This must be an amalgam of several dreams. I don’t know the order.

While shopping in a grocery store, I realized I no longer had a purse. I was certain that it was lost, not stolen, and did not know how to find it or what to do.

I was in an extraordinarily long kitchen. While it was enormous, it bothered me that its design was impractical. Instead of turning around between, say, counter and island, the chef or cook would have to walk up and down an impressive distance simply to put a recipe together. If someone could afford a mansion and a kitchen that size, couldn’t he or she manage to come up with a better use of the space?

Outside a chef was running after a train, perhaps having forgotten to give someone something. It was important for him to catch up with it. He did, and then the train tore off with him on it. He’d been kidnapped!

He must have escaped, for I saw him running toward me. I thought he might make it, but the train soon reappeared, traveling at full speed. The chef could not run fast enough along the track, and someone caught him up and carried him off again. The train reversed and retreated. I felt badly that the chef had been fooled into being captured. It could have happened to anyone.

When I looked up, the ceiling above was a glass dance floor. The dancers were dressed formally in black ties, tails, and cocktail dresses. I noticed their shoes shuffling, packed so densely overhead that I could see little else. I knew how they were dressed, however.

I heard myself being serenaded, although I didn’t recognize the song. The performer was Todd Rundgren, who was no more than two feet tall. I strained to understand what he was saying and to understand the absurdity of it all.

I was on a hilltop overlooking a church or community picnic. The scene looked eerily like a bucolic landscape painting, beautiful and serene. It didn’t resemble anything at home that I remembered. I also noticed that one or two of the trees looked tropical and out of place. In the distance I thought I could see CS from my days as a docent. I was torn between staying to enjoy the scene and feeling obliged to walk over and say, “Hi.” I wanted to look at it forever.

I noticed train tracks next to the house I was in, with two branches that ended in front of it. I asked the owner how she could be sure the trains wouldn’t veer onto the branch lines and hit the house. She seemed confident that that would not happen, but I wasn’t so sure. When a train passed, it was uncomfortably close.

Another train came toward the house and seemed about to hit it on the other side. At the last moment, it went around a odd, tight loop in the tracks to avoid the house. For the train to go around the loop, its speed had been greatly reduced. I wondered if someday an engineer would forget about the house and the loop and to slow down. I marveled that anyone could live in a house with trains passing within inches on either side, with no right of way or grades. Yet they were not full-sized, modern freight trains, and I didn’t notice noise or vibration.

Life seemed to be a train wreck, waiting to happen.

It’s happened before that I’ve served aboard the USS Enterprise, although it’s not always the same iteration. This time I was in front of something dangerous that seemed to require me to get a phaser and fire at it — but I could not make a decision. I didn’t know where I was, what I was dealing with, what the rules were, or even who I was.

When finally I decided to get the phaser and fire it (hoping not to be caught if I were doing the wrong thing), I wasn’t sure it was at the correct setting or that was aiming at the right spot to eliminate the danger. I pushed buttons randomly, not knowing what they did. I was petrified of killing. But I felt an overpowering urge to take control and do something.

I lived through two variations of this scenario. In both, I had to make a decision. In both, I dreaded being caught.

It’s interesting how I translated my anxiety about the meeting today into the opportunity to be a confused and anxious Star Trek adventurer.

I woke up thinking there should have been a difference between “defense” and “security.”

I don’t seem to dream, or at least to remember dreams, during times of petty stress. Perhaps even in my sleep, my subconscious doesn’t have time to relax and stretch its imagination.

I was back in college and could not explain in a satisfactory way, to myself or anyone else, why. Not only was I aiming for the same degree, but I had a loan, no, a grant, to fund this futile exercise in “doing it better.” It sounded ridiculous to me and my listeners.

Back in my room, I found that my computer speakers played a video of whatever I was listening to, but I had to have a CD designed for it. When I tried it again, the speakers went dark. Or were they now the wrong kind of speakers?

ECP parked in front of the house we rented, bumping the tree in front. Judging from the scar on its trunk, it had been bumped before. I worried because it seemed loose, and I had a vision of it falling over onto the house so that I lost everything I owned, including my computer and backups. I sent AP to the town hall to have it removed, even as I contemplated how it was at the corner of the house and was unlikely to fall onto it, and how barren life would be without it.

At town hall, a block away, the functionary told AP that he seemed to be nervous. AP replied, or thought he replied, “Of course — bureaucracy makes everyone nervous!” This surprised the clerk.

At the house, I kept trying to see how unstable the tree really was, probably making it even worse. (Did the tree represent my teeth?) Finally, I had ECP take a Polaroid photo of it, although this doesn’t seem logical now. When she turned to me with the camera, unbeknownst to her, her face was screwed up in a combination of pain and horror as though she had been burned. Forgetting that it was a Polaroid camera, I was impatient to see what was wrong, but noticed the photo spitting out. It showed the tree engulfed in flames. The concept that this was happening in another dimension was horrifying to me. We were both frightened by more than a tree potentially falling over.

I was watching an old monochrome movie on campus in which men in medieval gear were told there would be a bounty awarded to the man who returned with the king’s right arm. In the next scene, a man cornered another, who I sensed was not the king, and with a short sword hacked at his right arm at the shoulder repeatedly to sever it. The victim, who offered little if any resistance, fell to the ground as the other chopped. Each time a blow was struck, he’d cry out, “ARRR! ARRR! ARRR!” It was terrible to see, but the rhythmic nature of his cries distracted me.