I had brought my old English professor Ross to a magic show. I knew of the magician somehow, knew him to be brilliant, and wanted to impress Ross. The first trick involved a naked woman, evidently covered in shit, walking up to Ross and grabbing at him, touching him. The trick, of course was that the woman was actually covered in chocolate.

The magician called me down to the stage as a volunteer. I was very confident and relaxed about it, sort of performing to the crowd myself. The magician instructed me to walk around the perimeter of the room, along an elevated, unprotected walkway. It turned out to be strewn with obstacles—things to step over or around, at the peril of falling off the wall. I navigated them with no trouble and was not scared.

“What music are you listening to these days?” the magician asked.

I could only think of lame, obvious replies. “Hendrix. David Bowie. Led Zeppelin. I guess kind of classic rock”—I cringed at myself using the phrase “classic rock.” “The Dead,” I added.

The trick was that at the end of my journey around the room, the magician produced a box full of cassette tapes of the artists I had mentioned. I realized that he’d accomplished the trick by culling the box from some selection of thousands of cassettes that had to include what I’d mentioned.

Dreamt I was 10 minutes late for the meeting on Tuesday with my boss (actually scheduled) to determine “responsibilities” for the coming month. Feeling guilty, I took a job with me—it was a physical job, in an old-fashioned job jacket—and brought it with me. She said something like, “Is this a good time? Do you have to take care of that job?” I paged through it, feeling slightly ashamed that I hadn’t beforehand. I looked at the instructions in the routing sheet and they didn’t seem unusual. “I don’t think it’s urgently hot,” I said.

The mood in the workplace was self-consciously celebratory and upbeat, like the hallways of the “Fame” school or something. Music played as employees arrived and greeted each other effusively.

At another point I was in a record store browsing through vinyl, and considering buying some though I knew it to be almost obsolete. The selection was limited, with only a few hundred albums in all, but an entire section divider was devoted to Marshall Crenshaw. I found a copy of the Wings’ Greatest Hits and scanned the tracklist, wondering if I should buy it. S. was with me.

I was reading messages that had been written by Microsoft on the occasion of the acquisition. They were printed on bricks in some public place or something. One said, “It is better to lose a national strategy and then to win it, than to win it right away.” I perceived that as their view of our acquisition, and their reasoning for letting it fail.

I dreamt I was planning on robbing a bank with CW and KC. When we got underway, in the morning, there were dirty coffee mugs strewn around the sidewalk. Bystanders and people from the bank watched us bemusedly. I felt horrible and guilty. I knew we were busted and that we’d be going to jail. I awoke in dread. It took me a few seconds to convince myself that it had been a dream.

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.