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  • We couldn't find the dog so I called the newspaper. He was there, they said, though I didn't know why. He had a tag and had only been outside for a few minutes. There was no fee but I would have to come get him right now, they said.

    I hung up and told my mother I was not going to be the one to go get him this time. She started yelling and I told her I had made forty phone calls on behalf of that dog over the past two days. She didn't care, kept screaming, coming after me.

    I left the room furious and remembered we didn't have a dog.

  • a red cord I was expected to walk across. There was a guideline to hang on to but everything spun and swayed. I could not help but look down to see what my feet were doing - I had no control over them, and terrible balance, and I knew I would fall. Why couldn't I see how far away the ground was?

  • Back in middle school and I could not find any of the right books. J. Michael sat in front of me and he kept moving his desk up so I couldn't prop my feet on the rack under it. I knew I would be in deep shit about the math book especially.

  • someone's penis had been shortened by three inches but I don't know why, or whose.
  • This one was incredibly vivid, almost a lucid dream.

    It began with my mom and I standing in our garage talking; we looked out the window and saw some neighborhood people trying out our old, decrepit basketball goal. We went out and talked to them, kinda got to know each other, and then I took some of them into my backyard to show them around. Night fell.

    We were standing in front of the dog pen, and I looked up to the west and saw the constellation Orion. But there was something wrong with the star that was his left foot - it was dancing crazily, juking back and forth. I rubbed my contacts, thinking it was something in them, but when I looked back at the star, it was still going.

    The tiniest bit of fear began to creep up my spine. As I watched the star, it suddenly became apparant that it was moving in a circular motion. I looked closer, and the star became the point of the needle of an altimeter. The altimiter was rapidly spinning down to some predestined altitude.

    This frightening vision was suddenly interrupted by a large explosion from the other side of the fence that separated my yard from the one next door. The explosion knocked me back at least 10 yards. What happened after that was vague; I think I might have died.

    I woke up, blinking in the light streaming in my window, relieved that I wasn't dead. As I got up and started moving about the house, a profound sense of dread began to grow in me. Something was wrong with the light outside. I stared out the back door into a sky that was incredibly bright but with no sun. It was overcast, but the clouds were this pinkish-orange color. It was so unnatural that I new immediately that the world was ending.

    I noticed that the answering machine light was blinking with four messages, so I hit "play". The first was my mom from work, telling me of all the signs of the apocalypse that were occuring. As I listened, dumfounded, my good friend Nathan called. I didn't realize he was leaving a message until it was too late for me to pick up. At first this didn't seem so bad until I tried calling some people, and was getting all kinds of weird error messages. The phone lines were all screwed up, and there was no chance of getting Nathan nor my fiance on the phone again.

    Feeling profoundly alone, I turned on the TV to check for news. I then opened up the entertainment center doors to turn on the amp and the tuner, and found my mom there, curled up and wrapped in a blanket. For one horrible moment, I thought she was dead. Fortunately she wasn't. I helped her get out of the cabinet. Then I really woke up, to the profound sense of relief that the world was not ending after all.

    I hate apocalypse dreams.

    In the beginning, I was born. Then, I experienced around 10-12 years of life as a new person.

    Now, obviously, I did not dream 10-12 complete years of experience. Rather, I dreamed a few passages in the life of this person. This created the illusion of having passed through 10-12 years. Because this was a dream, the illusion was perfect. My mind was encased by it; wherever my mind wondered, it created whatever was necessary to make me feel completely and wholly that I was this other person with all of his experiences. I was unaware that I was dreaming.

    Most of the time, I was completely unaware that I was previously a person named "Dan". Occasionally, deep within my subconscious, I was aware that I had once been this other person. At times when I was aware of this, I felt as if I were deep in meditation, or in that strange state inbetween awake and dreaming where the mind sometimes does strange things.

    During the dream, I reflected that being almost completely unaware of my previous life as Dan was very similar to the way a person can forget things when their environment radically changes. The way an adult can forget what it's like to be a kid, the way a person barely surviving in the wilderness can forget what it's like to be in civilization, or even the way scientists stationed in Antarctica for a year forget then find they must relearn upon return to the rest of the world. The memories are there, somewhere, but they're so infrequently accessed that they become dim and obscured. It was also similar to the way the the world can radically change within a few moments when tripping on acid, except the moments are very long.

    Somewhere around age 10-12, I was born yet again, and started life as a third person. I lived their life for many years as well. I'm not sure how old, but I dimly recall it being older than the second person. Again, my mind was completely engulfed in this person.

    Again, as this person I reflected on where the second person (who had a name that I cannot remember) had gone. I did not think the second person had died, but I was unsure. I certainly had no memory of him dying, but it was certainly possible that his existence had ended without my being aware of it.

    As the third person, I was more aware of the second person than I was of Dan; indeed, I'm not sure if I could even remember Dan at all at this point.

    Still, I felt that the he still existed, somewhere, somehow, and that eventually I would return to living his life. I suspected that at some point, my perceptions would shift and change, and I would no longer be the third person, but would again be the second person. That, as the second person, I would have only the vaguest subconscious memories of the third person; I would again be completely absorbed in the life of the second person.

    I did not reflect on how or why any of this might be happening.

    I also reflected on the extent to which Dan, the second person, and the third person were one in the same. They were definitely different people; they had their own lives, their own experiences, yet we shared a common mind. We had many of the same tendencies, and developed (somewhat) similarly, but not identically.

    Not long after that, I awoke, and found myself again living the life of Dan, and only being dimly aware of the existence of these other two people on the fringes of my subconscious.


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