For the better part of the day I could not remember my dream at all - nothing about it, not an image, not an apprehension. Then I got a flash - I had spoken indiscreetly, unflatteringly, about someone behind their back. They'd heard me, and I was mortified. But I do not know who it was.

I was reading an anthology of several comic strips. The first one was written in, and set in, 1970. The character was describing his car, a beater of the period that he had trouble with but that got forty miles per gallon as long as he didn't drive it too fast. I thought about all the times I'd driven my cars too fast, and not gotten good enough mileage. There were at least two other cartoonists featured in the book. One was a woman with a particularly good one. Can't remember much about it, though.

I was at a party back in Connecticut, in a big, cluttered house, that had been going on for some time, maybe days. Finch arrived at a certain point and we were trying to remember whether one of us had loaned the other twenty dollars the night before to buy drugs. We couldn't figure it out so we let it go. Then it was seven o'clock in the morning. Everyone else was asleep but me and Jesse. I was reading the paper, a little annoyed and bewildered that I was up so early. Jesse was negotiating something with an official person, possibly Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. But this person soon became a woman.

Tremendous difficulty putting in contact lenses. One became large and spherical as I held it on the tip of my finger. It was a sort of anti-contact lens: it was eyeball-shaped, with a contact lens-sized hole just big enough to allow the optic nerve to come out of. I wondered how I was ever going to get this on my eye as I stood in a bathtub that was filling with bubbles.

The band reunited in a dirty house. There were two acoustic guitars, one without strings. The immense tedium of waiting for things to happen returned to me. Waiting for recording to start, waiting for band practice, waiting for the time to go to a gig. In a litter-strewn living room.

I was back at work, at my old job, after an absence for an unclear reason. I had been in charge of integrating a translation feature into Office Communicator. I kept trying to find Jim to ask him what the status was. I looked at it on my computer screen and it appeared to be working. John and Britt were there. Britt was telling me that a friend of hers had asked to go on a trip with her and she was annoyed, didn't want to go. Finally I found Jim as he was racing to catch his train. He said he could chat for a few seconds if I followed him. We entered a building that had a passageway to the underground station. I followed him down on the escalator, which was going alarmingly fast and was bowing and undulating under my feet. I wanted to ask him if there was anything more I should do.

I played a soccer game. I was on a team of guys my age playing a team of teenagers. They kicked our asses 4-0. Later, I recounted the game to someone. I emphasized how soundly we were beaten, making it a story of the old being inexorably eclipsed by the young. "The game started at 2 am and lasted for two and a half hours," I said, as though this made the kids' feat all the more remarkable. Then I relived the game in my head. I cursed myself for not taking more chances. I recalled making some successful passes but I wished I'd launched the ball at the goal a time or two. Then I was playing the game, but the circumstances shifted. Barack Obama was playing. So was George W. Bush. I imagined how terrible it would be if Bush were still president. He took a free kick. His personal assistant was assigned to play goalie.

A job mourning dream. Standing around with other doomed coworkers considering our prospects.