I was in another country, or at least it seemed to be another country, but I don’t remember any active participation in the dream — it was more like watching a movie. A person I thought might be famous was performing a frontal lobotomy on some hapless patient, a man. It involved sticking a clear tube into his head and looked terribly barbaric.

I could see the patient overnight, and he was suffering from some bizarre complication. For some reason, he started to swell badly. It apparently caused him a great deal of pain. He didn’t say anything, but somehow I knew he had decided to get revenge on the person (not clear even that he was a physician) who had performed the surgery for leaving him overnight without anyone to check on his condition. He seemed to feel a burning need for out-of-proportion, burning revenge.

His wife or a woman (nurse?) appeared in the morning, and by then the swelling was more or less gone, but he was still bent on revenge. I couldn’t tell when, where, or what form it would take. I was afraid it would be violent and bloody. I didn’t want to see it and tried to close my eyes, but I could still see everything. Every time something happened, like the “doctor” opening a car door, I thought, “This is it” and braced. At one point, he was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and his chair was pulled offstage and behind the curtain, and I thought, “This has to be it.” But it wasn’t. Not even sure that it wasn’t Carson who was pulled off.

This went on for what felt like forever, and I kept trying to wake up or redirect my thoughts, but couldn’t.

A second dream . . . This one involved a woman (which could have been me) driving a bus that was way behind schedule backward. This was because she’d been too busy making up for lost time that she was backing up (through quite a lot of terrain) to a restroom down the street, which made the handful of last passengers of the day scream. I’m not sure it was me, though, because it seemed to me I was trying to explain how bad the crowding on the bus because of the problems had been, but nobody quite believed me.

I was in a rural farm area (I think the bus was, too), and there was this odd thing — a silo-type thing that must have been miniature but at the same time wasn’t that one dipped into to get some especially good mustard, or maybe it was mayonnaise. Someone showed me and told me it was courtesy of someone and was very popular in the region. I could never figure out how to do it, and every time I tried to do it, I’d just find hair or something weird. It had the aura of magic, however.

I’m not sure how this figures in, but there was an old man celebrating his anniversary whose wife ripped the buttons off his orange shirt to prove he had hot sex (knowing that many would be skeptical or laugh), only, being very distracted, they never actually got around to it.