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.

A series of short dreams...

A series of dreams.
On a train with several people who are apparently friends. We're riding in one of the cars near the end of the train. Another train, or vehicle of some kind, is following behind us on the tracks. One of my companions, a young man, suggests that we uncouple some of the train cars so that they will crash into the followers. His face has a kind of mischevious or even mean-spirited expression. The cars are uncoupled and they crash into the following cars.

In a restaurant/night club. Low lighting, rough walls, many small round tables, some people. With a group of people I have entered the room, walking down a short flight of wooden steps. One of the people I'm with tells the group that the Rolling Stones first played together in this club. We are all thrilled and look around in vain to see if they might drop in tonight.

In a hospital. I've got an incurable disease and the doctors have decided to put me out of my misery. I'm being led down a green hall, wearing a hospital gown, to a small room where the mercy killing will take place. I'm reluctant to enter and feel great sadness that my life is about to be over.

In the museum. I walk down a hallway, which is dark and narrow. Doors open from the hallway and people talk in the doorways and sometimes crowd the hall. Everyone seems taller than me. I walk to another corridor which is separate from the rest of the building and enter. It contains a tall set of wooden steps that lead to my office. There are two or three college age people coming and going in the corridor, and one man, older than the rest, walks through a doorway to return to the other corridor. He is very tall, mostly bald. He bumps his head on the lintel without seeming to notice. I start up the stairs but they get rickety as I climb. Near the top I see that in order to get to my office I will have to leap across an empty space and twist around to land in my office. I feel dizzy and the stairs start to come loose from their moorings in the wall. I'm too frightened to leap. One of the students at the foot of the stairs, a young woman with short dark hair, looks up at me and asks if I'm still disoriented. She is apparently referring to some earlier problem I'd had. I wake in distress.