Strange dream in which S. and I got to know Ivanka Trump. She was nicer than we expected. It struck me that she was just like everyone else, really.

I came upon a journal that my grandfather had written about my grandmother’s mental problems. In real life she’d been an alcoholic and a depressive, but in the dream it was something more debilitating. He described her as having the faculties of a child. He wrote in the kind of old-fashioned cursive you’d find on a banquet menu. As I read a few pages it occurred to me for the first time that he was ashamed of her.

Then I was in some kind of class where we were to take turns performing an anecdote or a stand-up routine. I hadn’t prepared enough. I had written down a few ideas but I wasn’t sure how to elaborate on them. One was “that time I saw a piece of construction equipment explode in front of me.” One of those “tank-like things with a plow.”

We took a trip from somewhere in the Gulf States to Syria to Paris. We realized we couldn’t take Syrian Airways because “Bashar Al-Assad runs the country.” Sara was wearing a headdress and her face was painted light blue.

Later I took a psychedelic drug, and as has happened in other dreams I felt it coming on very, very strong. I was tripping like crazy.

There was some kind of work event, every employee gathered in a sort of meeting house that was open along the side. I approached from the lawn outside, feeling alone and outcast. A basketball was bouncing around among the crowd, like a beach ball at a concert. It came my way. I bounced it off my fist and it flew into a trophy shelf on the opposite wall. The trophies—the agency's awards I guess— were all made of glass or crystal, and they shattered and fell to the floor. I cringed and clutched my head, trying to show remorse. Work turned into school. I was working on a project with M. B. Some kind of art project.

I was sitting with a group of people and Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager. There was a ping-pong table nearby and someone asked him if he wanted to play. He was a bit coy but sounded game. I asked him, “Who was the best ping-pong player in Led Zeppelin?” He answered straight away but it was unintelligible. I asked him again. I couldn’t understand him again, but pretended that I did.

M. R. and I got on an elevator going down and he gave me a chewable narcotic that he promised was strong. I popped it into my mouth and before the doors opened again I was high as hell, and told him so. I could feel the drug pulsing through my veins and the euphoria flooding my brain. He just nodded, like, see what I mean? We sat with a group of friends in the waiting room of some institution, maybe a hospital. A cop-like figure was asking us pointed questions, like what’s that in your mouth? We managed to evade him but I don’t know where we went from there.

I was at a restaurant with my dad at the top of a medieval tower by the sea.

I tried out for a job as the caretaker of a big sailing ship that ferried tourists around some islands.

I was watching TV with S. and a woman singer was fronting a band of heavyset, bald guys who looked exactly alike. “I wonder if they’re brothers,” I said. It was some kind of protest event, maybe anti-Trump.

Disturbing high school dream. I had the sense I was surrounded by more diligent, optimistic, and popular kids, and that I would end up scorned, forced to desperately justify my presence.