Dream about work that involved an apartment—moving work-related files into an apartment.

There was a song with a video, an unofficial video, posted on YouTube. I think it was by the Flaming Lips. It was about an ordinary man's intrepid climb up Mt. Everest. In the dream the way up the mountain was paved with decrepit steps and walkways, like a vertical Great Wall of China.

I was at a Miles Davis concert. It was in a kind of semi-outdoor space, where the stage and some seats were under a canopy, like at Tanglewood or something, only smaller, like a wedding tent. Miles was playing a very distinctive, simple line on an electric bass. I don’t know where his horn was. This was like what he did late in his career, when he played the keyboard onstage. But this was late-’60s Miles, the music open and exploratory. S. was with me. We watched and I thought about him, about what he was doing and what he represented. We wandered to the back of the room and it became another room on the other side, with an identlical stage, a kind of mirror theatre. There Louis Armstrong was playing. He was in his element, with his longtime band. He was singing “Hello Dolly” and hamming it up and scatting and doing what he does. I thought about how Miles and Louis were two sides of something, connected in their opposition. It’s an obvious thought, too obvious and almost silly to express, except that it happened in a dream, and you’re innocent when you dream.

I was walking on a half-submerged branch in a lake, thinking to myself: All my life I’ve been pretending to be normal.

I was sitting with J.D., complaining about a redesign of the Y website. It was impossible to sign in—the user name and password section were non-functional, as though they were placeholders. I felt myself getting angry at J.C. about this, and as I was starting to say so to J.D., I suddenly noticed that he was sitting in a chair between us. I tempered my comments, not wanting to offend him, but I still said something like, “This is really fucked up.”

The Super Bowl had just taken place and there was that Monday-after-it feeling around town. People were talking about how the winning quarterback—I think it was Tom Brady—had done or said something regarding Nike. The events of the game had perhaps become mixed up with the ads somehow.

I was running to catch an MTA bus, except that it wasn’t New York City, it was more like Paris. The bus came at the top of a hill and went down toward a river, like the Left Bank goes down toward the Seine. As I rode it I realized I was hungry, and could eat anywhere I liked; I wondered where I could find great food; probably not along the big boulevards, I thought, but more likely in the side streets somewhere.

My bags were in the aisle. Three waiters who worked for the bus in some capacity got up and walked to the front, stepping over or around the obstacles. They leaned out the bus door and picked up glasses and bottles from tables on the street outside, and did so with acrobatic flair, like those showoff bartenders. Then I was sitting at a table with the waiters, and Jake and Kevin were there, and we talked to them about having gone to school in London back when there were riots in the streets.

I was in London, where there was some talk that they’d switch from the pound to the dollar. (It seemed like a terrible idea to me.) In a pub, something was playing on TV about a horse race. It then appeared that the broadcast was a replay of something that had happened right outside the pub, and then the screen became a window, and the corner of a horse racing track wound around the outside of the pub, elevated like a train track to second-story height, with the building on the inside of the corner. The pack of horses galloped by. In its midst were two official-looking people, a man and a woman, who were running alongside one of the horses and trying to guide it, as though it were going astray. They wore the sort of uniforms that airline check-in attendants do. They could not control the horse. It and two others bolted toward the window. I still understood that this was TV footage of something that had happened in the past, so I wasn’t worried. The horses crashed through into the pub and amid panicking customers. I wondered how many people were hurt, or died, in the catastrophe. I stood in the bathroom, which was off to the side and therefore out of harm’s way. I wondered if anyone had been lucky enough to be there the moment the horses had crashed in.