After a long period of forgotten dreams, where for months I have been lucky to wake up with but the smallest of fragments of what I had just been dreaming still floating in my head, I awoke this morning with the better part of a quite peculiar dream intact.

I am on my way to Missouri. The year is sometime in the future. I am a genetic mutation. I know a place in Missouri where I can make a few extra bucks at a bootleg operation. The farm isn’t making alcohol; they are not taking kidneys, but what they do is clandestine. They are making cheese. Not just any cheese, although at most times, this is just a normal farm, and cheese is a part of the repertoire of products they produce, but today, upon my arrival, they will switch gears and secretly change the recipe.

My mutation is that I am one of the one in 500 men who have developed teats near our hips. I produce man-milk. The farm I am visiting makes man-cheese. The product is illegal, but most would agree that this cheese has no competition. Due to our rareness and since this mutation to our species is new and not yet thoroughly researched, there is a concern that ‘this’ version of a genetically modified organism may produce undesirable results from consumption, so man-cheese is illegal. My dream didn’t tell me if it was illegal in France, too.

A strange side effect of being milked is that there is a correlating relationship to how much urine is produced, and so typically, after milking, I have the most extraordinary lengthy urinations one could imagine lasting minutes. It was during this act of disposal that I think someone reported the operation. We were alerted that the police were responding, and it was time to get away fast.

I grabbed a couple of Wigglers, threw one to my traveling companion, told him how to ride it, and we were off. A Wiggler is a genetically designed muscular creature about the size of a Frisbee that is three-pronged or Y-shaped. The top two prongs are handles for the rider to hold on to. These muscle-bound handles are attached through a brawny jumble of thick central muscles to a foot reminiscent of a kangaroo foot, only much smaller. To ride the Wiggler, you grab the two handles close to your chest and get on the ground face down. The foot of the Wiggler will keep your torso and face about six inches off the surface, but this requires that the rider wear hard rubber pads on the knees, hips, and elbows, so as you glide over the street, you don’t get road rash.

To get moving, pull up on the two arms or handles, and you go forward, push both, and you slow to a stop. Pull one, push the other to turn, do the opposite, and turn the other way. As the Wiggler flexes its powerful muscle and its foot begins the action for which it was named, the rider is propelled to a speed of nearly 15 miles per hour. The Wiggler is fast enough to evade anyone on foot and nimble enough to move in tight spaces to avoid vehicles.

As the police approach from behind a hill, we have the opportunity to pull around the corner of a house just as the policeman in chase comes into view; fortunately for us, we are no longer visible, but quietly we hide, hoping we have escaped the long arm of the law.

Rarely do I have nightmares, but tonight was one of those rarities. It is not so much the content of the dream I want to convey here today but what might be the impetus behind the ugly dream. On these occasions, when my dreams are filled with violence, it could be typified as being of brutal carnage. Often, the scenes in the nightmare are warlike; they start with pursuit and end with some type of bloody death. It was no different this evening, except the methodology of the last killings was telling, at least in regards to what I have thought might be the trigger of these types of dreams. The method of killing was what appeared to be an electric or high-pressure staple gun; on waking, I could not be certain that it wasn’t a bolt device.

These dreams with gory violence only occur after I have eaten a large piece of meat or a large portion of ice cream. Due to not eating meat for breakfast or lunch and then only eating it at dinner one to two times a week at the most, I have enough vegetarian days where I also remember my dreams, and I do think that on those days, my dreams are devoid of gore. The dreams after eating a vegetarian meal may still be intense, but I cannot remember once when my dreams turned so horrific that I forced myself awake due to what I was witnessing or what was about to happen to me.

The question I would like to pose here in this posting is, has anyone else noticed in transitioning to a more vegetarian diet that they can distinguish a trend in their dreams where violence accompanies their dreams after having consumed animal products?

I’m living in an old western town that hasn’t modernized although it is the present. The tallest building in town is an old five-story hotel that now operates as a gang’s operations center. This gang comprises the local government, law enforcement, and criminals. Typically, I walk the main street without incident. On one occasion, I witnessed Eminem talking with one of the gang members about how, when he first met them he was weak and intimidated and that it was that meeting that made him decide to toughen up.

The gang members are supposed to know who not to rob, but even amongst their ranks, there is corruption, and the town is becoming ever more dangerous. A friend of mine walking with two other people is picked up for questioning and taken to the old hotel. I enter the building, not knowing there is supposed to be a guard here. People I run into figure I must be someone because no one who is not a member just walks through here unescorted.

As I stroll the hallways, I become increasingly uneasy as it is obvious I shouldn’t be seeing what I am seeing and I wonder how it is I can walk along without interference. I step out on a fourth-floor balcony to find out whether the people I am looking for can be seen on the street. This vantage point offers a bird’s eye view of what is happening in town. I see two young men running up the street, popping through two different false walls in the façade of houses along the street.

This is a brave move; normally, they should not have to run and hide, but this is another example of the corruption within the gang. As I walk back into the hallway, I happen upon a man who is lifting a few thousand dollars in cash off of someone else’s desk. He looks at me, and I at him; I sense he is stealing the money; he tries to play it that he was not sneaking into or away from the desk, but I know, and I think he knows I do.

I leave the old hotel and go back onto the street, but as I walk away, it occurs to me that this guy who nicked the money got a good look at me, and I didn’t bother to take in much detail about him as I was already nervous about being there. I am afraid he is going to blame me for taking the money, and I will have a severe problem to deal with soon. I figured I had better return and explain what I saw.

This time, as I walk in, a member of the gang slaps a guard and tells him he is not doing his job and to stop me from entering like that. I am told to wait on the veranda. After some time, I began to think that this was going to be considered snitching, which is not cool either. I decided to change my plans and leave.

But the can of worms has been opened now, and as I am a half-mile back up the road, a looming figure steps up with a heavily pock-marked and shiny dark face, not saying a word. He looks at me with the words on his face, ‘Where do you think you are going?’ Without a word, I follow him back to the old hotel.

Through panic about what I’m going to tell whoever it is I am about to have to talk to, I have to make this believable as I am certain I shouldn’t talk about the money, but then it also crosses my mind that at some point they may learn about the money, come to question me about it and then wonder about the story I told them and why on this opportunity I didn’t explain the missing money. Argh, what to do? Wake up; your bladder is calling.

I started playing Mahjongg again recently and was reminded why I quit playing it last year. The game leads me into repetitious dreams, usually of some task that gets repeated ad nauseam, disrupting my sleep to such an extent that by morning, I’m more exhausted than rested. The dream is either sorting into some complex order of things that I am frustrated at the futility of the task and my ignorance as to how to speed the process so I can finally finish or like the Twilight Zone episode where the same scenario is lived out repeatedly: I am doing something over and over and cannot move beyond a certain point.

Well, this morning, I got lucky, and my last dream halfway broke me out of repetition, but in the dream, I had to go to prison. One moment, I am with Caroline; the next moment, I find myself among a group of prisoners on a rocky island in the ocean. Our landing spot is being hammered by ferocious waves. I am told not to worry as the island is too high for the waves to be of consequence, but I am watching a wave that comes close to spraying the flat rock surface we are standing on. Another wave, 60 feet tall, comes in over the previous one, and it is obvious that this one is coming my way. I grab a pole and hold on while the wave crashes over us. Dripping wet, we are ushered off the platform as it is now unsafe.

Next, I am driving a blue Hyundai down a long fenced-in driveway to the office complex on the far side of the island to finalize my transfer to this institution. I did find it slightly odd that my “real-life” car would be here. Only now does it begin to occur to me that I will not be able to go home today, tomorrow, or the next day. These people are serious. But why am I here? I am to be retrained in the American Way. Seems I drifted into deviancy, informational deviancy, to be precise. No excuse can be accepted that the materials I was in possession of could be considered artistic expression and collectibles; it is against the state. So, as in China during the Cultural Revolution, I am going to be reprogrammed; I will be shown my way back to being a true American.

But what about Caroline?

Forget about it; you are here for the next four years.

But I didn’t do anything!

You are an agent in possession of objectionable material and could be a danger to the state.

I am interested in intellectual activity, and I own obscurities for art and cultural reasons; I am an agent of curiosity!

But those subversive materials could hurt others, could hurt the state, and as you can see, they are hurting you now.

Oh my god. What am I going to do? Can I call Caroline? Ask her to wait for me for the next four years.

NO. When you could have put your life in patriotic order, you chose to be rebellious; now, we must help you become a good citizen.

Hey, this is like communist China!

Be careful; you could end up here for five years.

What do you have that incriminates me?

Take a look at this.

I am handed a book from a stack of what looks like scrapbooks. Someone has compiled photos, books, flyers, and materials that are said to be mine into these volumes. I recognize some of it, unfortunately, all Nazi-inspired motifs, but the communist stuff is definitely not mine.

I protest; this communist stuff is not mine! I am told that I am in denial and that this will add time to my stay in prison. Again, the horrid reminder that I am actually about to start serving a prison sentence, although I have never been to court, and now, worse, I start to panic about prison rape. The communist imagery is flipping by page after page; occasionally, something that was actually mine catches my eye. Why am I here? What is the ultimate purpose of pulling me off the street? Could it be that someone wants to witness me falling into humiliation?

This is where the dream is about to spin into repetition, as so many others do when playing that damned Mahjongg. I will roll over these questions or go over the images in the scrapbooks over and over and over again until they start to blur, and I get confused as to why I am doing this again and again. I wake up knowing I cannot play Mahjongg again.

Sometimes, the dreams arrive in rapid-fire, and then months go by where I vaguely remember fragments. This morning, though, I’m pushed out of bed by a persistent high-tension drama. The dream started with me on an assignment to do a photoshoot. The guide to the location appears to be a national park ranger; he takes me to a run-down industrial area. After maneuvering through the empty buildings, neglected railroad tracks, and through broken fences, we enter a very large warehouse. The floor to the east, west, and south walls is covered in sand. The north of the interior is a large standing wave surging with more and less water that changes the height of the wave. Watching the water flow, it is confounding how, as it gushes with more water, the break at the shore stays at nearly the exact same spot. Looking for a place to start shooting, from the west wall, I make my way east when, on the crest of the wave, I spot two sets of large antlers. They are mating marine elk. They bob and dip in the rising and falling waters as they and other marine elk attempt their lovemaking in what looks like the most precarious position to do so. As I walk the beach, I try to avoid stepping on crabs, it turns out they are crab-like beetles. Except these don’t run away as people approach; they run for you. Caroline warns me of them on my back, and I try to show no concern, hoping that if I don’t think of them, they won’t bother me. Wrong approach; they are soon on my back, going down the back of my pants. I holler to Caroline to help. She picks them off me, and soon another 4 of them are crawling up my pants leg; I think one is under the front of my shirt; check my hair. I’m starting to get very uncomfortable and head for a door paralleling the wave on the north wall and enter a steep stairwell made of red brick. This is one of the two columns on either end of the structure where this 1000-foot-wide wave is crashing into the warehouse floor.

In the stairwell heading up over slippery bricks, the environment here could be from Escher with its large corners, misplaced windows, and openings going nowhere. Areas are lit with pastel colors, with corners lit with a gradient of light that begins in pink and gradually becomes blue. This looks like a perfect location for some dramatic photographs, but I am told this is not where the photos are supposed to be taken. I am not going back out into beetle land to fight with those pesky and sometimes painful creatures, so I quit and am soon back outside.

Coming down the hill is an SUV carrying a passenger who turns out to be the man I’ve been contracted by for this photoshoot. Biggy Smalls is in the backseat; I’m instructed to get in and drive. As we drive forward, menacing men approach the car, and unseen men sitting with Biggy in the dark of the backseat encourage him to shoot the man who approaches. There’s a constant undertone of voices telling him to shoot people as he and I try to discuss the logistics of finishing this difficult photoshoot. Biggy is reasonable but a bit one-track-minded regarding wanting these photos. As we approach the building with the wave inside, a large police vehicle arrives, and Biggy instructs me to throw the car in reverse and begin to make my way out of there.

Bullets are flying, and Biggy’s gang moves forward, firing as we back out, trying to make our way to safety. All of a sudden, the beetles don’t seem such a big deal compared to being in the crossfire. We drive north, but Biggy insists we dump the car as the police would have identified it at the scene we just left. So, on foot, Biggy and I walk with a light step through a rundown neighborhood of what appears to be squatters having taken over. Biggy peers into windows, cracks in facades, past doors falling off hinges; he is looking for a potential ally where we can take cover. Wrong door and it will be another enemy who will shoot Biggy dead again. I’ve known the entire time that this is Biggy in the afterlife. We continue to creep silently up the street until we both see cops a couple of hundred yards across the street, we try to slip to the left. Biggy tells me how, even dead, he’s a magnet for white hatred and law enforcement. Now we are being chased by the police, but we are on foot; this is surely going to end badly….I can no longer handle the tension and wake up.

The dream begins with two characters I imagine as being bad guys who recruited me to help make a “core sample” from a super-capacity fiber trunk. A core sample lifts a traveling stream of information that can be analyzed or hacked and has serious security-violating issues. Not only that, but the data must be lifted in such a way that all receivers downstream do not see anomalies in timestamps or travel time, which will trigger alarms suggesting a drain or hack of the fiber stream. This future moment in which this occurs is when light is being used predominately for both computing and data distribution. We have learned to shift, hold still, and otherwise move photons with absolute precision. Due to this, governments have made quantum teleportation outside of government and U.N.-approved scientific applications illegal. The reason is that with optical computing and optical quantum teleportation, criminals, terrorists, and hackers would be able to project imagery into locations that would lend confusion and terror or be used in acts such as making a victim believe the door to their home had just been kicked in and then the person is forced to sign over financial information to someone they believe is there to harm them when in reality it is nothing more than a hologram being quantum teleported using the photons available during daylight as the distribution system for reorganizing images at another location. So, the guys who have me, I feel threatened by their demand to have me help lift this core sample; I don’t know if I can trust them. This is a crime of high proportion, but I have the skills to properly lift the stream undetected, and somehow, they also know this. These contractors leave me to do my work as they set up in a van with part of the equipment that will carry the data chunk, but before I can get to work, Howard Dean shows up. Turns out that Howard Dean is the nefarious character here. The two guys who contracted me wanted to expose Howard, but Howard needs this network to remain untouched as he has found a way to hide his QT packets (Quantum Teleportation) and is using an old peer-to-peer network to camouflage his steps and place of origin. Howard signals two celebrities to join him by placing his hand and voice into their reality and signaling them to follow the hand. What happens in how they get to our location is unseen by me in the dream. Maybe they are not really here, maybe Howard isn’t here either, or maybe the entire thing is a hologram; without moving too close and becoming overly familiar by trying to come in contact, I cannot distinguish who is actually here and who is not. I suppose I cannot know for certain if I am where I think I am. Now, I am left with the dilemma of how to stop Howard from his hijacking of reality for his political and financial benefit and expose that our government is committing information warfare against its own people.