Aw hell . . . I don’t mean to sound sentimental, but I did dream a dream the other night, and it was what you might call a sentimental dream. It wasn’t my idea. My brain produced the images and I was held hostage in my own dream world, was strapped inside my dream body like a ride at an amusement park! All I could do was look on and let my dream self move and talk, and so on. I had no control. It was hell.

Y’all ever seen ‘A Clockwork Orange’? Well:

Yeah, uh . . . anyway. . . .

As you do, I appeared suddenly in my dream. I was on a very long escalator in D.C. I was going down. There must have been thousands of stairs on this escalator. I reckoned it would take me a half hour to get from the top to the bottom. The escalators on either side were packed full. Maybe four or five people ahead of me was a girl with short red hair and a red sweater. She turned around and looked up at me. It was my ex-girlfriend from a long time ago—the one whom I loved very dearly, and who haunts my dreams from time to time!! She was back to haunt me. And there we were, two dream people, trapped on a molasses-slow escalator on our way to some subterranean concrete bunker, way the hell down there.

She made a face of recognition. I reckoned her face would swiftly sour but it didn’t. I reckoned next that she would come up to me and punch me in the face. Instead she smiled and ascended the escalator, asking the people there to let her pass, and she stood on the stair below me and hugged me. I had to bend down to reach her. She kept hugging me so I kept on hugging her too. Her sweater was fuzzy.

My dream self said, “I think about you all the time. I’ve missed you so much. Hell, man, it’s killing me.”

Dream ex-girlfriend said, “I’ve missed you too.”

I told her that I knew she wasn’t real and that this was just a dream, and she said it didn’t matter. I thought, yeah, I guess it doesn’t matter. What’s the difference, anyway? I got to hang out with my friend in my head. If that’s all I had, then I would take it . . . so I took it!

I jolted awake at 4 a.m. It was was still dark outside. My room was freezing but I was covered in sweat. I felt sad as hell just then. I felt rotten and fucked out. I got up and fed Dante and drank a bunch of water.

I went back to sleep!

I’m sure I’ll see her again soon. She was a great person. I miss her a lot~!!