I’m in Yakima, walking on Browne Avenue, about a block away my old apartment. Two guys, approximately ten years older than I, are standing next to the wall of an industrial-looking building that does not really exist in that location. One guy is high. He’s got his ten-speed bicycle leaning against his hip. The other guy is waiting for someone to walk by, and this time that someone is me.

“Hey, man,” he says, walking toward me. “I want to give you something.”

“Thanks, but you don’t have to do that,” I reply.

“No, man, yeah I do.” He puts his entire wallet in my hand. It looks like the black leather one I have in real life, except his is much more beat up, and is even more stuffed full of receipts, bills, and cash. Even though the wallet is in my hand, I leave my hand flat, to show that I have no intention of taking it.

“Really, that’s okay. You need your wallet.”

“Look at this,” he says, a bit incredulously. He shows me a wad of fake-looking cash that he pulls from behind his real wad of cash. “You’re crazy.”

“You need your money, I’m doing okay.” I turn to walk away.

He pulls out a six-hundred-dollar bill, and holds it in front of my face. “Then just take this.” He puts it in my hand, but again I leave my palm open. Our hands are pressed together with the bill between them.

“Really, I don’t need it. You keep it.”

Now he thinks he’s being clever. As if to entice me to stop him from doing something bad with it, he says, “I’m just gonna go buy a piece with it.” I know he’s lying.

“Keep your money. See you around.” I walk away quickly. He becomes angry, but drops his wallet at taht moment, so he can’t do anything to chase me. High Guy tries to get onto his bike to come after me, but he isn’t capable of walking, so the bike tips over, and the guy falls on his face. When he looks up after me and tries to yell something, his face is bloody on one side.

There is a woman walking past all of us, giving us wide berth as she walks quickly to her black four-door Audi and gets in. I walk down to my apartment, but I go in the side entrance, just in case the guys are still watching me, which I don’t think they are. When I get inside, I see a large group of children filing past my window, screaming loudly. My blond wife (not someone I know in real life, and I’m not married) enters the room and starts to loudly sing a nonsensical song. She looks very strange, and her face actually changes shape and become slightly disfigured as I stand there looking at her. I try to get her to stop singing by kissing her, which works somewhat, but she still continues humming while we’re kissing.

That’s when my alarm went off and I woke up.

I never felt threatened, or out of control of the situation. I was very calm, and somehow knew just the right way to interact with this guy.

Very strange morning for dreams. I was only asleep for 45 minutes, but during that time I had an uncountable number of short dreams of all types. Some were ads, for a refrigerator, and for some sort of new Google service (?), and for a couple of other things that are eluding me at the moment. Two were extremely fast-paced cartoons, one of which was about a little Peruvian donkey named Mayaya. (It makes me laugh just to write that sentence, because I know how weird it must sound.) I don’t remember the other cartoon. Out of all those dreams, the only one that had any kind of narrative that I could write out was the one about the two guys and the humming wife.

OneYearAgo