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Imaginary Keith pops from a dream, his eyes darting.  He takes in the room’s sounds then slides out of bed, hoping to get as far away from it as possible.  Some dreams are better run from, even in waking life.

“You okay?” I ask.  I’d watched as Imaginary Keith tried to stop the water from leaking out of the pressurized tank.  I’d watched as he’d realized there was nothing he could do.  Watched, over his shoulder, as the water level dropped in the clear plastic tank, the largest of the tanks, installed near the bottom of the stadium bleachers.  I’d watched as the last of the water sprayed out, soaking Imaginary Keith, and he looked up, frightened of what was next.  I’d watched as the stadium seats, literally thousands of them all perched above my friend, ten stories high, began to slowly sway back and forth, now that the weight of the water was gone from their base.  And then I’d watched in horror, right along with him, as the entire stadium leaned out once too far and began it’s fall to the ground, taking with it the thousands of people who would surely be killed.  And I’d watched, in the dream, as Imaginary Keith, stunned and unbelieving, simply stepped off of the bleachers in an unconscious act of self-preservation.

And then the entire bleachers hit the ground and the thousands of people were dead, and I watched as Imaginary Keith slowly sat down, his back to a wall, staring at nothing as he tried to understand what had just happened.

“You okay?” I ask again.  He dresses quickly.  He is trying to get away.

“Yea, sure.  Why,” he says, avoiding eye contact.

“I saw what happened.  It wasn’t your fault.  Besides, what kind of dream has water ballast engineering holding up an entire stadium?  That’s just foolish.”

“Did you see the last part?  When people started asking me what had happened.  When they started saying that I caused it.  Did you see that part?”

“Yes.” Some mornings I wish I wouldn’t watch his dreams.  Some mornings I wish I would just be more like Imaginary Keith, getting dressed quickly and walking away, hoping to forget.

“It’s not about the falling or the blame,” he says.  “It’s not about looking up and seeing 5000 doomed people silhouetted against a perfectly blue sky.  It’s about the questions.  It’s about the people and their questions.  It’s about people only looking for the answers that they want to hear.”

I’m not sure what to say.

“I just can’t answer anyone’s questions,” he says.  “I’ll never have the answers they expect to hear.”

For two hours I drift in and out of sleep.  Dozens, maybe even a hundred dreams pass through my head, all unconnected with each other, yet somehow tiny magnifications of my waking life.  I wake after each dream, enough to know only that I am dreaming, then roll over, pulling the blankets tight to keep the cold, fan air from reaching in and waking me, and fall back asleep.

It is literally a dream job.  I am at work.  From 5 to 7 it is my job to dream, and I attack my job with enthusiasm.  I love my job.  I must work fast.  So many dreams.  So little time.

I meet a friend at an airport, unexpectedly. My plane is boarding and he is heading across the lobby, back to his boys.  Necessity pulls us apart, but we are still smiling and laughing.  I watch him disappear behind a door, then walk through the gates.

Layers of something.  Soft to the touch. Cotton towels, maybe.  White towels, between thicker layers of color.  Yellow and light green.

I step gently onto the stack of hay, hoping to reach some cobwebs high in the eaves of a house.  A friend has me by the wrist, but it is not enough. The hay gives loose and I fall, pulling my friend over with me.  But we twist and jump, and the hay cushions our landing.

Water is running and shooting up in the air, all around me.  It is like a river cast in cement.  I walk carefully across, stepping from concrete stone to concrete stone. I wake, dry, missing both the sound and the mist in my face.

As I slip my laptop into it’s bag I notice that it has been switched.  It looks the same, but is smaller.  Someone has gone to great lengths to deceive me. I sneak around the dream, looking for my laptop and the person who has made the switch.  I think of my stories, in someone else’s hands.  When I wake up, it is hard to know whether I feel determined or scared.

Dreaming of winning a lottery is more tiring then you might imagine.  You toss and turn all night, thinking of a thousand ways to give away so much money.  In the morning, when you finally wake up, not only are you very tired, but you’re still broke.

And then it hits you.  If you ever do win the lottery, you will invent a game called Tired and Broke, which you will pass out to everyone all over the world when they have a baby, like some people do now with cigars.  You will have so much money that you will buy the Gideon Bible Company, so that every tiny little free Bible in the world can be replaced with your new game.  Travelers, alone and feeling forgotten, will be drawn together, as they shuffle around on the concrete walkways of their cheap motel, looking out over the parking lot for someone who wants to play.

Hints of Imaginary Keith’s dream were still on his face as he slowly ate a bowl of oatmeal this morning.  Hints of being a prisoner of war and watching people die slowly from dysentery, starvation, and neglect as they all think of an impossible escape.  Hints of his job in the prison camp, which was to toss one book after another up to another prisoner on a high platform, who would then turn and toss the book back down into a big fire, kept alive by the unending supply of books.  In Imaginary Keith’s eyes, I can see the part of the dream where he risks his life to hide a dictionary, so that he has something to read later, when his shift is over.  I see in his eyes the pain as the prison guard finds the book and rips off the cover, throws it in the fire, and then hands the book back to Imaginary Keith.

It’s sort of hard to imagine, but if you can picture Borders being turned into a gulag you’re halfway there.

In the end, none of it matters, as both prisoners and guards see that they have been labeled expendable - a large bomb, as big as a truck, is seen sitting next to the burning pile of books.  No one knows where it has come from or how it got there, but everyone in the dream knows exactly who it was that put it there.

The timer on the bomb is ticking down, and at first glance, shows just under three minutes until detonation.  There is no where to run.  Even if the prisoners had the strength, there is no time to get far enough away.  In Imaginary Keith’s eyes, I can see the part of the dream where he runs his hand over the dictionary, feeling for the missing cover.  I can see him focus in on the book, blocking out the madness all around him, until he collapses to the ground.  And then I see him open the book, and watch as his finger slowly moves down the page, searching for a word he doesn’t even know he is looking for.