Neil was roommates with Lewis Hamilton and had become close friends with him. They’d hang out, go to parties together. Jesse, Henry, Kevin and I, and maybe someone else, met up with them in Las Vegas, where a Grand Prix was being held. Lewis was very friendly and spent hours with us. He asked me about my mom, and said he was in town for the race. After he left, we talked about how amazing it was that we’d just spent the afternoon with him. Someone pointed out that Lewis’s mom had a young son, who was effectively Lewis’s dad. The filial math didn’t seem quite right to me.

“You mean stepdad,” I said.

“No, no. Dad.”

It didn’t occur to me that the correct term was brother or stepbrother.

We were in a shop and a bad heavy metal tune came on. I wanted to tell Kevin how bad I thought it was. I turned to him and found him behind the counter, ringing up customers for some reason. “What is this? Don Dokken?” I said. Kevin just rolled his eyes slightly at me and continued working the register.

Jesse and I made our way to some blackjack tables. “What are these for?” I asked him, thinking I was being very witty. He only smiled a bit. I didn’t feel like playing but he did, so we sat down. I dreaded the possibility of losing money. We each put a hundred dollars on the table. The dealer sat on the floor behind the table and fussed with the shuffle machine, which she held in her lap. It was taking a strangely long time, so we left. I must have wandered away first, and then met up with Jesse upstairs where the others were.

“Did you take my money off the table?” I asked him.

“No!” he said indignantly.

I was furious. I went down to try to find it and got lost in a maze of similar-looking gaming rooms and hallways. At one point I climbed up some stairs to find a swimming pool, the water cresting at the level of the floor and splashing around my feet. “At least I found the pool,” I thought, and wondered if the others would be interested in going for a swim. As the dream ended, I was either saying or thinking “I’m lost!” and I felt somehow that my friends would hear me.

There was a flying object low in the sky, not really a plane, but something like a blimp with wings. It began to do slow loop-the-loops. Often in my dreams, the planes crash. Not this time.

I had been in Vegas for a few days and it occurred to me that I had not gambled at all—I had not once sat down at a table, nor wagered on a game, nothing. I felt vaguely proud, but also perplexed. What had I been doing there? It had been some kind of event I think, possibly work-related, but also involving friends.

Toward the end of my dreams I wondered about the motivations of Islamist terrorists.

Dreamt I took a long, complicated car ride to Las Vegas. I was there with Sara, Jake and some friends of Jake’s, some of whom I knew, some who I didn’t, or at least didn’t remember. One was handicapped somehow – a paraplegic, maybe, confined to a wheelchair. Jake organized everyone around a conference room table and had us read an epic poem. The poem consisted of dictionary definitions of selected words. I soon grew tired of the exercise and said so, got up, and left to go to a casino. I felt a bit guilty about abruptly ending the reading so I tried to be good-humored about it. Jake surmised that because I had left, I must have figured out what the poem was about. He spoke knowingly to me about it. All the defined words, it turns out, were related, and they formed the substance of the poem – it was about sex.