Naked in the Lobby

Such a cliché ridden dream. I was stuck naked in an elevated hotel lobby. I was shielded from people only by the fact that I was sitting in a monstrous green striped sofa that faced a huge window that looks out over the outside world.

Two friends came to my aid, I have never known before they were brothers. One of them was a Frenchman named Jean-Claude. The other was German. Apparently they have been separated at birth. They were both trying to find ways of helping me. Finally they got me an oversized white T-shirt and some sweatpants but no underwear.

I needed to find a way home but they told me I also had to eat. I had no money but a menu from the hotel restaurant appeared in my hand. I realized that I could order food and have it sent to my house and then I could slip away myself and go home in these outlandish clothes, perhaps by taxi.

There were turned out to restaurants, both serving beef. One specialized in steaks, the other in roast beef with crepes. I decided on the former. They served steak in three sizes. Each came in a black steel pan. The pan had a small steak and a triangular piece of roast beef. Even the largest size wasn't very big. But I didn't want to have the one with crêpes.

I was figuring out which credit card to use, and how to slip in to the massive T-shirt so I could get away with walking down the lobby. I woke up.

Coffee in Paradise

I dreamt that I was watching CNN and there was a movie trailer. I stepped into the television and became part of the world of the film. I was on a pathway in an Idyllic landscape. Three bald dead people were lined up, on the ground kneeling, touching each other, face to back of head. In the back was a living person in the same position. This was a sort of yoga exercise. Attaching oneself to a kneeling row of corpses was a pathway to a higher consciousness.

As I walked further down the pathway children in brightly colored clothing skipped by. The pathway doubled back. There was a vast banyan tree with little purple streamers hanging. We were supposed to walk beneath the tree with tongues sticking out and let the streamers touch our tongues. Behind, across a river, will more trees. There foliage was overlaid with bright turquoise maple like bunches of leaves.

Someone said to me, "this is a preparation for the life after life." 

I stepped through the CNN wall and now I was in a political wrangling situation with people running for office. But I didn't care because I was about to take off in a new adventure, an L5 colony that was being shot off into space.

As the colony lurched into the sky we were all rolling around inside. Presently, the flight became smooth, and I was able to see the beautiful world inside the skin of the L5. First, we were all lined up at a ticket booth. Everyone was buying a ticket to go somewhere. It was like a museum. Everyone was passing through the ticket booth on the right-hand side. It had a glass wall with someone inside. I looked next to the lady in the ticket counter and saw what looks like a stamped hotel receipt that said room. I said, "Could I have some coffee please?"

She said, "no, this is only a ticket booth. You have to go inside." I said, "I'm so sorry I saw the receipt, you see, and assumed that if you could get a room you could also get coffee."

The conversation seemed to distract the lady and I was able to pass through on the left without paying at all.

Within the skin of the L5, a vast vista of fields could be seen just like in that famous book by O'Neil. Ahead, there was some kind of carnival or fun fair. And finally, that was in fact a large counter behind glass selling coffee. I went up to the line and asked for a cup. But before she couldn't give me a cup, there was another official holding a license sticker in his hand. I'm sorry, said the officer, but you will need an official license before selling the coffee.

I said to the officer, we are outside the jurisdiction of the United States. We are not even on earth. Why are you insisting on imposing Earth's authority here?

The officer said technically, this is a territory of the United States. He stuck the license sticker on the glass and I was able to get coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

Then, I woke up.

Filming the Killer

I had a terrifying dream. It's about a serial killer of the John Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer variety. In my dream At first I'm like the serial killer's assistant. I'm like someone that he decided not to kill and now keeps around to help him murder people. There's also an old couple who looks after him. He has a crazy house that is able to fold up and become a prison. When he brings a victim, the old man who guards the house pushes a button and the entire living room raises up like a drawbridge and folds up the house.

I watch him chasing a boy who is very reluctant to go with him in a dark alley. The boy says he cannot go because he is sick. But the killer grabs him. He starts screaming and the killer somehow jumps into a canal and keeps walking, holding the victim who now has a screaming muffled because they are underwater. They enter the basement of a house. The rooms are completely underwater, yet look normal. We enter the house. I'm following and watching. There is a doorway. The doorway is up three or four steps, it's a black door. Behind the doorway it is completely dry even though we have been walking underwater. I'm thinking to myself that is not logical, the water levels cannot be this different. What scientific anomaly is this?

The killer carries the victim into the pantry then up some stairs into a central hallway. To the left is the sunken living room. He gives the instructions and the old man pushes the button. The house closes up. He disappears somewhere with his victim, up into an attic. I reflect upon the fate that I escaped.

The old man says, don't worry. It's not so bad. When he's not looking, I mess around. He shows me where there is a
crack in the wall where he can go out. The house is not a trap after all.

Suddenly, I realize that none of this is really happening. Actually I am a filmmaker. The boy is a real former victim who has volunteered to be an actor, reliving his trauma and perhaps working through it in the process. I am sitting on the bridge outside the house which is actually a set. The buildings are stone and we are near a canal. 

I tell him, I'm really sorry to put you through this. Now the next scene in the script isn't exactly what happened. Please don't be disturbed. Just act.

More and more, since leaving the house, this film is becoming a period piece in which people addressed in Victorian clothes. We filmed the scene in which the victim goes to the police. The London constabulary marches over to the house and raids it. They discover evidence and go back to the police station.

However, the next scene is unexpected. We go upstairs into a hidden room. A group of 19th-century people who appeared to be some kind of Oscar Wilde secret club is having a meeting. There are people in extravagant costumes, and someone in drag. I film the scene. They are discussing what to do with the serial killer.

This is really terrible, says the man in drag. He is a blonde in a green dress. This person will damage our reputation Things already bad for us in the society where we are hated and condemned.

Another man says, we must take care of this ourselves. We must make him disappear. Yes! They all agree. From now on the man says he is marked.

I continue to film the smoke-filled room then I wake up.

This terrifying dream appears to somehow be a replay of the film Tenderness of the Wolves. I watched it on video about four months ago.

Coming To Town

Tonight I fell asleep at 9 PM and I had a vivid dream just now waking up at 5 AM. In this dream, I'm directing a Christmas play. It's very brightly colored — a comedy about a family.

Looks to be a sort of amateur production. It's a small theater, with the audience on those fold up aluminum chairs. The setting of the play seems to be the night before Christmas and it's very slapstick.
The play has already started when I suddenly realize standing back stage that we never cast Santa Claus. Santa Claus has a couple of scenes in this play where he appears with one other character. The script appears in my mind's eye on those pages with Santa Claus in them become suddenly very glaring. The fact is, they are essential to the play. That's why we forgot to rehearse those scenes. I realize I will have to play him myself.

I am wearing a white jumpsuit as I stand backstage. Quickly I tell someone who is with me, I think he is playing the father in the family, to run to the store and buy me a red Santa Claus outfit. The outfit is identical to the one I'm wearing right now except that it I s red.

"What size?" He asks. I tell him size 46. Then I say no, bigger, bigger. The biggest you can find. I stand in the wings stage right. The audience is having a great time, laughing and smiling. On stage every character is dressed in green and white. I am needed in my red to complete the color scheme. Anxiously I await the arrival of the red jumpsuit.

Mr Somtow Goes to Washington

I dreamed that I was at a gathering of presidential candidates. All the Republicans stood in a crowd on the left side of the room. The Democrats were in a semi circle on the right. I myself was a candidate and I found myself standing in the middle of the room next to George W. Bush. We were ordered to arrange ourselves in the order of those who had the most to the least votes. George and I had the highest and with therefore next to each other.

I asked who the lowest scoring Democrat was. To my surprise it was another George Bush. He was also a governor. He stood off to one side, looking like a cross between George and Jeb. 

I said, I really miss you Mr. President.

George smiled and said, yes those were some fun times.

I said, no matter how horrible things got, you always put a good face on things.

He began laughing, and then presently we all got the order to march forward and the candidates all went, shoulder to shoulder, down a winding path behind a monstrous boulder.

Wounded Fish

I dreamt that my sister and I were investigating some kind of murder. We are in a house and we come to a room full of cats. But the cat we seek, a silvery tabby, is missing.

There is evidence of missing cats in another room, plus an injured fish named Ivan. We find a row of stools in another room and it's sort of a cat hospital; on each stool is an injured cat. These are sort of bar stools with low backs by the way, a row of about seven of them. The stool that should have our missing cat is empty. Next to it, wrapped in swaddling, covered in a blanket, is a weird shape. My sister lifts the blanket and screams. It is the tortured body of the missing fish Ivan.

We go to the kitchen, to our left, and await the owner of the house who will come. He is outside the kitchen door. He is a fat man with a rifle. We have our pistols ready. He will be here in just a minute, I say. (Actually I'm not sure if I say it or my sister says it, but in those minutes, my sister is suddenly a strange man, then my sister again.) We hear footsteps. Shots ring out. I wake up.

Emicturate!

Here is an odd dream I had. I dreamt that my son Johnny (in the dream he is in his late teens) wet himself and was being dragged out by thugs to be flogged as a punishment. I came out into a large quadrangle and saw this horror — these burly guys were whipping him and had thrown him down on the ground. I managed to fight off the bullies. I pulled Johnny up and waited for him to pull his pants on, and walked him across the grass. I said to Johnny, "This is called emicturation. There are three ways to cure it, three kinds of medication." ... In my dream I remember listing the three medicines in great detail, but I don't remember that part.

I know that the proper word is "enuresis", but the word "emicturate" appeared in my dream. This as far as I know is a "joke" word used by a science fiction writer (I can't remember who) who said in an article "But what emicturates me most (look it up)" - i.e. "pisses me off".

P.S. Johnny never had that problem. I can't figure this out. The whipping scene was very frightening.

Valé Moqué

Another wildly vivid dream after I went back to sleep around 6 and wake up 2 hours later. In his dream, I'm visit a movie set which seems to be Lord of the Rings. But I'm not actually at the set itself, just sitting in a studio commissary nearby, while some of the film crew are dining. Photos of the lush New Zealand scenery and of some of the actors are hanging. (The commissary is open air, with a railing, slightly elevated above the concrete of the studio lot.) We're talking about how remarkable it is that so many of the actors in the film have gone to Eton. Several are mentioned by name and they are familiar ones (I don't actually remember them, but they are maybe people like Eddie Redmayne or Max Pirkis. 

Someone mentioned a name I've never heard of ... Valé Moqué. "I've never heard of him," I say. No, I'm told, he's definitely an old boy, and I am surprised my companion uses the phrase old boy because Etonians themselves rarely use it. Valé Moqué? I keep repeating. Yes, yes ... I'm shown a recent school list that shows he only recently "graduated" (again I am a little surprised at that word, which Etonians also rarely use). I say, "I'm still in touch with people who are there now. I will ask one of them about him."

I walk through the restaurant, past people in elegan square t tables with four chairs who seem to be having tea and being very English, saying to myself in a frightfully upperclass accent, "Eaugh, eaugh, eaugh." Perhaps I'm trying to make sure people realize I went to Eton myself.

I walk out of the commissary down a few steps and cross a concrete walkway that has people in costume moving around and then I suddenly see a huge warehouse which is really a set for "The Mikado." Abruptly, I'm no longer an observer but an actor. I enter a scene in which a lot of people are standing around in Chinese (note - NOT Japanese) attire. I myself am wearing a 19th century frock coat of some kind, and the people around me are in a circle including a lady in a purple kimono-like (but Chinese) costume. They are loading up some wagons or something, for shipping, but are moving very languidly, without enthusiasm.

I begin declaiming in a Shakespearean way (obviously acting for the camera) "Why are you here in foggy San Francisco, instead of enjoying the tropical delights of Hawaii?"

A bent, elderly lady speaks to me, but it is incomprehensible. I realize it's not English at all, but fake English as it might be comedically faked by a woman who only speaks Chinese. 

I realize that as I am in a movie, I don't actually have to say anything that makes sense when it's a foreign language, so I begin talking to her in fake Chinese. She reacts knowledgeably. Fake Chinese! I think to myself. Cantonese, to be precise! We continue the conversation in the fake languages as I wake up.

OUT OF EGYPT

In my dream, I have arrived in an Arabic speaking country, perhaps Egypt, to conduct a choir. When I enter the choir room, a low ceilinged, metallic hall, I am confronted with a motley collection of singers who are being introduced to me. First, I am introduced to the basses. There are only 2-3 of them sitting in a column on the far right, and they are all grotesque, cartoonish gorillas, very fat and much huger than the humans in the room. At the far left is a column of tenors. In between there is one row of young looking sopranos, and several rows of altos behind them.

I am bewildered and don't know how I can possibly conduct this ensemble, I go outside for a breather. There's a veranda outside overlooking an urban scene and some desert. There, the man who originally brought me to Egypt to conduct, perhaps their professor or guru, talks to me.

"It's so random," I say, "I'm not sure how to handle it."

I pull out a book in which there is a seating chart of the room inside. I look at this map and try to determine the nationalities of the singers. "If enough of them are of the same ethnicity," I say, "such as all Arab," I could handle it. I start marking up the page.

Suddenly I am aware of another person beside me. He has an auto-stamping device that prints a dark blue circular logo on the page. He starts stamping all the Arabs in the room map.

"You can't stamp this!" I say. "It's my passport." 

"All right," he says. I see now, he is preparing to take over the chorus as soon as he has figured out who all the Arabs are. He well then become the conductor, freeing me to sneak off into the moonlight, perhaps fly away. I wake up.

Mayhem at the Met

I dreamt that I was a new artistic director at the Met and it is was an opening night to end all opening nights. The theatre had all sorts of secret passageways and a pink dessert room with glass sliding doors. There were other hidden rooms with reclining seats of great luxury for secret high end members, though the view of the opera wasn't very clear. Also a control room with huge seats for members of management - and no real view of the stage. At the end, I said, “They're off to war here. Let's have three big climactic drum sequences each ending in a huge audience shout, added to the end, so the audience really knows it's the finish of a grand spectacle.” They put the sequences in. Thew audience claps in some of the wrong places but it's a huge success. (The third drum sequence takes a very long time and they start cheering and applauding far too early, but at the end there is a loud tam tam stroke and everyone is cheering madly.)

My boss, the general manager, in a tuxedo, says as I gaze at the dessert room, "there are other special areas, too, including one for men only, and a lawless room, because you can open carry weapons there." Someone offers me a steak, and says that Mikey and I should go and eat it in the lawless room. They had me the steak but the meat is in perfect spheres, slathered with a mayonnaise sauce which I am allergic to. The applause is still going on as we walk down to the llawless area, past plush velvet and columns everywhere. Mikey's steak is sliced and normal shaped, not like my spheres. We look at a photo card of how the steak is supposed to look. Mine resembles spheres of watermelon. The meat is very very soft. Everyone is praising my new ending ... except the tenor who is going around bitching about not having a curtain call. (He's wandering around in a powdered wig.)

I successfully scrape off the sauce to one side and avoid the allergy. I don't actually get to the lawless room. I've finished the food and now I am heading to the exit, which leads up a balustrade in the middle of the orchestra stalls. I begin humming music ... a descending oboe theme and a rising string figure. It's the overture, and in the dream I believe it to be La Clemenza di Tito even though earlier the opera appeared to some variant of Aida. It is just playing in my head. An old lady in a layered white dress (maybe a sort of wedding dress) says to me, "it's amazing how these tunes stay with you."

"Yes," I said, "this tune was all the way from the overture yet I remember it perfectly."

I am moving up the staircase and I remember as I wake up that this is actually the theme from Mozart's Prague Symphony, not "La Clemenza" at all.

COPS, BROTHELS, and HOSPITALS

I had a very weird dream. I am driving a large car, a Mercedes I think, in Bangkok. My parents are in the car as is Mikey. It's a long journey somewhere in Bangkok, but we have pulled out from what looks like the former Erawan Arcade (in the 1960s) and have moved towards a T-junction. (There is no T-junction there in real life). I have been parked on the left side of a very broad one way street with many lanes and I actually need to turn right, but there are are too many lanes to cross over and as I try to sneak across, a policeman pulls the car over even though I have already been forced to turn left instead of right. I park slightly out of the way. The police are in a sort of booth right in the middle of the intersection.

I rehearse what I am going to say - that I was trying to go right, there were far too many lanes ... eventually that I'm jjust going to bribe him 100 baht ... but he just doesn't come. A large limousine pulls up to my left, obscuring the view and enabling me to slip away. My parents are no longer in the car and I say to Mikey, let's stop and eat somewhere ... maybe in Chinatown. Then I reflect on how hard it is to park there. I wonder why I'm even driving in Thailand at all because I haven't done so in a decade.

We pull into a strange kind of place, like a sort of massage parlor, and they tell me and Mikey to take a look at some paintings of men working there. One of them seems to be named Anouk. This painting looks better than the others, but presently we see the real Anouk, embracing a column. He doesn't look anything like the picture. He is wearing a white sort of cheesecloth shirt unbuttoned at the top and has very dark skin and is somewhat unshaven, with a toothy kind of smile. He says to me, "Shall we get started?" in a strong Filipino accent, and indicates an inner room, and leaps into my arms with his arms around my neck in a weird parody of a bride about to be carried across the threshold. I realize this is some kind of male brothel run completely by Filipinos. I am about to say "Mikey, let's go," when he says ... "look over there ... it's Phee Mhong."

I have no clue who this is an assume it someone Mikey used to know a long time ago. When I look where he is pointing, the building has a new corridor lined with dilapidated beds and it is sort of like a hospital. The corridor is angling off to the left, at 45° from the rest of the place. There are glass doors, an exit from the building, and the corridor to the left. People are lying in the beds and they might be receving massages or medical attention, I cannot tell. There is a trio of sad looking, paunchy men at the entrance to this new corridor. They are in some kind of tribal dress and the one Mikey has indicated is an old man with white hair and a paunch and a poncho as well as some kind of loose fabric pajama bottoms. It is a depressing vista and I decide we must go, but I don;t know we can leave without engaging these people in a conversation....

A Fifth Lower

I dreamt that I'm performing a fiendishly difficult a cappella piece with a number of singers. The score is written graphically instead of in notation. Notes with ledger lines are hung from an intricate web of clothesline like lines that crisscross the page.

It is a Capella, but Loon is sitting at a piano occasionally using a note or two. My part is a bass part but for some marking reason it is written as the second of the clothesline hanging way above the others. The parts the weaving in and out andI sing one note and the next one plunges way below. The plunge is from B-flat to e flat. I successfully hit to the plunge and the pianist plays repeated e-flats confirming I managed to guess the right note. Everyone says to me, "how did you do that?"

I tell them that I just guessed from the contour of the part but it must be a fifth apart. Everybody congratulates me, but I know it is just simple logic.

SCARED WHITE

I had this dream about race and gender. I am like an advisor or social worker, a white woman, visiting a black family. There is a white neighbor, an old man who intimidates and bullies. I receive a severe tongue lashing from this guy who slams doors at me. I turn around to the family I am visiting and say, "When he sees my black boyfriend, he'll turn white." They all laugh hysterically, but with a certain amount of fear. The youngest son has a pageboy haircut and looks a lot like a girl. He is worried about getting into a good college. I say, I get you're really only pretending not to know things, that secretly you know everything and you get all As. The whole family is concurring and he is looking more and more like a girl. He has a frightened, very serious look. I wake up.

But the thing is, I thought I typed all that already, but when I searched for it on my screen, it was gone, and I have a feeling that I dreamed that I typed it because I have the feeling I have just woken up in my chair....

PLAYING CHESS WITH DEATH

I dreamed that I was a knight who has sworn eternal blood-brotherhood to another knight. But each of us has sworn fealty to a rival monarch and we have been commanded to kill each other. Instead, we are playing a game of chess, each carefully trying to figure out a way to delay the killing blow.

This was in fact a long and complex dream and I woke up thinking I MUST remember, I MUST remember, and one thing in particular is that there were three "conditions" in the dream, and one concerned two words that were circled on a lined page, written in a gorgeous round hand. Those words are gone from my memory completely.

All that remains is that final scene of the two knights sitting across a chessboard. It's like a double-vision edition of THE SEVENTH SEAL.

Gas Masks

In my first dream, I was at a rehearsal conducting and showing a stack of posters of the orchestra playing in Carnegie Hall. Then Wishwin Winry Sureeratanakorn the cellist stood up. He said look here's another poster of me. I am playing the Dvorak cello concerto. It's in Carnegie Hall too. I rifle through the posters and find his poster behind ours. I see the name of the orchestra. The initials of the orchestra are SW A R. In the dream I know the initials stand for something like south something Asia something. I ask him when the concert is and he says August 7. I say, good! I have to be in America right afterwards. I will fly in for your concert.

I wake up and find myself in another dream. I am a child in a New York apartment and I'm in a 1950s sitcom family with a Donna Reed like mother. The whole house is full of an acrid poisonous gas. Special gas masks have been issued. They are paper with Bizzarre markings and they wrap around the head. The gas masks haveA special foldout section on the two sides with additional dials and switches for special occasions.

I know that I somehow have been responsible for the gas leak. I am going to go and heroically fix it. I say to my mother, I'll have to wear the mask overnight because I'm leading the expedition to fix it. She thinks this is very sweet. She bends down to kiss me and the scene transforms into the closing moments of the TV show, with black and white and a moving score by Alexander Courage. A heart-shaped cut out provides the wipe that ends the scene. A camera push in and then I wake up.

(By the way, the heart wipe seems to come from I Love Lucy, and the "moving score" of those sitcoms wasn't by Alexander Courage - he wrote the "Star Trek" theme. The final closing chords in my dream were similar to those chords.)

The Jacuzzi of Dreams

Another really weird dream. I'm living in Hollywood in the house of a really rich and powerful person named Brian. There's a big party. A very impressive Svengali like guru shows up. He speaks of wild adventures. All the guests are enraptured though I myself am skeptical. He speaks of a journey and being boiled alive.

Suddenly we hear sounds like popping or bursting. Brightly colored globes at our feet are illuminated. The popping is the sound of a hot spring. It's vulcanism.

Water is flooding the room from overhead pipes, and the room apparently is actually a Jacuzzi.

It's very exciting but too hot. I leave the party and go upstairs to bed. I go to sleep and then I wake up again. And waking up, this is still part of the dream, I remember all that has passed as being a dream. I walked on the stairs and find a huge empty Jacuzzi filled with rich foamy water. The steam is filling the room. It's a semi-covered veranda and the water is very pale blue. The steam fills the room so I can't see much.

I think this is a great time to enjoy the Jacuzzi. I enter the water but it is chilly. I see a red LED thermometer that reads 90° hanging on the tile wall. Suddenly the Jacuzzi is full of all the party guests from last night's dream. They are all naked. They are a cross-section of the rich and famous. The Svengali stands in the middle. He says I'm here to teach you new adventure. And we must all be given by soaking together. "But," I say, "the water's too cold." He tells me I am right but to sit there anyway. "I'll wait till it gets warmer," I tell him. I leave the room. I enter a hallway and then I go through a door to a veranda where there's a way up to my room up and exterior Z-shaped staircase like a fire escape encased in a metal grid. As I go up the stairs I wake up again for real.

London Unspoken, Paris Unbroken....

Last night I started dreaming of a soundtrack that I am composing for a film in which slowly, strings were playing in triplet thirds to represent the sound of a vehicle entering a tunnel, The music welled up and alternated between C sharp minor and A minor in my dream. Then the sound of a bamboo flute joins in, Then there was a voice saying we have to make the announcement, so big this announcement, First London, London unspoken. And Paris, unbroken, We must rent this huge empty irregular polygon shaped shopping mall with an huge hall in its center to perform this music. The announcement is apocalyptic for the whole world. The mall with the polygon hall will be the beginning.

Human Sushi

In my dream, there's a war between humans and aliens. They are like giant lizards. We holed up in a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel there is a doorway made of dark wooden beams. I am hiding in a shaft to the right of the door, avoiding some crossfire. There is a huge explosion, that allows me to escape down the tunnel into the open air. As I escape, I am watching a replay of the explosion. A man in a black beard and his wife are using black gunpowder to blow themselves up. They are dressed in black but the costumes are archaic, like a western. He is wearing a black bowler hat. It is a tender scene and I know that he is doing it to save my life. I slip out of the tunnel opening. The aliens have captured all the humans. They are lined up and tied to stakes behind the counter. They are dressed quite formally in 19th-century clothes, white and beige. It is a glass counter like a pastry shop. Behind the glass are open faced sandwiches, each one topped with a quivering piece of human flesh.

At first I think it's a human sushi bar, but then it more resembles a delicatessen, as they are open bread rolls, like hot dog buns. There are sliced human flesh but also some cubed chunks, very bloody. To my surprise, the humans tied up behind the counter exhibit no signs of being hacked up and no wounds. Yet I know it is their flesh.

A lizard behind the counter is forcing the captives to eat these sandwiches, which have just been sliced from their own flesh. I slip away knowing that the old couple have lovingly blown them selves up and saved my life.

This was part of a much longer dream, but the final scenes are all I remember. The open air delicatessen with the humans tied up behind the counter was an extraordinary and vivid scene.

There seems to be a reference to my own novel that was a tie in to the V series from 1985, "V - the Alien Swordmaster" where the aliens open a human sushi bar in Tokyo.

CHOCOLATE HEARTS

Then came another dream in the late morning. In this dream, I am a woman who is in line for a heart. Hearts are being manufactured. I am listening to a disembodied voice explaining this new technology. I receive a new chocolate heart in a gift wrapped box.

The Buddha speaks in a dream

This extraordinary dream woke up me before 6 am and now I cannot get back to sleep:

I dreamt that there were three of us. One person had gone on ahead and a woman was behind me. she wore lavender. In the first room there was music playing. It was an anteroom and it was decorated in the style of the 1960s. The living room furniture had open, polished dark wooden frames with a bit of a curve to them, sort of like the curve of a longbow.

It was some kind of test or audition. I was summoned into an inner room. A man seated at a lit desk read out of my name. The lightning was fluorescent and made his face a kind of chiaroscuro silhouette. Creepy.

He pronounced my last name something like sessionseses. . Then he and the woman behind me pronounced my name correctly in Thai. The lady behind me laughed at his mispronunciation.

I play the piano. It was a white electronic piano. I play for quite some time and the music is somewhat like the opening of the Rachmaninov Vespers (a big choral piece so I am not sure how the piano produces this sound).

After a while I was called into another room. In this final room, the Buddha spoke to me. He was standing wearing yellow, and he had a halo. He did not look real but like one of the paintings on the wall of the Thai temple.

He spoke to me words of great comfort and wisdom. In the dream I woke up and was desperately trying to write down everything I had experienced in the dream. I was already forgetting things.

I was in another living room quite different from the first one, because the chairs were plump, sofa-like, comfortable and fully upholstered (no wooden naked frames). The woman was sitting in an armchair and I was sitting at another one and I was telling her that I seen the Buddha in my dream. She was no longer wearing a lavender but it was the same woman. She had on a white cardigan. Also a pleated dress. I told her that we all have cancer and that I was no longer afraid of it. The Buddha had dispelled my fear. It seemed to me that I was talking about someone else.

The woman listened to me gravely as I told her about my dream.