We were staying in a treehouse. It was part of an elaborate complex, high in the sky, spanning several trees. Other people we knew were staying there. It was for some kind of occasion, but I can’t remember what. A calamity occurred, possibly a hurricane. There might have been a fire. As a result, all the ladders to the treehouses were destroyed. No one could get back down. We waited and wondered when we’d get rescued, and how. Maybe helicopters? Eventually I found myself back on solid ground. I don’t know how I got there. But there was one woman still stuck up there. She’d lost her mind and you could hear her prattling on to herself, like a crazy upstairs neighbor.

PC and I had joined with a group of other people to rent an apartment for a semester of school. The idea was to save money and concentrate on our studies. There was a TV that wouldn’t work right unless you paid for it, by putting money into it I guess, the way pay TVs used to work at bus stations. If you didn’t pay it made an awful staticky noise that got louder and louder until you turned it off or fed it money. We wanted the TV to work so we could watch Yankee games. There was something the matter with A-Rod in the dream, not what’s really wrong with him but something parallel. There was great doubt as to whether he’d play again, whether he’d be any good. He’d been struggling with some kind of all-consuming injury, something that seemed not just physical but maybe spiritual. Crowds of reporters descended upon him as he emerged for spring training, ready to practice and to test himself for all to see.

Frustrating morning dream about some dreary task that never got done, that I had to plan for and accomplish before moving on somehow.

I was in some building, a cross between an office building for work and some kind of school building, with dormitories on some floors, classrooms and offices on others. I waited for the elevator to go up. The doors opened and an unconscious man fell out, his body curled fetally across the threshold. I took him by the shoulders and looked at him. Blood was coming from somewhere. I shouted over my shoulder at some people, “Call 911! Call 911!” full of purpose, feeling like I was doing the right thing.

The bartender offered to sell me coke and I said yes. He handed me a little folded paper packet and told me eighty bucks. I had a hard time finding four twenty-dollar bills. I thought I had them but then there were three. I counted them again and they were just a bunch of ones. Finally I thought I'd assembled them, and I handed them to the bartender.

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.