This dream starts at my mom’s house, which this time is my childhood house on 55th Avenue in Yakima. I’m in the dining room, looking through a bunch of old boxes, and I find a box of Christmas cakes and pastries and breads from the year before. They aren’t wrapped or anything. I yell to my mom, who’s in the kitchen, “Hey, mom, is it okay if I throw this stuff away? It’s old food, that’s been sitting here for a year. Obviously you guys aren’t going to eat it.” She hems and haws, so I decide to leave the stuff for her to go through on her own.

I go outside and start working on my Honda, fixing the windows because someone tried to break into the car, and now they won’t roll up correctly. [This is the case in real life, too, incidentally.] I walk inside to get something, and my mom walks toward me with a screwdriver pointed at me. I get startled and confused, and I step back from her. She says, “No no. . .you’re misunderstanding me,” and she puts a few of those small alcohol-soaked medical cleaning cloths on the end of the screwdriver and then starts to clean a place on the front of my neck. I think it’s ridiculous for her to be doing that, but when she’s done, I thank her and then go back outside to finish working on the car. I finish one window, but the other is cracked and broken on the bottom. I think to myself, ‘Great; no window at all on this side of the car. What am I gonna do when it rains?’ I get mad, throw down the tools, and storm off down the street.

While I’m out, I run into Jake [Jacob Ray from the Young Immortals]. I tell him I’m just out for a walk, but he’s welcome to join me. I have a pretty heavy backpack on my back for some reason, with a bunch of my stuff in it, including a change of clothes, a whole bunch of CD’s, and a couple of microphones. We start walking and talking, and this scruffy red-haired street kid in his mid-twenties starts hassling me. He’s wearing a jacket with patches strategically placed all over it. He’s talking to someone else, but every time I move to walk away, he blocks me. I try walking away from him, and he walks over to stop me again. I tell him seriously, “Dude. . .I’m leaving now.” Jake is nowhere to be seen, so I turn and walk away. StreetGuy ends his conversation with the other person and starts to follow me. I step off the sidewalk and start to walk in front of a huge yellow four-wheel-drive pickup truck that a fiftyish woman and her adult daughter just got into. They start it and pull out, and I almost get run over, but I jump up and grab onto the hood. My feet are about a foot off the ground, and I’m holding myself up with just my arms.

I yell for the driver to “Stop, dammit!” She speeds up and says loudly, “I’ll have to anyway, right up here.” I realize that it’s a good way for me to put some distance between myself and the street guy, so I wait until she comes to the stop light, and then I jump down and run off. I’m next to the light-rail train tracks. I can see the guy about two blocks away, running toward me, so I run along the fence, on the opposite side of the tracks from the passenger platform. I’m having a hard time running because there are metal wires everywhere, holding up the roof of the platform, and because I’m wearing the huge backpack. StreetGuy continues to gain ground on me, so I climb over the fence and jump into the canal. The current moves me along nicely for a while, and when I get to the main part of town, I swim over to the edge and scramble out.

I’m still wearing the backpack, which now weighs twice as much as it did when it was dry. I take it off, unzip it, and rummage around to find my phone and call Jake, but the phone is freaking out because it’s been in the water. I turn it off and on again, but it’s still not working right, so I start to walk in the direction of the town’s main square. Jake is there, and he sees me and says, “Ohhh, buddy, I was really worried! Glad you’re okay.” We walk across the square and go toward a smallish basement bar. I tell Jake, “I want to leave as soon as possible. I can’t stay very long; that guy’s still after me.” He agrees. Waiting in the short line of people are the pickup driver and her daughter. The daughter recognizes me and says, “Hey, you’re the guy wh–” but Jake and I push past them, walk past the door guy at the bottom of the stairs–who is so intent on the people in the line that he doesn’t even look over at us–and walk into the dark bar. The lighting is very subdued and cool, with white Christmas lights around the edge of the ceiling and candles throughout the room.

Somehow we get separated instantly. Jake disappears to talk to a woman friend he sees, and I walk through the dark bar into the big, bright adjoining room, which has fluorescent lights in the ceiling. The seats are arranged in rows, like the waiting room at a hair salon, except every other row is facing the opposite direction so that people can socialize. In between the rows of chairs is a row of low wooden tables, covered with magazines of all types. There are a bunch of people in there, sitting and chatting and having drinks. I see my old roommate Rob [from Yakima], who I haven’t seen since I left there. He’s dressed very strangely, in a navy blue mesh shirt and black jeans, and he’s a bit thinner than he used to be, but other than that, he seems the same. He introduces me to a girl that he just met. She’s Asian, and she’s pretending that she hardly speaks any English because she’s not interested in Rob. I find this to be hilarious, and when he introduces me to her, we shake hands and share a knowing smile. I tell her it’s great to meet her, and tell Rob that it’s been good to see him, but that I have to go because “there’s this guy who keeps following me and stuff.”

After that, there was another long section which I can’t quite recall, and then I woke up.

Oh my gosh. . .I got up at 6:30, and it’s now 7:30. It took an hour to write all this down!