Nuclear fears

Tough night. Woke at the dread hour of 4:30 again, tossed round and round trying to get comfortable though my shoulders ached in half the positions. Slipped in and out of doze. At some point I began explaining to someone else what I thought about when I lay awake. I thought: sex, work, art, death, love, god, etc. Then I imagined making a special pair of dice. On one of those octohedral or whatever game dice I would put those words describing the basic existential knots, one word on each facet. Then a companion di would have various approaches to those ideas on each facet. For instance, laughter, despair, irony, sadness, etc. I couldn't decide if the dice would then be rolled and discussed as some kind of therapeutic and/or spiritual activity or if they were the prelude to some complex game.

Then deeper dreaming as I finally got to sleep about 6:00. I'm riding with Sandy in the van downtown, where she drops me off for some meeting. I wander across the university and to the museum, where many people are milling around in the parking lot. One of them, a former supervisor, is oddly dressed. She has one breast exposed and the the dress she's wearing is multicolored and thin. She has dyed her hair some bright color. She looks distracted as she idles around the parking lot. This is surprizing since she is or was a very conservative dresser and is roughly my age. After a bit we enter the museum and sit around a large table, where I see that I was mistaken--that woman wasn't who I thought. Instead, the real one is there looking twenty years older than in actuality. Her hair is long and solidly gray. She seems distraught. Someone reveals to me that she has an incurable disease.

I leave and go back downtown, only to find that the van is missing. Despite the fact that I was dropped off earlier in it, I now expect to find it parked. It isn't. I go inside a restaurant and try to call Sandy. The woman behind the counter there knows me and we start talking about some job search. I call Sandy but some other employee there answers. He says he won't get Sandy because--well, something catastrophic has happened to the country. Perhaps a nuclear event. He says Sandy has chosen to stay and work because most of the other employees have fled. He talks very very slowly, so that it is maddening to try to get information from him. I wake distraught.