'Sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free'

At work again.

Large area with many people working at very informal terminals. My BOSS boss is there and he seems to sense something is going on in Jackson, one of the cities whose newspaper we lay out. He goes into a Very Important Meeting and finds out that the editor there has gathered his people to announce that one of their writers hanged himself. Everyone is aghast. My dream self imagines that guy's column sig and how we just put it on a page recently.

///

I am stressing out. The sun has come up and I am still at work, trying to get away, get out the door, go the fuck home. It's not our real-life office but some kind of posh suburban setting that's more like a sprawling Colonial-accented ranch-style house with a meticulously manicured lawn. People keep coming to me, needing me to help them put out fires. I'm exhausted and exasperated. I can feel the cool, damp morning air settle in on my skin and clothes from the previous day and it's making me feel bottom-of-the-barrel awful.

My boss comes in, apparently straight from the bar across the street. I can't tell he's drunk until he announces he is and then starts acting completely crazy. He doesn't look like himself — dream boss is more squat and burly than real boss. He does something to a chair near me — grabs it and shakes it, maybe? — that is the final straw. I explode and leave.

When I finally get outside, I freak out because I can't find my car. Then I remember that that's because I carpooled in a bus to work from the location where my car was actually parked.

Moving

I am in a new apartment, one that's quite roomier than my current home, but one that's still strewn with moving materials and my usual packrattery. I walk around and look at the place with some confusion; I vaguely remember my ex helping me move into the place, and I feel guilty about having asked him to do so. But mostly I can't remember how I picked this place, or why. It's sufficient enough, and I'm digging the roomier bedroom, but as I walk outside onto the stoop, I see some things lining the stairs that I know are not mine, and that would seem to have belonged to a previous tenant.

There's an owl figurine, and some kind of dusty flowerpot. I get the distinct feeling — the fear — that the woman who lived here before me (I can feel that it's a woman) must have died in the apartment. I wonder how she died. And why I got to move in so quickly.

I am suddenly struck with another fear — how easy is this place to break into? I peer into the bedroom window and see my bed, and wonder who else could have been watching. I don't feel unsafe, necessarily, but I also feel like I might be at risk. Especially since I have no idea where these apartments are located and their reputation for safety. They seem nice enough, but looks can always deceive...

Then I remember my old apartment and can't recall ever giving my building manager any notice that I was going to be moving out. I imagine him and his wife walking into my empty, echoing living room and wondering where I've rudely run off to.

Marauding

I'm with my sister and a few other people. We're dressed in what can only be described as rejects from the Mad Max costume line.

As we drive through a field, we hear of a group of marauders running through the area. That's our cue to intercept the group and kill them.

We come upon a band of middle-aged and elderly suburbanites walking across a grassy meadow. There are the balding males with bermuda shorts, polos and sandals on. There are one or two grandmotherly figures in the group wearing pop beads and obscenely bright floral tops.

My sister, who is right next to me, has already pulled out her weapon. She's ready to roll.

I pull out an elongated knife (or maybe it's a short sword) and hop off the vehicle. We circle around the group that has now reacted like a herd of cattle. They're facing outward, wide eyed and panicked.

From the left, someone starts hacking into the group and I know it's go-time. Quickly, I dispatch two with a few deep cuts. They go down with very little noise and almost no blood issuing from the wounds.

As I circle around the back of the group, I see my sister bending down over an old woman who is on the ground near breathless after screaming, searching frantically for a way to get out of there. I'm strangely passive to her fear and nearly laugh as my sister asks her "do you want to go quickly?"

She repeats the question a few times before the woman finally nods. My sister steps on her chest and begins cutting in a way that would not bring quick death. The woman never screams. In fact, she lays there looking up at my sister patiently awaiting her last moment.

I come upon a middle-aged guy with his gut hanging out significantly over his shorts who continues to face me even as I circle him and says to me, "I never knew you were so good with those weapons." I slice into him twice very quickly. He drops to his knees as blood starts seeping into his mouth. As he falls over, he asks, "are you good with all of them?"

"Half," I reply. "I'm good with about half."

He nods and expires.

Space cadet

Amber and I are in a space shuttle. It's weird, because it's just a giant, open, cylindrical space lined with padding and wires and other spacey things. We're not strapped in. We're just kind of hanging out. And whoever is driving the space shuttle — later I'll see that it's one of our photo editors — is having trouble getting the thing into space.

We'll feel a rumble and then see from the tiny windows that we've got liftoff, and we'll see the earth beneath us begin to rotate (I doubt this is how actual shuttles lift off) only to, a few seconds later, find ourselves on the ground, outside the shuttle, waiting on the technicians to fix whatever problem we're having.

At one point, we're sitting near train tracks and I start telling Amber all about how Regina Spektor read a short story written by one of my other friends, and how she loved it, and halfway through, I realize I'm telling Amber her own story and I feel so embarrassed and ashamed.

I look over and see the aforementioned photo editor tossing big crates around outside the cockpit in order to solve whatever takeoff problems we're having.

Then we're back on the shuttle. I have some vague memory of us storing food in a tiny fridge even though none of the other passengers thought to bring anything. I feel slightly gluttonous because of it.

We have liftoff again. It occurs to me that we are probably going to die on this shuttle, and I suddenly want very much to be off the shuttle or to wake up (I realize I'm dreaming, but it doesn't go lucid on me because I can't control anything). Once again, the ground outside starts spinning around us as we rise toward the sky. I imagine with horror of what it must be like to be in a shuttle explosion. One minute things are fine, and the next ... what? Does everything just get white hot and you stop existing? Death makes no sense to me, even in my dreams.

I wince as we meet the horizon and rise up through the atmosphere. Out the window there is blackness and stars. And then everything kind of happens in a montage — as I'm standing there, looking out the window and thinking about the relative pointlessness of space travel, I see what human space traveling has wrought on the galaxy (I see giant oil rig things on distant planets; it's unclear if it's Earthlings who struck out to look for oil, or if it's just the technology we shared with other cultures in the galaxy). And while it's really freaking cool seeing all that crap, I feel that at any minute the whole thing's going to explode and I'm going to die.