I saw a girl I hadn't seen in a long time. She showed me her room, which was much cleaner and fancier than I ever would have imagined it to be. There was a framed black and white photograph on the wall which depicted, among other things, two apples. She said the apples represented two asses.

A little guy named John follows me around crowded hallways. At first, he's just kind of weird, but a slow hostility builds in him as he continues to pursue me. No one takes any notice of the fact that when I step into the air it takes a few seconds longer than usual for me to hit the ground. Slowly, the kids filter out of the halls and I'm alone with John, in a short section of hallway that ends in two big heavy double-doors that lead into a stairwell. Without saying anything, I deliver a vicious kick that sends John face-first to the floor. After hitting the ground, he's motionless. I duck behind the double doors just as a vice-principal turns the corner and rushes to inspect John's body. I watch for a second through the doors, which are still slightly ajar, but when I turn to go down the stairs, the doors close with a loud bang and the vice principal becomes aware of my presence. I jump into the air and start swimming.

As I feel the katana blade enter my right shoulder, I think, "Oh-- this is how my dad wants to teach me, by making me think it's a real life-or-death situation. If Hemingway knows what he's talking about, I shouldn't feel this wound for a few more minutes."

Playing in a one-off cover band with a bunch of much older dudes at a bar in who-knows-where Pennsylvania. My parents are there, and Roby. A girl I had a crush on senior year of high school shows up and I greet her. The drummer of this band I'm in is really tall and really serious about this show. He has long, meticulously-styled hair that's dyed dark black and he spends a lot of time setting up his drums and a mic for his vocals. I'm the lead vocalist of this band, but besides the first song (The power of love) I don't know what else we're supposed to be playing, and I don't know hardly any of the words to The power of love as it is. Of course, I don't consider the ramifications of these facts until the set has started and I'm mumbling into a microphone. The song begins and I feel that sickening feeling in my stomach that I've missed an obvious vocal cue and the audience knows it. Luckily, the front of the stage is covered in stacks of huge speakers and monitors. I waste some time trying to climb them, but they're too wobbly and seem like they might want to come down. Also luckily, we're playing first so hardly anyone is committed to watching us anyway, the audience are mostly either outside or sitting down on couches against the far wall of the room. The room is dirty, too. I can sort-of hear the drummer singing in the monitors, and he sounds pretty into it, which is fine with me. I do some silly flourishes on what I hear him say, then make my way to the front left corner of the stage and try and do Noel Fielding's Mick Jagger impersonation. The crowd seems more confused than amused, but they're not getting burly or anything. Four old punks (2 male, 2 female) walk in and stand right in front of the doorway-- deciding what they think of this band, I think. I tell one of the guys who is holding 2 home-made purses that he's got two purses made out of the same material my wife made a purse with.

Somehow I flew into Portland and arrived at a gas station. I wanted to go to a shop on _______ Street, but I had no idea how to get there, and the map drawn in blue Bic on a torn-up piece of loose-leaf didn't extend but a block or two past _______ Street. I took it out and looked at it again, just in case one of the streets I could see from the gas station parking lot happened to be one of the 3-4 streets on this little map.

"_______ Street?" asked a high-pitched voice from behind me. I turned to see a boy of maybe ten years lounging confidently near one of the gas pumps. He had a little red bubble goose on and a toothpick in his mouth. "You don't want to go there."

"Oh, is it bad?" I asked.

"Yep. You'll get jacked," the boy replied.

"Well," I said, smiling, "Keep in mind that I'm from Baltimore-- is _______ Street really all that bad?"

The boy laughed and introduced himself, then told me he had something we wanted to give me. We walked to one of the cars that was getting fueled-- an SUV. He popped the back and I saw a short stack of large canvases individually wrapped in big billowy plastic bags. He pulled a canvas from the middle of the stack and handed it to me-- it was a portrait of the little boy.

"You paint?" I asked. It was a pretty good portrait.. for a ten year-old painter. Just then, a woman approached. She looked like the young mother of a precocious prodigy-- stylish glasses and styled hair, but with a certain 6-8-year lag in the clothing department. I introduced myself to her and she asked me a lot of friendly questions, then offered to drive me to their house instead of the shop on the sketchy street that I was trying to get to. I took them up on it and got in the car.

So we get to the kid's house and I meet his dad, who reminds me a lot of Cosby-- not only in his build and his mannerisms, but because when we get there he's comically trying to wrestle a snake that's wrapped itself around his two best friends, a diminutive Korean doctor or scientist and a lanky off-duty policeman. We laugh and I find out that my Uncle Bear is coincidentally visiting this place, too.

Uncle Bear takes me to a Weird Al show in a small tent, where Weird Al is DJing hard-ass drum and bass tracks with his posse (which includes the same Korean doctor or scientist in a different outfit) and doing a pretty bang-up job of it. Every once in a while he cuts the volume to half and picks up a mic to introduce somebody who's won a contest. This time, it's a Weird Al impersonator who, at first glance, looks exactly like "classic" Weird Al, but upon closer inspection appears to be actually a quite-different looking man with a really good costume on. The real Al passes the mic to the looky-likey who begins to tell jokes. It's easy to tell that audience didn't think they were going to be any good, and so the hearty laughs that follow his first joke have a satisfyingly genuine sound: "What do you say to a Spangeless? Save it, Spange-Less."

So we jump out of the plane and hover a long way above the bay. It's not noisy or destabilizing at all, it's like treading water but a little less strenuous-- you do it with your chest instead of your legs. There's five or six other people I just met (we're staying with them, we're on tour) with me-- they do this all the time but it's my first time. I start to sink a little and it suddenly occurs to me that this might be harder than they're making it seem. I yell up, "Hey, I'm kind of sinking, am I doing something wrong?" They're all nonchalant, "Oh just come back up here. Take smaller breaths." I start to feel like there's really no point to doing this if I'm just going to be anxious and all. I look down at some docks and some warehouses down below.

I'm in LA, sitting at a table in a nightclub, watching a band that's compromised mostly of ex-members of Guns and Roses, incl. the almighty Slash. He looks good. The singer is this kid Josh who used to play guitar in my friend Craig's mathrock band but who moved to NYC a good many years past. He wasn't a lead-singer type, more of a mathrock-frontman type, but now he's the semi-confrontational lead singer in Slash's new band. It's not a big nightclub and the audience is all sitting at tables with drinks. Abruptly, Josh leaves the stage and jumps on a table and starts hitting the wall. I starting howling and cheering, because although it looks kind of silly, I am always excited about the effort in these sorts of things. The rest of the audience, though, starts shooting me the stinkeye and takes me for a heckler, and it appears Josh suspects something similar. He comes over to the table I'm sitting at with my girl and picks up a plastic glass that used to be full of water and chucks it right over my girl's head. Not close enough to be scary but close enough to make some kind of aggressive impression. He does it again with a handful of napkins. All the sudden, I'm surprised to find myself shoving all the cups, plates, silverware, etc. right off the table onto the floor with a loud bang-- so there's nothing else for him to throw, right? He walks back to the stage, but the audience all clearly now think I'm some aggro asshole.

Just then I notice that someone else is singing--- it's the guitarist, who has a really dated wavy longhair style pulled back to a ponytail. All their other songs have been hard, but obviously this guy is on some George Harrison shit or something and gets to play his weenie sensitive ballad. He's singing kind of off-key and very pussy. I forget about the lead singer and look at this man's face. I can see how nervous he is. I can see him thinking that it isn't going well, that the audience wants more of the hard stuff. I start to sweat, start to forget that I'm not him, even though I would never write or sing a song as wussy as this one.

I'm in school, there's a surprise math test, it's on some type of calculus I've never seen before which has numbers in two columns that some operation has to be performed on. I don't know what the operation is, though, because I've been skipping class for a long time. I was going to skip again today but I figured my attendance might get low enough that I'd automatically fail if I didn't start going again at some point. When I realize there's no way for me to divine the necessary operation by simply staring at the numbers, I walk out of class, pull my right foot over my right shoulder from the back, and start floating around. A freckle-faced soccer player named Ryan laughs and asks what I'm doing, and I demonstrate how, if I hop with my left leg while my right is hanging over my shoulder, I can jump really high and float back to the ground gradually. If I jump at an angle, it's kind of like flying.

I fly to a weird, scrappy house in the woods where most of the kids I know who go/went t MICA are preparing for an art show that I am also a part of. The place looks like a YMCA haunted house two weeks before Halloween-- like, it's not ready at all, but nobody seems worried. In the room I am supposed to be doing something in, there's a giant hot dog painted on one wall that stretches from the floor to the ceiling. Next to it, there's a big empty space. At the bottom of the empty space someone has started to draw the outline of a crawling baby in black spray paint, but they've made it much too short. I explain to some girls that the baby should maybe be bigger because all the empty space makes it look kind of crappy. They agree. I ask if we have to paint over the bad baby, and they say yes. Someone starts painting over it with silver paint. The wall's previous coat isn't silver, though. I decide to go home. My right leg is still hanging over my right shoulder this whole time.

I hop out of the house, pull my leg off my shoulder, and start running. I run to the road and run in the road, going faster than I can really manage. I fall down onto my butt and slide down the road at a quick pace. The road gets hilly and I wonder if I'm somewhere near Dickeyville. It's going to take a long time to get home, I think. I start to wonder if it's a bad idea to slide in the road-- will cars not see me? Maybe I should stand and try to run on the side of the road. I get upright, still zooming faster than I can manage, legs flying all over the place. I see a car in my lane facing the wrong way, but luckily it's parked. There's actually 2 or 3 cars parked behind it-- it seems like someone's extended family has either just arrived or is just leaving from some kind of holiday get-together. I run past their cars but I have to touch the hoods to get around them-- I wonder if they care but I'm going to fast to see. I start listening to AM talk radio somehow as I continue flailing/falling/flying down the road.

The radio show I can hear has a guy with a stereotypical Jewish old man voice for a host. He is talking to a caller with a similar voice who is describing a thing called "Psychotron"-- apparently a term used by local Jewish conspiracy buffs to describe a secret revival of the KKK that is currently underway. The caller talks about a man named Michael Caine who is either a cop or friends with cops and whose tactless barroom boasting has revealed some of Psychotron's secrets.

I got a ride from Max to the westside, but Roby decided not to come. The westside was mostly indoors-- something like five or six square blocks of abandoned buildings had been joined together, their roofs connected. You would walk into one building and find that all the walls inside had been torn down except for the outermost walls, which had a few different doors in them. The doors would lead right into the next building. There was a bazaar-like atmosphere because a great many people were living and working all in this giant ubersquat. There were little shops set up and offices, although there weren't many walls between them. I found my friends Steve sitting at a desk working on a computer, sporting a beard I'd never seen on him before. He was glad to see me. There were merchants selling guitars and inflatable colored dogs, among other things. Some of the buildings in the ubersquat just served as alleys in between other buildings, and it seemed like no matter how many doors I went through, I still couldn't get my bearings. I was originally walking with Max and four other people I'd never met, but I lost them somehow and ended up outside again. A street urchin guy getting off of work with a group of other dudes pulled a switchblade and grinned.

I decided to go to Japan to play shows again, even though I wasn't sure if it was a good idea or not. Maybe nobody there had heard any of my newer stuff-- or, based on what I had seen and heard of the last few newer Japanese bands that had come through Baltimore, maybe they were onto such a futuristic tip over there musically that my stuff might not hold up next to the average Japanese act. Whatever the case, my first (and only) time there was amazing and frightening and wonderful and I've wanted to go back there more than any other place I've visited. Somehow it worked out so I decided to go.

I planned to go alone, but not by plane. Instead I went to Olympia, on a hunch. Once I was there I went to the water, where there was a gigantic fortress on the water-- Olympia's famous port, one of the major hubs of the American import/export game. Beyond it I could see hundreds of ships, too many to count and steamers mostly. They were coming in and going out, docking, unloading-- it was noisy and crowded and quite beautiful to look at. My only luggage was my brown backpack, from which I pulled a deflated inner-tube, mostly white but with some pink and purple geometric designs on it, thin zig-zag lines and some tiny staircase shapes. I walked through the hubbub of the port and was easily able to get to the water's edge, where I blew up the inner tube and waded in.

Next thing I know, I was floating into a very similar port-- in fact, it was so similar I was initially convinced I had come right back to Olympia. I approached the port from one end, paddling myself up onto a grassy bank. It was only at this moment that I wondered how wet my laptop had gotten. My hair wasn't very wet, which gave me some hope. I thought it might be possible that only one side of the laptop would have been submerged during the trip and that it might be totally fine after it dried. I decided that this was "most likely" because I didn't want to think about what I would do about these shows in Japan if I didn't have a laptop. I pulled my cellphone out of my pants pocket-- it had been submerged in the water for most of the trip, and the display was acting weird, but it still seemed to respond somewhat when I pushed on the keypad. Maybe that would work fine after it dried, too. I put it back in my pocket and decided to focus on trying to get to wherever it was that I needed to be, but as soon as I walked up the grass and onto a paved walkway, I was almost immediately accosted by a young girl in a fancy dress. She was pretty, with brittle red hair piled high on top of her head-- she was clearly at some kind of special function. She was not into my presence, though, and explained that she and her group had rented this part of the port weeks ago and that I couldn't be there. I told her I was just leaving but she acted as if I had said the opposite, and continued to argue with me about her group's exclusive rights to this part of the port, so I just walked away, fiddling with my cellphone. She was white but once I cleared the high arching entrance of the port I realized I had in fact actually made it to Japan.

It was busy and crowded, with lots of signs I couldn't read sticking off just about every building. Japanese people were everywhere-- especially in diners. About every third building seemed to be a diner, the same kind you might see in any American metropolis, with the same clinking coffee cups and silverware, probably the same greasy food, too. As I walked further from the port, the streets became more and more narrow, until I was in a world of alleys, something like a roofless mall crossed with a dystopian labyrinth. At a few points I had to actually enter and walk through diners in order to keep going. I was starting to panic at this point, realizing that even if my phone did work I had no number to call, and no idea how far away my destination might be-- it might be on the other side of town. Part of me wanted to relax and allow myself the possibility that since I was charmed enough to actually make it to Japan on an inner tube, the place I was looking for was probably really close and I would probably just know it when I saw it, as long as I wasn't clenched up and freaking out.

I kept walking, scrutinizing signs written in entirely alien characters, trying to find some other way to evaluate them that didn't involve language. Eventually, I found the place-- a venue, but also a restaurant and hostel, full of kids, many of whom were from out of the country and could talk English to me. I wasn't supposed to play until the next day but I was welcomed in by a few of the people there. I couldn't figure out who exactly was in charge, nobody seemed to talk to me for very long before disappearing or directing me to some other part of the place. I walked down some stairs into a wide room with rice-paper walls and a long, low table that people were sitting around on pillows. At the head of the table was a smiling guy with a giant cubical cardboard box. I sat near him and another kid seated nearby explained they were having an auction. Up next were some figures for a tabletop fantasy wargame. I'd never played it but they looked cool, and supposedly it was a set that was only released in Japan. The guy next to me won it for like 80 yen. I didn't have any money on me, but when another set of Japan-only figures for the same game came up, I made the second bid. The first bid was 180, I bid 190. I thought about bidding more but didn't think I should actually win since I couldn't pay. I did win, though. I explained that I didn't have any money, so I didn't get the figures, but I wasn't too sad about it. Another guy explained to me that a package was coming for me tomorrow and in Japan it costs 80 yen to receive a package. He said that he or someone else who lived at this place would pay it for me and I could pay them back after the first show, which I thought was very kind.

I put my backpack down in a room that had a lot of bedrolls on the floor near the front door of the venue, then I walked around. It was a big place, taking up multiple buildings. I went to a dancing area with a bar that was almost empty and flirted with a girl from Europe. She wasn't that into me, though. That's all I can remember.

I went to my parents' old house in Baldwin, which contains the entire cafeteria/auditorium of Carroll Manor Elementary. Tons of people of all ages and colors are sitting around eating, including a real vivid elderly Italian gangster with huge glasses who I recognize from somewhere, but can't completely place. My parents are nowhere to be seen, though, but for some reason I don't feel any anxiety about the huge crowd that's assembled here.

Van Halen is there, and they play an amazing show, on a huge indoor stage that somehow fits inside the house. David Lee Roth sings and X-Pac is the bassist. After the show, I'm standing in the backyard when I look over my shoulder to see the sweaty dudes coming out of the house with white towels draped over their shoulders. I'm surprised by how humble and normal they are. People keep coming up to them to tell them how good the show was and they seem grateful for the compliments and totally willing to chat a bit with any of their fans. I feel awed that such a bunch of old school rockers could play such a good show. I think about saying something to them, too, but I end up just hovering nearby and eavesdropping on their conversations with the fans. I notice that X-pac looks a lot bigger in real life than on TV and I wonder how he hooked up with Van Halen.

My school and another school are participating in an art and music show being held at a big mansion in the woods. Bands are playing and art is hanging up and teachers and students from both schools are walking around getting ready for the thing to start. The mansion is about as big as a mall--- in fact, it may be this same giant mall I've visited on other nights, just relocated to the woods and stripped of all its commercial elements. Every student has a room to sleep in after the show. Other students from my school include Dan D, Kevin O, and Mark B. Some of our bands are going to play, as well as some bands from this other school, and paintings and drawings and sculpture from students of both schools were on display throughout the part of the mall-mansion near the room with a stage. That room had a familiar kind of classic blue assembly-hall carpet and those uncomfortable stackable chairs arranged in rows in front of the stage. Everyone was running around getting ready, it was kind of chaotic.

I start to feel uncomfortable in my clunky dress shoes so I spend a while looking (unsuccessfully) for this pair of And One slip-ons that I have. During my search, though, I found something else--- "blasting caps" hidden throughout one of the rooms, underneath sculptures and behind paintings. I was concerned and began intentionally eavesdropping on some of the other school's more sinister-looking teachers and discovered that many of them were packing pistols-- as well as some kind of grudge against my school. We had done something-- some kind of prank or something, I guess--- that embarassed them and they were going to actually kill us all in retribution.

I told Dan and Kevin and Mark and we all nervously tried to figure out what we might be able to do, despite being completely unarmed, to prevent our deaths. (btw, I used the phrase "blasting caps" a lot in this dream and everyone I said it to seemed to know immediately what that meant.) For some reason just out and dipping wasn't a possibility-- none of us seemed willing to forego playing the show, even though it required us to remain in this place with people who had murderous intentions towards us.

I looked for my And One slip-ons and a way to prevent the massacre of my schoolmates nervously for a while before finding D, K, & M again and letting them in on the only plan I could think of: we should get as many kids as possible to strip naked and streak through the stage area, causing a commotion that would require the teachers to go into regular disciplinary-teacher mode, trying to control us. I figured that if they pulled guns and shot us when we were obviously unarmed (and unclothed) the other kids would be way more frightened than if we waited and let them initiate whatever plan THEY had concoted to dispatch us in spite of the public setting. Before the dudes from my school could even all agree that it was the best plan, I went and found this popular fat kid from the other school and told him that I knew about his teachers' plan to murder us and that it was very possible that some of his own classmates could die, too, if there were explosions and gunplay, and that if the show was disrupted by naked kids from BOTH schools that the scheming teachers would be certain to balk and forego killing anybody in favor of more traditional forms of disciplinary action-- at least until they had control of the situation again, which (imho) spontaneous nudity could pretty easily put off for quite some time.

I woke up just as the popular fat kid from the other school was telling me whether he and his crew would streak with us, but I didn't get to hear his answer. I was drenched in my own sweat (irl, that is.)

First time ever I've been cut up with razors and knives, and this happened repeatedly. It didn't hurt very bad but I was unable to not freak out and try to get away whenever it happened.

This is the second time in as many nights that I can remember being in a state of flight from people who want to hurt me for hours and hours and hours-- last night, though, I wasn't quite as good at getting away from them. I received multiple cuts all over my arms and chest. Didn't die, though, and always managed to elude my attackers eventually, although it always turned out to be a momentary escape.

The setting and other contextual details are completely lost, but at some point, someone told me that my teeth were rotting and I realized that it was true, and that I hadn't even been entirely ignorant of this fact but for some reason hadn't been able to think about it in such simple terms: "My teeth are rotting." I had this forlorn feeling that I had been treating the situation as if it was much more complicated than it truly was, but that I could no longer pretend that it wasn't a very simple matter, you know?

It wasn't the crux of the dream-- just the one thing that happened during its course which I remembered two hours after getting out of bed.

Last night I was in school again for the first time in a while. It was a new school I had never seen before. There was this dude named Sullivan who was kind of like an older Tony Bennet and I saw him walking around the halls and got psyched. I tried to talk to him but he was way old and kind of confused and hard to understand, but he was real smiley, and somebody else told me that the school pays him to hang out. He doesn't ever sing, though, apparently, and nobody but me seemed to think it was cool that this old celebrity was hanging out at our school.

At some point later in the dream, Matt Papich was playing a guitar with 3 necks. The top and bottom one were 12-string, the topmost being shorter than a usual guitar neck, and the one in the middle was just regular.