Here's the embarrassing, comical, cartoon of a dream I had last night. Try not to take anything from it -- it's here as entertainment.
     Which isn't to say I didn't wake up this morning and stagger to the bathroom, sobbing and retching.

     There is an occasion. I don't know what. The time is now. Beth invited me. Other attendees are Beth's boyfriend, and Becky and her boyfriend. The place we're staying in is a small hotel. Many of the rooms are tiny, like on a cruise ship, and there are shared bathrooms in the hallways. My room is shared with a stranger, and is very very small like a train compartment.

     There will be some free time before the event that this reunion is for, and Becky and Beth want to use it for a quick camping trip with their boyfriends. So they go, but then Becky's boyfriend disappears from the dream, like she'd never had the boyfriend. She comes back and goes into her room.

     Saturday passes with Becky locked in her room, surfing the Internet, sewing, and watching tv. I am in my room, tolerating the installation of my roommate's new pool table/bar/roulette wheel/entertainment center. It fills most of the room. There's hammering and sawing that I know Becky can hear because her room is right across the tiny hall. Also I had mentioned yesterday that this installation was going to happen, so she knows that I'm here doing nothing, amid crap. It gets to be about 4pm and I've reached a breaking point. Why is whatever she's doing worth more to her than me, or is it just that I'm completely out of her mind? My mind is seething. When I wonder whether she's done anything sexual in there today, I'm disgusted at myself -- I'm not thinking right and I need to come out of it.

     I'm trembling. I decide to take a shower, knock on her door, and suggest we go out to dinner. I go down the hallway to the bathroom, and get in the shower. I leave the door open because if she comes out I want her to see me naked. Once I'm in the shower she comes out almost immediately. She calls through the shower door that she's going out. I yell back but she tells me she can't hear, the shower's too loud. She puts something on the counter and leaves.

     When I get out, I find a stack of historical videos about nautical revolutions in fictional countries. There's a note: "You should watch these videos tonight. They're from Terry. Love you. -Becky." I go back to my stateroom and pop one in the new pool table. It tells me that when the interests or property of one's empire are at risk, inaction means suicide. Interpretation is meaningless. Act! act! act!
     My enactment of the principle is dazzingly pathetic:

     I dress and race out onto the beach. It's dusk. The beach is a field of large rocks and I leap from rock to rock at full speed, glowing a blue-white in my running-jumping perfection. It's a kind of mating dance and it communicates my love and my pain, and I know Becky can see it as she rides in a yacht, tracing the shoreline. Many times I spring across huge gaps and sidestep giant driftwoods with twisting flips. I cross the bay and enter woods that encircle the city. I dodge predators, first wolves and then werewolves. They have no chance of catching me. Becky is not worried.

     I reach the city wall and scale it. I race across its top, which has grass and towers and gaps and all the other architectural details featured on fortifications. It's only a few seconds before I'm being shot at -- something I knew would be coming. It is, once again, the French, wearing colonial uniforms and carrying muskets. The French are a whole new level of enemy, far more threatening than werewolves, and things are getting complicated. I'm still glowing blue and my increasingly technical moves are still on display, but even as I know this strengthens my woo, it dawns on me that my mind has been resisting this reality: Becky is not moved. She sees me and considers what I am doing to be simply what I must do. She finds my moves impressive, as anyone would; however there is no impact.

     I am shot in the leg as I fly across a chasm. I throw my arms out to catch the roof's edge, but it's too late and I fall. I splash into a narrow canal and am washed out to the beach. My uniform is big and British and keeps me afloat. I can't get it off. The soldiers will soon be upon me. I try to dive but it's useless, my coat won't go down. The men are coming down the beach. They want to make an example of me. One shoots me in the head and the other walks out to strip the coat off my corpse. As he wrestles my dead arms out of it, despair takes me.


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