I walked down a dry gravel road on a warm fall afternoon. Birch trees lined each side, their white bark peeling and waving in the non-existent wind.

To my right, another path opens, and leads up a hill whose steep incline was over 45 degrees. Climbing up this hill, I grasp ruddy weeds and old gnarled tree roots that protrude from the tan coloured dirt path.

As I reached the hills' top, the ground sloped downward until it reached a winding stream littered with stepping stone rocks. On my right side, the birch tree forest, to my left, the stream. Beyond this was a swath of grass covered land which divided this world from the featureless ocean and gray-blue horizon.

The bank of the steam was populated by Komodo dragons who sluggishly meandered about. However, I was approached by a komodo dragon whose body was covered with neon-orange spines, not unlike a porcupine. Down the stream, and across various stones and shallows I ran from this creature. One of my boots became stuck in the mud, but I left it behind.

It was here I realized this place was exceedingly familiar.

Behind me existed a distorted version of Champlain College, and beyond it, what was once a swamp in another dream.

I now stood on the swath of land which divided the stream from the ocean. On this grassy area existed a rectangular gazebo. From the ceiling of this structure hung doll parts - arms, legs, torsos, and the occasional unblinking plastic head.

A series of wind chimes, each with their own pull-string, hung at the entrance. Behind them, a little
black girl whose hair was gathered into two fuzzy pigtails. The wooden flooring of this ghezbeoh was covered in long dried blood, instilling me with a sense of dread.

"Why does this place disassemble people?" the little girl asked. I climbed atop a fallen tree, and looked at the wind chimes. I knew that pulling them in the wrong order would mean dismemberment. A blue fog seemed to be rolling in from the forest, drifting across the river toward the gazebo.

"Because," I replied "Sometimes people need to be taken apart know who they truly are." The girl looked at me an nodded, then turned toward the horizon. The blue fog was thick now, reaching past the stream and over the gazebo. I sat down on the fallen birch tree and let it envelop me.

A disconnected, half remembered dream.

I was eating dinner in a trailer-style, 1950's diner when a storm front moved in. There was lightening outside, and a girl appeared at the doorway.

She was pretty, with brown hair, and without preconception, I believed her when she told me I was special, and how I should be with other people like me. Her evidence is that earlier that day, I did something to save a person, and that I'm deserving of being with 'them'.

I leave my things at the diner, and notice she's gone in the blink of an eye - and so are half the other patrons.

I walked outside, and under a grey sky, notice a column of people all smiling, walking down the street. I see a boy I knew as a child (who knocked his teeth out on his bikes handlebars) - he tells me a similar story about an attractive girl. However, in his version she said he was the only person found deserving. I look at the column of people, and feel they've all been told the same thing. I also worry about my belongings that are stashed under my seat in the diner.

I follow the mass of wandering, smiling people to a house without doors, and there's a longtable, with elegant plates for everyone. Their eyes and smiles alarm me, but a sense of acceptance pervades the room.

While disconnected, and without the structure most of my vivid dreams have - this one stayed with me for a few days. When the pretty girl told me I was special, it reminded me of the pure belief I had as a child. There was no doubt, and her words filled me with complete trust. However fleeting, it was a wonderful feeling to recapture.

I walked in the ocean waters for the first time this day, while visiting Australia in July, 2008.

___

I ran down a horizontal path made of roughly hewn stone and jumped over the foot wide gaps. A swirling, malevolent sensation of dread followed me. There was a man ahead of me, also running but he disappeared into the murky water that filled void between the gaps. Tentacled horrors with thin and tendrils like reached down toward me from behind and to my left.

* * *

I stand on a stone plateau, with stone steps reaching upward in front of me. I run toward the shadowed, swirling tentacled horror awaiting at the top of this Aztech shaped structure. Thick ferns and leaves surround the left and right side of the stars, blocking any escape. As the beast ensconces me in writhing darkness, I'm shown a vertically rotating series of video screens, each with terrible things upon them.
Fear, sadness and horror mix as the beast tightens it's grip. I remember the shoreline, the beach - and something terrible arises from the salty waters.

___

I awoke with a twitching, spastic start, heart beating and covered in a cold sweat. I immediately asked the four Korean kids if they'd had nightmares, as I'd noticed them moaning or shouting earlier in Korean while they slept. They all had, although they refused to discuss what it was that frightened them so much. I asked if they'd been in the ocean yesterday - they all had, either walking or swimming in it's waters.

I asked Stephen who had the bunk below me if he'd had any nightmares, and if he'd touched the ocean. He's done neither.

I walked down an long hallway with its ceiling open to a twilight sky. It turned left at the end, and the wall was covered in band stands. Danielle C. sat in one set, looking outward, unaware of my presence. She got up, walked down and away.

I , or perhaps we stood in a darkened theater, oddly shaped. The floors induced a sense of vertigo, slanting subtly downward toward the screen, which was high and toward the ceiling. As the lights came on, the floor in front of the screen was revealed as rising toward a three sided triangle before the screen, further inducing a sense of confusion. The angles were all wrong to my eye. A film began on the screen, but all I saw was white light emanating from it.

I exited from the theater, possibly through the screen into the desert. I rode a horse slowly down deserted paved, cracked highways. There were no cars nor other traffic. Beside the path stretched a light colored sand, and dry, sandstone cliff faces. The sky was a midnight gray with wispy, dry clouds smeared across the horizon. There was no sun and no moon - only an eerie, omnidirectional dream-lighting that showed the path ahead.

Throughout this dream, it felt like I was accompanied by other people, and I reacted as if I was among friends. However, when I looked back, there was no one there.

Riding atop the horse, I once removed both hands and proclaimed "Look how I can ride. Now I can shoot Nazi's with BOTH hands!"

I passed into an intersection heavy with abandoned cars. The area was still desert, but had sparse patches of grass near the road. I dismounted my horse, and looked around. Beside the road was a ditch which sloped forward. Inside it, I found my pair of black and white shoes and my Canadian Backpack with the zippers all undone. The journal was missing. I packed the shoes inside the pack, put it on and looked for my horse.

It had crossed the road, and a man approached it. He was shoving his hands toward it's face, spooking the animal. I told him to go away. The horse was still across the road, but further away on the sandy space between lanes. A series of cars began driving down the highway, and did not stop. The horse stood, watching me try to cross the road.

I never got back to it again.

Somehow I slept through an epic rainstorm. This generated a dream about a television series that doesn't exist.

The conceit of this series was this - the first season was explicitly written as the dream of a writer - one where the spaces, moods and behaviors of the characters reflected the ever changing dreamscape.

The events of the first season operated in a very Lynchian way: Actors purposefully became other characters while maintaining the same appearance, but the 'threat' of the initial season was revealed as the end of the dream - a conclusion to a fictional dreamworld.

The second 'season', as described to me by my father in-dream was equally fantastic:
The events of the first exist in the second as a detached outline. In this second series, the writers dream is made into a series that loosely takes events from the prior season, and fills in the gaps with new fictions. Character relationships shift and meld, often overwritten in a way that the characters themselves are constantly remembering events of their previous lives.

In this shifting narrative, the only hints that the entire series is a multi-layered metafiction are strange objects or writing that appears in the series set design: News paper clippings pinned to a wall, paintings of a man at a typewriter, etc. The whole concept reminds me now of John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness" - a film where the protagonist gradually realizes he's a scripted character in his own movie, controlled by a horror writer with Cthulhuian ambitions.

In the end, the small black/white television in my dream revealed to me that the writer dreaming the TV series was in actuality a product of my own dreams - I dreamt the writer. Circles within circles, layers within layers.

I feel like my entire dream-fiction television show was actually a distorted, meta-fictional version of Twin Peaks - but there was no backward speaking, dancing midgets. There was however, a character who looked like Tom Cruise who hid in air vents shooting people with barbed arrows.

After being x-rayed on a tilting science table at the hospital today, I walked down the road to my old Elementary school where my father now works.

The schoolyard was empty, so I went around behind the school, past the basketball nets and over the aged concrete. This place has so much memory and dreams wrapped up in it for me - somehow, all rolled into one, taller than life, and longer than the lunchtime recess.

___

I have reoccurring dreams in two particular places at this school - the back yard concrete area, and the schools stage area/gym. Some defy description, while others are full of fun and wonder - colourful Chinese dragons rippling through the air of a darkened gymnasium like water, or the time when I was Spider-Man, but hooked up to a series of pulleys that allowed me to jump and cling to walls.

___

None of these images are real in any physical sense, but they're bound up with the glowing experiences I had in this place - the times I put aside my fear and doubt by going on stage in annual lip-synchs (or 'air-bands' I've heard them called), my first kiss on the tall hill at recess, my first real friendship, or countless other memories.

I went into the school and signed in with the office, letting them know I was Mr. Scott's son and I was waiting for him. I was directed to sit on the bench outside the office to wait. Over the next 15 minuets, each and every teacher or educational assistant who walked by made a point of coming over to me, and with no sense of kindness or warmth demanded "Who are you?" or simply "What are you doing here?" After the fifth person to address me like I was selling crank to their children, I just felt crushed. The welcoming atmosphere I remembered for both visitors and students was non-existent.

When I approached the school, it was with the same sense of awe I had as a child. I wanted so badly to stand in the darkened gym and remember. Instead, like an unsettling dream, there were walls where there was none before - the hallway murals of children's characters were painted over with beige - and all the playground equipment was gone. No longer did the images drawn inside my head of places, people or how I was treated match up with the world around me. Sitting outside the office, I wished to have never visited - if only so I could still cling to my dreamscapes.

While the dreams and shining memories of my childhood remained static, the rest of the world moves on.

I stood on a cobblestone path at twilight, around me was a sparse Forrest. I remembered it reminded me of something from an old fairy tale. I walked, but flickers of motion that would abruptly vanish distracted me.

A deep sound that began above 20hz, but quickly fell below, and crippled me. Like an air raid siren you feel, but don't hear, the assault continued as the world shifted. I stood through the same Forrest, but I was surrounded by plague victims - blackened and dying, the ran towards wooden steps that led up the hillside. Pursuing them were armed men in hazard suits and frighteningly anonymous gas masks.

I wrapped my blue wool coat  tightly around myself, and ran up the stairs. At the top was a ridge and the sky filled with stars. A ship unlike any I'd ever seen stood docked to the stairwell. It was
constructed from many copper pipes, canvas and other materials.

Looking vaugley like a creation of Jules Verne, it was suspended in the air by two vast, oblong balloons. Through the scuffed glass of a nearby window, a man wearing a long brown coat and tousled hair screamed at me. I turned toward him as he pounded on the window and screamed again "It's a Time Crash! Get out! Run! -"

Another wave of deep bass descended, shuttering the outline of the ship. A great pressure built up behind my eyes, and I stumbled. Time and perception fractured, showing me the events of 50, or perhaps 70 years from now, jumbled with the present. The hazard teams, the quiet gray Forrest, the diseased people fleeing, the empty cobblestone path - the conflicting epochs shuttered and froze, fracturing and skipping into an indistinct haze.

* * *

I laid in a large freight elevator, slumped against the wall. The lift came to a stop, and opened on to a boardwalk lit by a deep red sunset. I searched for the man in the brown coat, but the boardwalk was empty.

Standing on the wooden sidewalk, I looked into the horizon until black dots swam around my eyes.

* * *

I walked amidst foggy streets and empty yawning homes made of aged, almost blue plank wood. I was looking for a place to rent.

The streets were empty of people and sound, but there were lights on in a three story building on the street corner. The second floor opened on to 3/4 rooftop deck, fenced in with chicken wire, while the third floors windows were dark.

I was with a group of friends - faceless and indistinct, they drifted down the hall, led by an elderly woman describing the fixtures and appliances this house offered. I walked up a steep, rickety set of steps to the second floor - opening on to the 3/4 second floor deck.

There didn't appear to be any way to the third floor. Curious, I climbed on the railing, careful not to fall by gripping the chicken wire. I reached the third floor after locating a seam where the wire was not completely affixed to the ceiling above.

Entering through a window, an old man sat in a worn rocking chair in a long, narrow room. In the dim light, this room connected to another larger room facing the front of the house.

"Things don't always come back the way you want" the man said sadly. He looked at two encircled rings on the floor in front of the door. They looked like two circular gears set into the old wood finished floorboards. An identical ring assembly was laid into the floor of the larger room at it's center.

I realized something troubling. From the outside of the building, there was no larger room. There was only this small, one room apartment atop this old building.

Looking through the doorway, the light shifted, drawing odd shadows in ways that light should not behave. I touched the doorway, and realized it was solid - a mirror. Abruptly, the rings on the floor began rotating in place and the sound of gears moving filled the room from below.

The world went askew, and straightened. I stood in the larger room, now lit with grey light. An identical old man sat in his chair, and mumbled something I couldn't hear.

_____
Though recollection becomes fuzzy from this point onward, I learn that the gear assembly is actually a gateway between parallel worlds. However, physics and the interaction of matter isn't consistent between each universe. Amino acid chains and protean don't react the same way in one world as the next. The old man and his wife had two children who were heavily disabled.

Upon sending them through this gateway for medical help, their DNA now recombined to correct missing strands - two horrors emerged instead.

What was a normal human being in one universe became an ogre in another. Violent, and looking very much like the disfigured guy from "The Goonies", I ran through this confusing parallel dreamworld, trying to escape a bestial creature damaged by its transition from one world to the next.

_____

As I awoke, a compressed epilogue of some kind was produced - showing me that this house and the work within were part of a larger war between worlds. The creation of terrible creatures, produced by the forced transition from the physics of one place to another. A vision of a single warlord, adorned in bronze armor, inlaid with the familiar gear-motif stood atop a concrete barricade, and released unmitigated horrors upon another opposing side of disfigured, but still visibly human soldiers. Wearing the hazard suit-armor of the semi-humans, I fled this conflict - up a set of stairs, through a door, and into the blue mist.