Sara and I were at some kind of overnight party, possibly in a foreign country. I woke up early because I heard the sound of someone playing a guitar. He was playing "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," and I was compelled to get up and take out my guitar and play along. The clock said something like quarter to nine. By the time I got to the living room where he was playing, the song was almost over. Someone else was accompanying him on an unplugged electric bass, which was inaudible to me. I got my guitar out anyway, my new Martin, and I started playing a few odd chords and riffs. The guy said, "Wow, you have a -" and he named the model of the guitar, but it was a word I'd never heard before, and can't remember now, though after he used it I noticed that it was printed on the headstock of the guitar, where you'd expect, and I said to him, "Yeah, lots of people have been telling me, hey, you have a -, but I didn't even know it, all I was thinking when I got it was, I like the way it sounds." For some reason he found this very funny, and I felt oddly proud of my nonchalant attitude about the specific model of my guitar. He introduced himself with a soul handshake and said his name was Julie Stone.

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"Julie Stone."

I was lying in bed in the morning and I had the idea to write a science fiction novel in which a severe disorder has infected certain people: they are incapable of discerning whether others are male or female. Somehow this throws the entire society in turmoil. All of gender and sexuality is put into question. Additionally, inanimate objects have gained not only consciousness but gender themselves. Toasters, cars, chairs, shoes, everything. It's all slowly gravitating toward full consciousness and sexuality. The people who suffer from the disorder are called Aniamata if they are male and Annamiata if they are female - those aren't clinical terms, those are their actual names once they are diagnosed.

Sara and I were driving into the wooded country to go to some sort of event, though it wasn't clear what it was. When we were near it, we saw a young man directing traffic, maybe directing cars to park in a field by the road. His head was shaved and bore a tattoo of a Swastika. I pointed this out to Sara with some concern, and she said something like, "At least it's not a red Swastika," as though authentic Swastikas were always red. I told her Swastikas were "always black" and she became annoyed that I was compelled to correct her. At some point we got out of the car and walked among crowds of people towards this event, or party, or whatever it was. When we arrived, there were rows and rows of booths set up, with people behind them, and the crowd just flowing in between them, and it was still unclear exactly what this was, except there were more and more skinheads and I realized we were at some kind of backwoods white supremacist convention. We were disgusted and decided to leave. On our way out, I noticed that Amy Winehouse was there, standing behind a booth. I figured she couldn't possibly know this was a racist event; she wouldn't be here if she did. She loves black music. And yet, was this some real aspect of her mysterious persona? On the path back out, we stopped and hung out with some people and I pointed back to the event and warned that it was racist, full of skinheads, and everyone listened with due concern.

In part of a later dream, my old schoolmate Chris L. told me he was in the NBA. I asked him how many minutes he played and he said about five.

"Five per game?" I asked.

"No, no. Five total. All time."

"Have you scored any points?"

"Yes, of course!" he said.

"Good. So at least you popped your cherry."

He laughed and said yes, he'd popped his cherry. This is particularly funny because Chris L. was one of the shortest kids in school.

I was in some fancy hotel with a swimming pool at the top. There was an enclosed pool that looked like any old pool in a gym and a pool that was in a loungy setting with a bar nearby, all potted palms and chrome appointments. I took the elevator up with a Hasidic Jew. Some disembodied narrator declared that the view of the ocean, which was visible from the glass elevator and through picture windows in each direction in the swimming lounge, as though the hotel were a tower in the water, had been "adjusted" to show what would be concealed by the curvature of the earth. I took a look and saw rough waters around us and an expanse of smooth, blue water beyond what should have been the horizon.

I was getting ready to record or something, with the old band, and the act of playing the guitar actually became the act of filling in a crossword puzzle. I was holding a guitar, but when it came time to play I saw I had a folded newspaper in hand, and a pen, and the way to produce notes on the guitar was to solve clues and, as rapidly and dexterously as possible, fill in answers in the correct spaces.

I dreamt of Van Morrison somehow, of his voice, of him singing.

I was with my mom and dad, hanging out in the morning trying to get ready for school. That vague anxiety of time slipping toward the day's obligations, obviously permeating my dream from a real-life awareness that it was getting to be time to get up. I contemplated buying a Saab. It was said they got 89 miles to the gallon. I considered bidding for one on some sort of eBayesque site. Suddenly Martin Scorsese's mother was with us. That matronly lady with the curly white hair and glasses who appears in his movies. She was telling us some funny story about men and women, how they interact socially, at parties, at dinners. "The most interesting men are always the ones who expect to be disciplined by their wives," she declared. It seemed to be something she was relating from her own experience, and it also seemed to be unquestionably true. I understood it to mean that when she flirted with men at parties, the ones who flirted back the best were the ones whose wives would later give them grief for it. A strange little syllogism. "No matter how you look at it!" I responded pointedly, somehow aware that what she said related to my mom's predilection for flirting and extramarital affairs, and hoping that my rejoinder would put an end to what could turn into an awkward conversation among us all.