It was the last day of junior year of college and time to move out. I had a small room in a nice 5-room apartment with Seol, Hugo, Peter, and Eric. As I started to pack my stuff up, I thought about how quickly the year had gone. It seemed, in fact, that only yesterday it was October and the entire year of school was ahead of me. Well, I thought, time does fly when you're having fun. As I carried a load of stuff out to the living room, which was partitioned off from the foyer by a ballustrade of sorts, I saw that Eddie and Seol were heading out. I decided to accompany them onto the bus to the airport. We walked over to the bus stop two blocks away on a beautiful Chicago night. After several false starts, our bus finally arrived... only to go straight past us. We started waving around, sticking our thumbs out in the hopes of flagging down the next one. It took about four buses for ours to finally come again and we got on.

Suddenly, I was transported alone by bus to the front of a studio where they were shooting a documentary about slavery. I joined up with four black men who were playing the part of free northerners. We dressed up in period clothing, complete with old-time rifles. The studio itself was a large fenced cage several feet deep in mud. We walked around to the back where construction was still being finished. Out of a rip in the back fence came one of the slave actors with a modern handgun, shooting at us. He missed and ran back inside, so we chased him in for several yards, my coworkers shooting with their own modern handguns. I was shocked to see the pistols, and then I realized I just witnessed a moment of gang warfare. My coworkers ordered the construction workers to patch up the hole, and then started yelling at the guy who first got shot at. They figured he must have done something stupid to anger the other gang.

We started walking around the next corner, and I was transported alone inside the cage. A bunch of "slaves" were either working or sleeping, but they paid no attention to me. I waded to the middle part of the set, which was partitioned off by another fence. I saw a "slave" couple making love in the mud in front of cameras, and I thought they were going pretty far for realism. I got on a small raft with Mae, which is odd because I haven't talked to her in real life for months. We floated silently towards the front of the set, past a house on the left, and then the awkwardness with Mae was so strong that I swam the last few feet. Since I can't really swim in real life, I was surprised I made it to the door without drowning. I exited.

I was in the back seat of a taxi now with Stacey, and we were discussing a picnic we could have that weekend. Asha got in at a later point and she and Stacey started talking about fashion, so I tuned out. We got back to my apartment where the rest of the fellows were sitting around playing poker and waiting for us. Stacey talked excitedly about the picnic, whereupon I blurted out that I had already agreed to go to a barbeque (as I had in real life). All the fellows booed me, and I realized the picnic was meant for all of us (I had thought it was just Stacey, me, and Asha). Now sufficiently guilt-tripped, I agreed to go to the picnic instead.

This might have been a separate dream, but I was now standing in a bookstore looking at the latest "Myth" book by Robert Aspirin and Jody-Lynn Nye. It was a huge, large-print, white-covered book - unlike the others in the series - so I decided to wait for the paperback to come out. I instead picked up a huge, 2000+ page paperback autobiography by Dave Barry. As I flipped rapidly through, I thought I saw the UW-Madison symbol next to a heading saying "How to be a Leader in Madison." I then spent several minutes flipping back and forth to find that page. The index mentioned a later chapter on page 2000 when his family decided to settle in another part of Wisconsin (reminiscent of the biography of Ole Bull). Everything was written Dave Barry-style of course, so the first sentence had a full phonetic pronounciation for "antique furniture" ... it was funnier at the time than it seems now. In any case, I finally found the part about Madison in an earlier page, and it turns out he was just visiting. But during that time he was asked to be a leader of something small, which I now forget.

My sister Roberta showed up in the store and said it was time to leave. Then I woke up.

posted by Larry at 8:00 AM