My dad was ailing and yet he was driving somewhere with my brother and me in the car. At a certain point he became incapacitated - not exactly unconscious, but suddenly unable to operate the car. I reached over from the back seat and did my best to steer us to safety, asking my brother to step on the brakes. We managed to pull off the road into a strip mall parking lot in our old hometown, Storrs, Connecticut.

We were indoors suddenly, with other people around us. My dad was slipping in and out of some kind of trance-like, near-death state. Someone asked him, "What's teap?"

"It's peach-flavored tea," he replied authoritatively. I viewed this as a sign that his mental faculties were still strong.

Then he began to describe a fancy dish he'd had, or seen, or was anticipating eating, which consisted of five kinds of small shellfish impaled on the spokes of a kind of radiating fork. He called this dish the "hand of god." My sister-in-law Amy was there and immediately corrected him, saying that in fact "the hand of god" was a phrase used to describe a controversial soccer goal scored by the Argentine player Diego Maradona in the 1986 World Cup against England, in which he deflected a ball into the goal with his hand.

I dreamt I saw a drone up in the sky. This was the night after I think I saw one in real life. In the dream it was darker but still small, jagged-looking. It flew lower and lower and closer and closer to me - it seemed that it knew I was watching it, or knew I was thinking about it, and this compelled it to come closer. I was afraid and rueful that I'd dared to notice it at all. It made a few harassing passes, a bit like a bee. When it was a few feet from my face it opened a mechanized mouth full of arrowhead-shaped metal teeth. I was terrified it would bite me of course, but when it didn't it occurred to me that its purpose was to open my third eye. It hovered right above my forehead and somehow coaxed my third eye from the middle of my brow. When it opened the drone placed a contact lens in it.

I was at a concert by a single woman, sitting cross-legged at the side of the stage. I had a guitar and wanted to play along but knew it would not be appropriate. But then the performer handed out guitars for people to accompany her so I played along to her version of "El Paso," which she was playing in the unusual key of C#.

I was on a trip with friends to Boston. At night we had to go from Cambridge to the city and that involved a very long ferry ride under a tiny moon. It was Vegas too, somehow. The Philadelphia Eagles were playing a preseason game inside a huge casino. They were winning and looked great. There were vague characters who seem to have been old classmates but whom I understood to be current and former coworkers. One woman revealed that she'd betrayed me in some personnel shakeup matter, and began to cry, saying, "I don't know why I just told you that." She said she did it because I deserved it on some level. I was forgiving yet tried to defend myself against her charges. Jesse was there and we had a beer and began to talk about what was going on.

Strange and very vivid dream about my mom, in which she was communicating with me from the dead. I was leaving on some trip, getting ready to go to the airport, and I was being sent off by others (including my dad, who was alive in the dream), with some ceremony, as though everyone knew this was to be a profound and meaningful voyage. The fact that I'd also embarked on a mysterious dialog with my mom was of a piece with the trip itself, and people seemed to be aware of that, too. It was hard for me to tell if my mom was happy or not, or approving of me or not. At one point I think I asked her to confirm that she loved me. The communication seemed to phase in and out, and though she was occasionally visible before me we never were conversing eye-to-eye. Generally, I perceived her as an overwhelming, supernatural presence permeating my mind and observing my actions. In the end I realized that I could communicate even more directly with her by drawing pictures of hats. I drew several hats - bowler hats with narrow brims - and was not very satisfied with how they looked. However, I knew my mom understood something in each stroke of my pen. I was compelled to draw a minimalist face on one hat, with simple strokes representing the mouth, nose, eyes.

I was at some college where a famous writer was an English professor. I'd heard that his favorite piece of advice was this: "Every story must have an alias. Why not you?" I took this to mean a story should be written from one's own point of view, or at least be based on one's own experiences.

At this college, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh were members of the faculty. I was hanging out with my dad and we spotted Phil entering a building with his bass, possibly on his way to teach a class. My dad said, "Look who that is," and walked over to introduce himself. I knew that Phil was very guarded about his privacy so I was worried that this would not go well. Some bodyguard or assistant tried to intercept my dad before he got to Phil. My dad persisted and finally got Phil's attention. Phil was trying to tell him to leave him alone, refusing to shake his extended hand. Then my dad was back by my side. He told me that Phil had hit him. Now he was lying in some kind of bed or stretcher, stricken, with a pane of broken glass extended over his body. I understood this to represent his glasses, and that they had been shattered when Phil hit him.

I was attending a high school reunion, somewhat reluctantly. My old friend Bill Suits was there. I recognized Colin O'Rourke, sitting on a couch. I went over to shake his hand and he said he didn't remember me. I said, "Well, we didn't like each other that much," wryly, out of the corner of my mouth. At one point I found myself alone in a room with Mike Simms, a notorious asshole. (He used to go to keg parties held by classmates, drink their beer, and report them to the police after he'd left.) I figured I should say hello so I said hello. He kind of grunted and turned around.

Then the reunion was outside, on a hill that resembled the front yard of the house I grew up in. There was some vague sexual tension among the classmates, the same tension that might have existed when we were seven years old and didn't know what such a thing meant. Jenny Allen was there. I understood that the event had been organized by Melissa Ladd.

I was also skiing, in what appeared to be a parallel, concurrent, dream; or perhaps it was a dream segment that formed a desultory interlude between one part of my dream and the next. I was wearing what appeared to be cross-country skis, long and narrow, and I had no poles. Someone was taking me and someone else around the bunny slopes, as though we'd never skied before. I wanted to protest, to say that I knew enough to ski down a real trail. The snow was thick and lumpy, late-season snow.

The reunion ended with lengthy goodbyes and complicated arrangements for transportation back home, or to a hotel, or to some ensuing event - it was not clear. Suddenly I was across the street, with Sara. There was a house and a vast field full of Jews of various ages and cultures, some orthodox, some young and modern. A rock band was playing, with the younger people dancing and the older, bearded men tolerating it from the fringes. It was some sort of protest event directed at the activities across the street, from where I'd come. Apparently the high school reunion was held under the auspices of the PLO or some other pro-Arab, anti-Israeli organization. I realized that the people who lived in the house on the Jewish side were kibbutzers, and this was some kind of disputed territory, like the Golan Heights. We snuck around the house and tried to avoid being caught by the occupants, who were preoccupied by the general festivities. It was a beautiful, modern, bourgeois home filled with art and books. We examined a thin volume about art, with colorful reproductions, and I fumbled with it nervously as I tried to put it back in its place on the shelf before someone walked in. We got out without being seen.