Lately I have not seemed to dream much, or I have woken up remembering only some uninteresting fragment. Mostly, I wake up as though from a void. I don’t like this.

This afternoon I fell asleep while reading A Short History of Nearly Everything and napped longer than I wanted to, but I slept more deeply than I do during the night. It was more refreshing than any sleep I’ve gotten in a while.

And I dreamed that I was visiting my father (but not my actual father), who I thought oversaw the golf course at one of our communities. There was something about him, however, that I didn’t trust. He didn’t seem to be much of a manager or to know anything about the job. When security employees, who should have been part of his responsibility, came by, he avoided rather than greeted them. This struck me unpleasantly, and I began to wonder who he really was.

He had parked his car in or near grass next to the road and told me we were going to hitchhike our way around the course. Before I could make him explain this strange proceeding or either of us could so much as stick out a thumb, a strange vehicle pulled up. It resembled the mobile billboards that are driven around downtown Chicago, but had a narrow flat panel suspended underneath. I think the seats were all taken by members of the driver’s family, but he offered to let me squeeze into the narrow space between the two billboard sides. I refused, so my “father” said he would. I lay on the panel underneath, only too late realizing I could be thrown out of it as the vehicle rounded bends. Indeed, I nearly was at the first turn, and I was so low to the road that I feared being flayed. The driver seemed to be speeding along on what should have been a golf course road meant for leisurely driving.

He drove for such a long time that I began to wonder if I had been abducted. Finally the vehicle stopped, and I discovered that my “father” was gone, and so was the driver’s family. We were alone who knows where, and then I was sure I had been set up. It was all very smooth, but I was not so afraid that I didn’t think I could defend myself. I did realize that he was a sexual predator, even as I remembered that that thought had come from a video recently posted on The Onion site.

I don’t know what happened after that.

I learned of a sure way to have hair removed permanently from the legs, so I had it done. (This is not something that troubles me when I’m awake.) I had been warned that the treatment might leave the fine, less visible hair behind, but it was guaranteed to remove the growing dark ones permanently.

Weeks or months later I looked at the backs of my legs, and the backs of my thighs were covered by thick white hair that was dense enough to be fur. It was very visible. I was both horrified and puzzled, as the back of the thigh typically isn’t hairy, so how had a hair removal process caused white fur to grow where there had been little hair in the first place?

The idea was so vivid that when I woke up I expected to see the back of my thighs covered with white fur. I didn’t look at or touch them.