early part of this dream were actually there; I just tried to faithfully transcribe them.

--Jane Doe

I think this isn't one dream, but five--the first four from REM periods earlier in the night, just half-recalled by morning; the last one comically, painfully clear.

--Chris Wayan

1: ROOSEVELT

I walk into a conference room to discuss what I'd have done if I'd been President just before World War Two started, instead of Roosevelt. I say "I wouldn't have assassinated the Pope or a 'prominent Japanese businessman' like Roosevelt did, in order to provoke an attack on Pearl Harbor so he could start a war."

2: IN HIS SPACESHIP

I'm in the spaceship of an evil genius. Is he trying to get in my pants?

3: LISSAJOU CURVES

I'm working with a bodybuilding contraption like a "bow flex" that makes you beautiful, using limb manipulation at each joint coupled with a graphics engine that "recomputes your surface" every frame using the equations described by the flexion of the machinery and personalization parameters from your participation with the machine. It's like those machines in Betty Boop cartoons that make you exercise with a strap around your hips... except of course this is modern technology so it's all computery (and really works).

Curves of my body...
Bow guided motion describes curves...
fluctuating newtons per radian over time...
The parameter space is full of Lissajou curves that restructure me...

4: SOFA JUNGLE

I'm in a videogame where you explore a wild jungle. Well, it's a jungle for we Lilliputians... but for the big people, it's a living room. The cliffs looming above us are their couches.

5: DON'T SHOOT THE IBEX

I'm driving along a country road outside the town I really grew up in, steering with one hand. I've got a hunting permit for deer and a huge rifle. I keep seeing lots of farm animals on farms that aren't there in in the real world, and it is a little jarring: giraffes, horses, goats, etc. Every so often some animal appears that is right on the edge... am I allowed to kill it? If I stare at a creature long enough, a little graphical overlay giving a species identifier pops up, explaining the legal implications of killing it. I remember passing on an ibex--I had to decide that one fast, since the car I'm in is passing the ibex so quickly.

Next I meet an Indian who has a license to kill anything he wants, so long as he uses traditional means. His vehicle is a leather kayak. His "traditional means"? An old elephant gun, resting across the kayak's handlebars.

Eventually I spot this guy in a white shirt who runs up a vividly green hillside. Aha! Now he's in season! The green hill grows into cliffs with tops high up but near in distance (100 feet?) from where I'm standing at the center of a courtyard. The guy sprints fast as a deer along the ridgeline, leaping over obstacles with grace and ease--he's breathtaking. In ten seconds he's run 180 degrees around the horizon; if I don't shoot fast he'll escape. He's about to reach a cliff where he'll have to make an incredible leap. He's running in a straight line to build up speed to jump it to the cliff on the other side. I draw a bead really fast (leading him a bit) and with a bit of hope I squeeze off a shot.

My target stumbles. And then he falls, falls a long way in a perfect arc off the cliff into the swimming pool below.

I go over and swim down and pull the body out.

I shot him in the left temple and can see his brains. He looks like Jerry, the guy from the party last weekend who I gave a blowjob to in one of the bedrooms (and felt guilty about it afterwards when the alcohol haze was gone). The white shirt makes me wonder if he's a Mormon, but when I turn over the body the tag doesn't say "Elder So-and-So". It says his name is Bryan and he works at Macy's.

Everyone else at the outdoor party comments "What a good shot" and "You sure aimed fast!" and then small talk turns to how it's been so long since they ate deer. My mom thinks I can shoot so well because I've played Quake some, but my brother says, "No, I think it's just general video game skills."

I put the rifle back in the car in its gleaming metal carrying case, and contemplate the smaller gleaming metal carrying case that is full of A-1 sauce. But it seems incongruous to eat a person I just shot with my hunting license... even with steak sauce, it still seems weird.

I go back to his body. I ponder how crazy it is that I wasn't allowed to shoot an ibex but I was allowed to shoot a Macy's salesguy. Why on earth wasn't this murder?

My friend wants to take a trophy picture of the body so I lift it over the fence and flop it down where it can be easily seen. It will leave an impression in the mud-like soil. Evidence!

We explore the crime scene, seeking further clues to Bryan's identity.

He has a prosthetic leg that ends in a peg that fits into his custom-designed spring-loaded Nike "peg shoe". Maybe that's why he was so agile?

Bryan's head falls off very cleanly, and his neck looks like a plastic post, as if he's a giant Lego toy. Except the neck-post is hollow and there's blood running up it from the torso to the head. This hole is perfectly circular and surprisingly clean, for a red seeping wound.

The party fades into the background. Bryan's mom walks up, and I say "I sympathize with your loss."

But privately, I'm thinking: "What's her angle?" A part of me wonders if she's going to sue over this. After all, we live in such a litigious country.

--"Jane Doe"

EDITOR'S NOTE

What a primal payback dream! At a party, Mr. Salesman pushes Jane to give him head, so in the dreamworld, she takes his head... And finds, when you really look inside that head, he's just a big plastic Lego.

I've never been so glad I don't eat meat. But it is true: A-1 steak sauce makes it moral.

--Chris Wayan

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