I was in the trailer, which was being driven through Switzerland side by side with another trailer. The slopes were vertical, and I had no idea how we could get up and down them without tipping over or plummeting. We used a clock, navigating according to the vertical line between the 6 and 12. I was frightened when I realized there were no windows, so no one could see where we were going.

We lost control and plummeted. Mentally, I prepared for death while hoping to survive miraculously. To my surprise, I found that we landed right side up, side by side with the other trailer, in the snow. This simply wasn’t possible, yet there we were. None of it made sense to me.

The rest is not suitable for public viewing.

To my horror I had bitten off the back half of my night guard on both sides, so a high school classmate said he would go with me to get a new one. He didn’t mean a customized one from the dentist, but a bulky blue one from a drugstore, along with a strange implement to cut the excess off. I was wary of this idea, but it was too late.

We went to the bakery café, which looked more like a diner and was filled with characters. When one man in particular entered, everyone cringed. I’m not sure why he singled me out, but he insisted loudly and firmly that I was mentally deficient. Another high school classmate, who seemed to be the wife or girlfriend of the first, told me it was best to go along with him. I didn’t like that he seemed so certain.

We went into another room to see a demonstration of a cannon being fired. This seemed very dangerous to me, but all went well — until a cannonball rolled toward the group from the cannon. I thought it must be hot, but no one along the wall seemed to be afraid of it. Another one rolled out (how?), another, and another, and as the pile grew people became worried that we’d be crushed by a room full of cannonballs.

We went back into the bakery café, but stuff was piled outside against the glass wall, and there was no way to get out and nowhere to go. I thought I saw a gap, however, and tried to break the window to get to it. The glass was unbreakable. I wondered if a heel might work, but I was wearing walking shoes. I thought of the device I’d bought to trim the night guard. I’m not sure that we ever got through the glass, but beyond it was a screen — or perhaps the screen was protecting the glass. There must have been a way out.

I did not panic.

Suddenly I found myself on stage at a pulpit in front of an audience waiting for me to deliver a sermon. I found a Bible in front of me and started to look for passages from which I could tell a cohesive story. I don’t know what I talked about, but I felt I was doing well enough that no one would notice that I wasn’t prepared.

Realizing that music would be expected, I turned to the music director but naturally did not know the hymnal and could think of nothing that made sense in conjunction with what I’d just said. The music director announced “Hymn #141.” Although I didn’t know what it was, I hoped the selection seemed planned and complementary to the sermon. I had misgivings about the music director because I feared that he (or she) suspected me. My worry stemmed from a sense of guilt, but I didn’t understand its source.

As I was waking up, I was thinking that being a minister isn’t very difficult at all — I had gotten away with it without having had to spend time on agonizing over a sermon. After I became a little more awake, I felt oppressed by the idea of having to come up with something fresh week after week, year after year, while providing spiritual and marital counseling and performing all the other day-to-day duties I didn’t know about.

By the time I was fully conscious, my idea of the job had been transformed from “piece of cake” to “overwhelming.”

I was on a commercial flight and needed to use the swimming pool. I resisted for a while, but finally gave in and went up to it on the top floor of the plane. Even as I used the pool, I could not understand the logistics. It looked just like a hotel pool.

Now the plane was moments from landing, and I had no time to leave the pool and return to my seat. The pool was outside the plane, and so was I. For the plane to land, I had to cut the plastic bag that enveloped it. This meant I would have to cling to the skin of the plane for dear life and that I would be dragged along behind it when it landed, which sounded like it might be painful and even deadly. I could not picture any scenario that would come out well for both me and the plane and was stuck in indecision.

Ultimately, I knew I had to cut the bag and hope that the consequences would not be too severe and that I could bear and survive them.

At around 1:30 a.m. I woke up from a vivid dream that may have come from the headlines. I was with an older man, perhaps my father in the dream but not my real father, in an aerie hideout when armed men broke in. They told us they were going to kill him bloodily, but that I could leave with one of them across the treetops. I don’t remember wrestling with the decision, saying good-bye, or leaving; I recall only fleeing through the treetops, hearing gunfire, and being told not to look back. I didn’t need to turn to see the horror in my imagination and to wonder at the ease with which I had left and my cowardice. I did not feel what I should have. When I awoke, I was shaking.

Next I dreamed that I was choosing my room at the White House, but it was nothing like the building on Pennsylvania Avenue. I liked every room I looked into better than the last, although all of them were bare bones, and some were underground. I wondered how I had come to be there and to have this opportunity. The strangeness of it frightened me.