Dream June 27, 2022: Mackenzee E. Crosby, Ashlynd Elizabeth Huffman and I are in the fabulous new office at The Ada News, looking at all the news and photo equipment they’ve bought us. We look out the huge picture windows to see a gasoline truck accidentally back into Wintersmith Park dam and explode. It takes us several minutes to gather our gear, and when we finally get on the scene, it is apparent that the lake water is contaminated with thick, sludgy crude oil. We try to photograph people who we know, but they are very reluctant and refuse to give us their names, even though we know them. Ashlynd notices that when we try to walk around to the other side of the dam, they secretly rotate it, so we can only see one side of the scene. That’s when I discover that my sunglasses are so aerodynamic, they can smoothly fly to the other side, but I regret that I can’t remember the password to my camera.

Dream, May 11, 2022: I am sitting in my car in an alley when an incredibly beautiful young woman starts hitting on me. We decide to go to my apartment. When we arrive my roommates are so jealous that one of them starts pooping whole loaves of sliced bread in the back yard. We tell him he will starve to death if he keeps it up. As I begin to clean up the mess, another roommate comes from inside the apartment, shouting, “Come quick, it’s acute chocolate poisoning.” I run inside to find another roommate with her mouth and face covered in chocolate, barely alive. I carry her to my bed, but when I lay her down, she is very unhappy with the loft of the pillow.

Dream, April 14, 2022: Mackenzee Crosby and I are at the old Crossroads Mall, which has been converted into a giant mental hospital. They serve us brownies as we watch political debates. I am very pleased with myself as I set up three televisions, so we can watch three networks at once. We are then trying to escape, but discover it is closing, and all the doctors are leaving. We run into Pam at an elevator, where I grab some cigarettes from a table and give one to her. She tries to light her own, but catches her hair on fire, so I light one and hand it to her, then light one for myself.  We find Mackenzee’s car but it is a huge Hummer/Jeep that requires a huge steel ladder for boarding. We drive around to the front of the mall because she forgot her keys. She and Pam wait while I go inside to discover that my Rotary club is having a huge 50th birthday party for me. I soon realize many of them are from my high school. I see Jena Owrey, who hugs me and gives me a huge stack of birthday cards, many with thousands of dollars in cash in them.

Dream, November 14, 2021: Courtney Morehead and I watch as a friend of ours shows us how to swim inside solid materials. He swims in the street, submerging and splashing in the concrete.

We decide to try the soil by the side of the street, and are amazed to find that if we believe hard enough, we are able to swim in the soil.

Courtney starts ahead of me, but I catch up and pass. I can hear her thoughts. When I hear her think she is very happy, I come to the surface, and she follows to discover we are at her mom’s house, only on the north end of Lake Michigan, at a glass-and-steel building from the distant future.

Glowing beings wearing robes (think Metrons) emerge and tell us we can enter through the front, and it’s not necessary to use the intercom.

“You might want to finish your swim in the south end of the lake,” the Metron tells us, “or you’ll end up stinking of fish.” He smells me, and I stink like fish.

Dream, October 2021: I am assigned to carry all the archives from my newspaper in special glass-lid boxes to a new cellar storage facility across town. When I start down the narrow stairs, I stop and discover that the light-colored cinder blocks are made of natural gas, but the darker ones are from a reddish stone from which we get petroleum. When I get to the bottom and start stacking boxes, I see that others in my office have stacked them so high that I have to un-stack them. I also see big bay windows that face out onto a large parking lot, where people are disappearing. When I walk out to the parking lot, I realize I will be snatched as well. I want to leave a note, but I realize people will think I’m crazy because we are being taken by characters from Star Wars.

Dream June 2016: Ayn, Robert, Scott and I are driving from Tennessee to go skiing in Alaska. Scott’s car is very overpacked, since it is also a college refrigerator.

We arrive in central Arkansas to discover that a landslide in the Sandia Mountains (which are actually in New Mexico) has covered Interstate 35 (a highway that actually goes north and south, not through Arkansas), and that we will have to walk across the mountains. As we do so, we become refugees among thousands, all of whom are, like us, dressed for snow skiing.

We see sandstone formations in display cases that are actually made of live ducks.

In Edgewood (which is also actually in New Mexico), we are taken into a small meeting room for orientations, then led down a hill in small groups, since we now number in the millions. The town’s Prime Minister holds a press conference. He tells us the landslide has been repaired. I see his executive assistant, Kathy, who is elated to see me. She hugs me, and I do a complete orchestrated version of La Bamba for her.

08-16-21 Dream while Abby was in the hospital: Downtown Oklahoma City has turned into a Halloween bondage sex maze. I walk from room to room until I am invited by a super gorgeous young blonde to have bondage sex, but for some reason, she can’t figure out how to tie me up. I leave in a 1973 Cadillac, the one in which I learned to drive, and the brakes and the steering fail, leaving me flailing through neighborhoods out of control, until the controls suddenly return.

08-10-21 Dream: I am drone footage of a thunderstorm, except that instead of rain, lightning is striking and killing thousands of white geese. The dead geese first fall on a soccer field, where kids think it is hilarious. They get covered in feathers and guts, and laugh and laugh. I pan over to see a large wedding party, where brides and bridesmaids are knocked into a large swimming pool, with more hilarity.

I then see my friend Daniel O’Daniel, who has a new iPad she is using for her new newspaper in Allen, Oklahoma. She tells me her husband’s trailer is stuck in the mud down by the river.

“Don’t examine my town!” she warns, but then shares photos of it from her iPad to mine, and I realize there are photographers from all over the world, but the scene has shifted to another soccer field.

02-26-21 Dream: we arrive in Las Vegas for a Major League Baseball game. Everyone in Vegas has found purpose in collecting and holding small cotton teabags that contain hope. I open the case containing Hawken the wolfhound and find it difficult to assemble him because his legs won’t attach correctly. When I finally do, a Kleenex box next to him explodes and the leader of our group puts us on full helmet alert until the pieces come down. Hawken takes me to the edge of the city where we pick the lock on the gate and go into no man’s land to hunt and destroy small steel robots shaped like dogs.

12-07-2003 Dream: Margaret and I are entering a “dream machine,” like a rotating darkroom door. We come out together or separately. We find ourselves at a place made of couches, some of which are lit from inside. Then we are at a party. There is a German guy with a very complex bottle of wine. Mom and Dad have toothaches, so I start to make tea, but have to wait and negotiate because the hotplate and the teapot have crushes on me.

01-11-21 Dream: Barry Manilow and I are hanging out on a college campus. We try to harmonize, but I sound awful. When I ask him to teach me some songs, he says he can’t because of copyright issues. I ask him if he has a secret studio in a third world nation with no extradition. When he says yes, I fly us there using my mind powers.

11-15-20 Dream: On the way to a poetry reading, I found a melon in a tree that was full of plums, and each plum was covered in small blue ladybugs that were a delicacy. We feast on it and it is delicious. At the end of my reading, I leave the stage like a rock star and circle back to perform an encore, but get lost. I try to steal some cake from a neighbor’s dumpster, but only find two small stocking caps a friend made for me. The neighbor catches me in the dumpster, so I tell him I am checking it for possums.

09-30-20 Dream: After sleeping crooked on my right arm…. I am walking in a tunnel with dead snakes of all sizes on display. I decide to pick up the cobra, but find it to be alive. After a short struggle, it bites me on the right hand. I try to get ready for work, but as it becomes more painful, I realize it’s a real bite and I need to go to the emergency room. I look for my car in a lot where I am covering a basketball game, but can’t find it. A friend of mine shows me the number of comical ways he’s injured himself in his sleep. I am then on my riding mower, which belches out white smoke.

08-24-20 Dream: While driving across a bridge over the Mississippi in New Orleans, we find it to be a drawbridge. It keeps lifting us up until the vertical, when we become airborne. We land at the entrance to a lead-lined hiking ice train to the South Pole. We hike, getting thirstier and thirstier due to seawater slush that feels cold but is too salty. Even our dogs can’t drink. At the end of the trail, we see a dude ranch, where we are fed corn on the cob. The ranchers explain we have just hiked the world’s longest train. Abby’s speech becomes slurred when she develops corn saturation.

08-10-20 dream: At a dentist’s office, I am assigned to protect a little girl from assassins. I see a red dot on a far wall, and get the girl to cover just as the rounds fall. Under hypnosis, I am able to coax the name of her attacker from her. I get on a very huge nuclear powered train and ride it to Asher, Oklahoma to cover a softball game, but when I get off, I walk in my house shoes through several back yards trying to photograph a huge thunderstorm and lightning event to the south. I shoot an amazing 15-second sequence of lightning using my phone, but when I play it back, it is a hysterical sequence showing the British man behind me reacting to the lightning, since I had the wrong camera selected.

07-04-20, Ashlynd Elizabeth Huffman, dream: You are I are commander and executive of a self-propelled howitzer platoon in Iraq; you are a major and I am a captain. We are ordered to move one of our guns to another part of town, which looks suspiciously like Lawton, Oklahoma, where I grew up, to suppress some insurgents. Before we can ever board the vehicle, we get ambushed, and fight them back into a high school cafeteria, where I shoot several of them in the shoulder. We climb and observation tower and I see that you have a stainless steel bolt action rifle chambered in .338 Lapua. You shoot at a TG&Y sign a mile in the distance, and when it hits, it’s incredibly loud. As we make our way back to the vehicle, an insurgent, a giant 6’5″ angry-looking Iraqi, stops me and says, “I dare you to give me an order.” I lower my weapon and argue with him, but when you see this, you come over and start yelling at him, scaring him off.

Dream 06-18-20: the space shuttle is trapped in a low earth orbit approximately five feet above Interstate 95 in downtown Miami. Controllers are afraid to deorbit the vehicle due the crew safety. Instead, they will use the escape vehicle, a grimy, steampunk ship no one likes, in seven months due to orbital alignment. I pull up behind the shuttle on the highway just in time to see a man in a “Finding Nimo” fish costume swinging on a trapeze above the ship. He gets close enough to smash the deorbit control panel, causing the shuttle to settle gently to the roadway. The crew gets out, grateful they didn’t have to use the escape pod.

Dream 06-09-20: a Sith Lord is occupying a cloud city above Earth, similar to the station Tom Cruise has in Oblivion. As I climb the long stairs to the top, I find him using the reanimated corpse of Rosa Parks to turn small animals to the dark side of the force, simultaneously removing all the Rosa Parks Taco Stands from Google Maps. I search frantically for Max the Chihuahua, but when I find Summer the Chihuahua, I remember that Max has been dead for over a year. Summer is wearing one of my fleece jackets. I pick her up, and intuitively know that she can’t be turned to the dark side.

Dream 05-03-20: at a busy hotel, I am involved in several murder schemes that involve killing people by getting them to drink too much water. As I leave, there are spiders everywhere. I walk to my car naked. The attendant hands me a bundle of clothes that won’t fit me, and the keys to a Boeing 747, which I am supposed to ferry to my home airport. As I walk out to the jet, still naked, I am required to climb a huge dead tree to retrieve a stuffed bear at the top.

Dream 04-24-20: Mackenzee Crosby and I were looking at some old Vivitar Series 1 lenses. The lens hoods were brown instead of black. When we were done, she gave me a ride back to my offices in a roll of 4L experimental plastic. On the way, we photographed some bank employees, but they dispersed after the first frame, which was over exposed.

Persistent, horrifying nightmares about spiders: it started with a fountain that mines glowing purple liquid from the ground. Then we were surrounded by huge spiders with long black legs and round white abdomens. They were all stealing cherries. Are there really cherry-stealing spiders, or has the Rona finally broken me?

Dream 04-05-20: we live in an apartment in the press box at ECUs Norris Field. I awake to find the I have just missed the women’s football game, but the Atlanta Braves are about the start their game. John Martin offers to let me use his jet pack, and I show off by leaping high enough to bump my head on the ceiling of an office building. As we run across town with steaks for dinner, Jeff Cali brags about his new radar detector, and tells us to go back to the store for cream of broccoli soup.

Dream 03-22-20: At the L.A. Times, I find a closet in the back of photo storage with a huge collection of old, obscure or one-of-a kind Nikkor Lenses, lenses that must have been custom made for The Times. I decide I want to take a bunch of them to the beach and shoot surfers with them. Suddenly Ashlynd Elizabeth Huffman bursts in, saying it is her first day at The Times and she’s trying to get to her car to drive to cover a huge fire in the mountains to the east. We get lost in a maze of stairs and exits. Finally, we get outside where we can see plumes of smokes rising to the east. We race to my car, but find that we have to wait in line 15 minutes for them to get my car out of the parking garage.

Dream 03-17-03: I am taking pictures in an ice castle that is also an executive headquarters. I occasionally go outside, where people are soaking themselves down because the ice castle is in the desert. We feel an earthquake and begin to panic, fearing the end is near, but we are placed on a conveyor belt with happy music playing. We all lie down, knowing we are being taken to see Santa.

Dream 01-20-20: I am in college. An inspector comes to my dorm room demanding to see my phone. He removes the sim card and I realize he will see all my secrets. After analyzing it, he says, “That’s it!” I ask him, “I’m being fired for what’s on my phone?” He tells me, “No, but you are losing your roommate.” As my the inspector and my roommate collect their things, I tell the roommate I still want to be friends, which he doesn’t. I am then on the beach with a buddy, reenacting scenes from Saving Private Ryan using a Kleenex box. When it’s time to come in, I see that my newlywed wife Kim has painted the floors in all the rooms. Finally, I get to the living room, which still has carpet and is an inch deep in dirt. Kim sits down next to me and I see a long row of teeth growing in a line down her leg. “See,” she says, “My wisdom teeth are finally falling out.”

Dream 01-15-20: Abby and I are lying in bed in a gazebo in the middle of the back yard, trying to stay as quiet as possible because the Gestapo are just outside. As I doze off, I realize we are actually in our real bed, dreaming about the gazebo. A movie is about to start, and we excitedly run into the theater. The best seats are on the front row, called “vomit row” because of all the old blankets and vomit. Instead of a movie, we are inside a NASA simulation. Space shuttles that look like pontoon boats land in the water around us. One contains a telescope, which has a bird in it that won’t come out. When it pokes its head out, it becomes a squirrel. It softly bites my finger in the same way our Chihuahua Summer does.

Dream 01-13-20: I have an old Dodge Polara in my garden for growing things inside all winter. When I go to harvest, I find bananas so ripe they have turned to banana-shaped oranges, and turnips that are so big they have partially grown into the steel of the car.

Dream 12-24-19: While walking through an ally In downtown Ada, I am accosted by thugs. I put my hand on my sidearm and they retreat. I enter our old newspaper office, which is now a pawn shop. I tell the owner I am going to get some old photo junk I left behind. It is mostly Kodak boxes and loupes. We see a skunk at the bottom of the stairs, and I retreat, but a black cat grabs it around the waist. I shoot at them with my sidearm, but flee, and as the police arrive, I realize I am naked.

Dream 12-22-19: Major industrial accident in Ada, maybe at a factory where they make sponges and pegs. Ashlynd Elizabeth Huffman works for us and we crash the gates at the factory to get the scoop. We swim in shallow water throughout the factory, where we run into pockets of people who support what we are doing. We avoid the executives and and PR people. We leave the factory to discover I forgot where I left my car. As we walk back to the office, a well-dressed woman in a Ferrari tries to bribe us with dozens of coupons for new smartphones. By the time we get back to the office, there is an awards banquet for our coverage. I see an old girlfriend (Melissa) who calls me Charlotte. “Richard,” I tell her. “My name is Richard.”

Dream 12-21-19: I put some barbecue on to cook, especially lots of bacon, intending to let it cook outdoors all day. I go to the movies with my friend David, who offers me absinthe. He then suggests we try a drinking game in which we add Percocet to each drink. I go home to find the next door neighbor’s teenage daughter handcuffed to the roof of their house. I climb up and we become friends. She says her dad left her there because her spirit was interfering with the instrument landing system at the airport. I touch her neck, which she likes and says is “intimate.” I climb down to check the barbecue, which has set the girl’s father’s monk robe on fire. I mow for a while to check if the ILS is back in service.

Dream 12-19-19: During a thunderstorm, my lawn mower needs to urinate. I take him to the bedroom, where I put the commode on the bed and urinate on the lawn mower’s behalf. Lightning strikes near the house and I am slightly shocked. When I move the mower again, there is a large puddle of urine under it, so I put it in the sink and fill the sink with hot water. I discover a previously unknown area of the sink where desserts are stored, and think, “something sweet sounds good.”

Dream 12-07-19: Randy Mitchell and I are walking in Wintersmith Park on our way to play racketball when we see an object in the soil by the sidewalk. We think it is the partially buried remains of a human body. The police arrive in force, including two helicopters, only to discover that the body is a whole chicken from WalMart.

Dream 12-05-19: Hawken the Irish Wolfhound and I take down an elk, often handsomely backlit and in slow motion. We are able to harvest nearly 200 pounds of fresh broccoli from it. As we do, an old friend of Abby Barron‘s arrives in an MG with fettuccine.

In the same dream, I am at Ashlynd’s graduation. When I see her in her robes, we fall into each other’s arms and can’t stop crying.

Dream 12-02-19: Everything is labeled 5412A. I am in the Star Wars universe, but it is mostly water. I am Richard, but in the role of Luke Skywalker. I gradually forget my real identity. I swim next door to my best friend’s hut, and she and I talk about it, suspecting something is up, but what? Several people we know are wading, and step into deep holes and disappear back to my old reality. My friend and I attempt to climb the Jedi Temple, but there are no handholds, so we try to find leftover furniture in the water. Some are desk chairs, some are huge industrial cranes covered in mud, and some are the arms of giant monsters. I hear music and realize I am writing a new Pink Floyd song called “The River.” The video for the song is me driving around town, but when I try to turn corners, I trip over pipes. I hear the lyric, “The River is making decisions for the night.”

Dream 12-02-19: Byng Schools is building a new, giant supergym in our pasture. As I watch the work, I see two aircraft dangle long tubes to collect atmospheric samples. The tubes crash into the cell tower in the yard. There is little damage, but the school decides to cut the size of the gym in half, which upsets everyone because there is no longer room to set up tables to sell candy.

Dream 11-25-19: Ashlynd Elizabeth Huffman helps me move into the dorms at ECU, but I move into the ones in the bad neighborhood, and my stuff gets stolen in the first week. We set up a sting operation involving the mascots to catch the perpetrators. Meanwhile, out of frustration, I take a school teaching job in Sheridan, Illinois. I commute daily in an old RV. The commute is so long that one day, I awake to find I am arriving at the school after sleep-driving through the night. I have forgotten all my clothes, so the principal lets me look through the lost and found, only to find there are only dresses for 13 year old girls and chicken suits. Back at ECU, we watch a complicated documentary about how luring criminals with mascots is illegal.

Dream 09-04-19: In order to receive a parking pass for ECU, you had to read the last page of a scented, all-pink novel by Hampton Allsockey.

Dream 06-29-19: Abby and I are in New Orleans during a flood. We repeatedly try to cross the Mississippi in her truck, but “turn around, don’t drown.” We see some police officers we know from Ada and talk to them, only to discover the latest trend among cops is to carry at least four huge hunting knives on their belts, beautiful, ornate knives with gold and silver engraving, some of which are at least ten inches long. I pull out a one-inch black pen knife and feel inadequate. I am then mowing New Orleans with Abby’s truck. The transaxle overheats and stops, but as I watch, the temperature gauge rapidly drops into the normal range.

Dream 06-17-19: Michael Zeiler has trained two dens of rare South American ants to smoke cigarettes and throw small lit firecrackers on command. He intends to deliver them to Trump Tower to blow it up. When his car won’t start, he tries to start a washing machine, and when it won’t start, he decides to drive the ants to the tower in a toddler’s plastic toy truck. Meanwhile, my coworkers and I are in the tower, trying to decide on a code name for Trump so no one will know we are talking about him. Most of the suggested names are much too long, like “The Sesquseptigenarian.” We hear an explosion and realize the ants have accidentally detonated at the entrance, meaning we will need to take the back door when going home in the evening. Trump orders us to the 15th floor, which is over two miles high. It is so high, the elevator bends to reach the door. A glass ramp extends across a chasm from the elevator to the actual floor. My coworkers and I stage an ambush on the ramp, in which several of us try to inject Trump with syringes, but when that fails, we beat him to death with a fire extinguisher.

Repeated dream throughout the night 06-11-19: I can see the name of the dream, but I can’t copy and paste it to share it with social media.

Dreams 06-10-19: I am part of the Cassini-Huygens mission. We load into a Cessna 210 converted for space travel, which alarms me because all the other people are so fat. We travel across the surface of Titan until we reach the center of a completely industrial area. We put on our coats and the lead astronaut flips a switch, revealing all the heat and light on the moon are artificial. I am then with Lisa Oxenham Bratcher at ECU, who keeps asking me about “2 and 3,” which means nothing to me. She then explains “items 2 and 3 on the ballot,” which will improve drainage in town.

Dreams 05-31-19: walking around New York City for hours at a time with Jodie Foster, getting to know each other, taking pictures of 9/11 flashback scenes. At the top of a long hill, a country music song starts… “wouldn’t want to be at the top of that apple ceiling, apple ceiling, apple ceiling…” we run to the bottom of the hill to see kids having a mud fight in a school bus. At the top of the hill, football players were practicing on huge letters of the alphabet. Later, I see an old girlfriend going into a doctor’s office and knock her glasses off with my shoulder, then hide. Later, when she’s coming out of the office, I do it again, hiding again, and Abby Barron and I laugh and laugh about it.

Dream 05-28-19: After I made an incredibly difficult sniper shot to destroy a Russian laser in a video game, John Wayne gave me the Medal of Freedom and convinced me to run for President.

Dream 05-27-19: We have hornets in the barn, but when the exterminator arrives, we discover they are actually lady bugs. A roving gang of ‘50s bullies tries to rough me up, but when the fat one appears to be naked, I help the sheriff arrest him. Stacey Prouty Chadwell replied to this: I had a dream with you included! You were hosting The Price Is Right and I was chosen as a contestant. The items, up for pricing, ranged from an outhouse, puppies, a trip to Amsterdam, to the price of integrity and of ignorance! It was out there, but we were all in deep conversation and lotsa laughter.
Do you write about your dreams, as soon, as you wake? (Edison did everyday of his life.)

Dream, 05-26-19 (while napping while listening to scanner chatter of a grass fire in Happyland after reading some of the suicide blog of Martin Manley): I am in charge of a top secret project to recover Star Trek characters from the International Space Station who have been shrunk to very small sizes for time travel to planets with very small inhabitants. Some of them are on tiny toy train cars. Others are in little busses that also seem to be at the Super Bowl. As I sift parts of the USS Enterprise on the floor of a gym, my wife Abby appears. I inform her that I have decided to be shrunk to the size of a speck of dust and will live under a piece of adhesive tape stuck to her left shoulder. She says that she will be joining me.

Dream 05-24-19: I catch some thugs trashing the house, but am too late to confront them. I am able to shoot one round from my 9mm into the back of their car from more than a mile away. Abby Barron and I are then in the first class section of a 747 headed for Houston. For some reason I still have my 9mm. I wear it in an open holster or put it on the table in front of me. No one seems to notice or care, which I find very odd, and am unable to find anywhere to put it out of sight. People complain that my laptop is too loud, but say nothing about the fact that I am armed.

Last night (05-08-19) I dreamed Max the chihuahua lost vision in one eye, and when I covered the other eye, he would say the word, “Dark.”

From Mackenzee Crosby: Channeling my inner Richard R. Barron and sharing my dream: David Schwimmer comes into Forget Me Not Floral, I refuse to serve him and proceed to tell him that his character in the show Friends is egotistical and sexist. He yells “Your banana trees suck anyway,” and leaves. I did not even know that I felt that way.

Dream 04-28-19: I am in an elite paramilitary group here in Ada. We’ve been assigned to clear out a suspected house. As we make entry, I am relieved to discover it is the house where I lived in the early 1970s, the one with the olive-colored shag carpet. At the back of the house, I find that my sister Nicole Barron Hammill’s room is three times bigger than any room in the house, in conflict with her accounts that it was the smallest.

As my unit and I drive away, I explain to Abby the names of all the weapons we are carrying. We make our way out west of town to a barn that I recognize. I explain to my unit, which is now just a bald guy I don’t know and my dad (who died in 2005), that I had photographed this barn years earlier before all the wood fell off, leaving just the frame.

On close inspection of the property, we find the body of an old woman, who looks and smells like she hasn’t been dead long. We see lightning strike near the base of the barn and realize it has killed another old woman. When we inspect her, she is wearing water wings made from rusty bird cages.

We enter a house near the barn and find a third dead old woman in the kitchen. I see her cat, and decide to feed it. I open the fridge and take out the milk and pour it, but the bald man tells me that it’s Tarn-X, not milk.

We go back outside, where my dad falls to the ground. He takes my hand and sings a hymn in a woman’s voice and weeps, something like, “And Lord, if I go to the church, will my soul be safe?” As we mount our vehicles and drive away, Abby bursts into laughter as we see that the barn is swaying in the wind just like the grass around it. I make a note that the wind is from the north.

Dreams 01-27-17… 1. I found a secret half of our house, where I was hiding all the large-aperture, manual-focus Nikon lenses I’d been getting at garage sales for a dollar each. 2. In the middle of a dramatic high seas rescue, I ran into Hillary Clinton. I hugged her and told I was sorry things didn’t work out, like we were old friends. Then a bunch of us helped her fold and pack some sweaters. 3. My fellow photographers and I search for the ultimate funnel cake. 4. Abby and I were back in 1969, watching the return of Apollo 12a, the 2-man mission designed to test the seats of the command module for an ultra-high-G reentry. The spacecraft looked like a super-slick space shuttle orbiter, but painted blue and sporting newly-developed laser engines. NASA parked it in my garage. In the dream I was also aboard the mission, which required the other astronaut, who I did not know or like, and me to wrap our torsos around a bar, like at a carnival ride. The space food was, as expected, funnel cake.

Dream Sept. 22, 2011: a train approaches, and as it gets very loud, I look outside to see a train being driven past our house on a flatbed trailer. The trailer stops, and the engine of the train unhooks itself, makes a u-turn, and comes up the driveway. I am convinced that Abby has done something to offend the engineer, and I am equally convinced he is intent on crashing through our living room where Abby is napping.

Dream, Jan. 8, 2010: At first I am hanging out with an old friend who I never see any more. We are at a creek bed, and her feet are really dirty. Then we are inside a hotel that has been flooded, presumably by Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Tsunami, and we are playing tag. Water is up to our waists, and there are partially-broken windows through which we climb while we are hiding. I complain to the officials that I don’t have one of the special Frisbees used to tag our opponents (which look like a flying saucer made out of Tupperware.) I get in my car and try to drive out of the parking lot, but discover the bridge to Pauls Valley (Oklahoma) is out. Workers disassemble my car and store it below me, while I sit on a plywood seat and start to ride the makeshift tram that leads across a waterway. As I ride, I realize that I will be thousands of feet in the air, and that I am only secured by hanging on to the plywood seat back in front of me. I can’t see Pauls Valley ahead of me, so I assume it will be hours before we arrive. Suddenly I arrive at the mall, where Joan Rivers says, “Welcome to the Gap!”

Dream, October 2007: I ran into an old girlfriend, Kathy, in the town where we used to live, at a particle accelerator where they were bombarding Christmas trees with neutrons. She has a midget on a leash. She tells me she has been married three times and her last name is now Schoecheekowskischke, which she made up. The midget, she explains, is an adopted child from the second marriage. I get into a blue SUV and start to leave, claiming that the church I am assigned to photograph will only be dry enough for another 15 minutes or so.

Dream October 2007: I was assigned to infiltrate a nuclear power plant. Our goal was to assassinate two people, both blond-haired women, and steal the weapons hidden inside. The weapons were phasers that had been deep-fried, only they looked a little like the nozzle on my garden hose (only deep fried.) We made our way through a labyrinth of metal stairs and railing to a series of doors. My partner (who I don’t really remember seeing) went inside and terminated our targets using a really cool chrome .22 with a silencer. We were then seamlessly running from the Israeli Army, dodging their small arms fire. Once they had surrounded us, we threw the phasers into a burning vehicle to prevent them from being captured. Then seamlessly, we are at a black-tie dinner party. Harrison Ford offers me a government job, which I accept because it will pay pretty well.

Dream, June 1989: I am holding Sandra K super close in an insane asylum to avoid being detected as an escaped inmate. We decide to go for a walk. We see a thunderstorm, and I hear George Thorogood music coming from the sky. I picked up my journal and wrote, “How does music come from thunderstorms?”

Dream 04-16-19: I am trying out for a cheerleader/dance team. We all receive cupcakes before tryouts. We assemble on a field, where an instructor shows us a series of dance moves. We start the dance, but I immediately realize I can’t dance at all and don’t know any of the moves, which I confess to a cheerleader in line next to me. As it ends, the instructor tells me I am off the team. The cheerleader storms off in a huff, and I see that she has stolen my journal. As I try to get it back, she uses an Exacto knife to remove the date, thus erasing it forever.

Dream 04-14-19: I am working at a Byng softball game when one of the girls is kicked out of the game for sliding into first too aggressively. I notice she is wearing a Victorian cape and hat. As we discuss the play, we see the dugout is now a precipice overlooking a canyon. “Look! Those birds are creating divisions in the water!” I see birds dive into a lake below, and as they hit the water, dams are constructed instantly. I wonder if they are trying to trap us, but as fuzzy carpet forms on the canyon walls and I see people walking both on the ground and on the walls, I realize the dams were built to allow gravity to work in an additional direction.

Dream 04-13-19: Mac Crosby lives in a Paris apartment overlooking the Champs-Élysées. She lets me crash for a week while I am in town. I have Hawken the Irish Wolfhound with me. We come and go all day and all night, going café to cabaret and everything in between. We make pictures, paint, write. The apartment is strewn with crumbs, empty wine bottles, paint spatter, and half-written poetry.

Dream 2016: I am back in college, living in a dorm by myself. The whole thing is very run-down. I hear a festival in the street below. When I walk down to it, I find I am in San Francisco, and it is an Irish jig festival. At some point during the dancing, people collide and a number of them fall down. I see Kathryn Sterbenc, and walk over to her to discover she is my wife. We walk for a while, and I break the news to her that I will only allow NFL teams to have 22-man rosters. She seems very upset with this news, so I tell her, “None of this is going to matter,” knowing that I am about to become omnipotent. Then, though I weigh thousands of tons, I float gently into the night sky.

Dream: 03-23-09: Literally everything in the world was incorrect. Abby and I used 3×5 cards to fix it.

Dream: 03-13-19: My goats were still around. In the dream I accidentally left the heat on in their shelter and it got hot enough to smelt iron. I then took Carl Lewis to a doctor appointment in Oklahoma City, but after racing through the lobby at a full run, he looked at an automated kiosk to discover it was actually in Omaha. Finally, Abby and I used bean patties to reanimate Denholm Elliott.

Dream: 04-13-19: I am working at a Byng softball game when one of the girls is kicked out of the game for sliding into first too aggressively. I notice she is wearing a Victorian cape and hat. As we discuss the play, we see the dugout is now a precipice overlooking a canyon. “Look! Those birds are creating divisions in the water!” I see birds dive into a lake below, and as they hit the water, dams are constructed instantly. I wonder if they are trying to trap us, but as fuzzy carpet forms on the canyon walls and I see people walking both on the ground and on the walls, I realize the dams were built to allow gravity to work in an additional direction.

Dream 12-14-18: I prepare to board a super-giant airliner which holds thousands of people. I get lost because it’s so large. We are very overbooked, so I am given a pillow and told to sit in the bathroom. I decide to take another flight, and watch as the plane breaks up on takeoff, catch fire, and crashes. I find myself in Iraq, clearing houses with Marines. We have no training, and our rifles are solid stainless steel. The work is arduous because no one is aware we are coming and every house we clear is a bathroom with someone shaving in it. I am teamed up with Jake Gyllenhaal, who is impatient with me and keeps telling me to not shoot him. Finally in open combat, we kill freely, until a family comes out of a house and we narrowly avoid shooting them. I board a helicopter and we strafe settlements. Finally, we get the word we are going home, so I sit at the mess table next to a women who doesn’t want me there because, “they always get hard on me.” Gyllenhaal tells me I’ll “never fire another round” in Iraq, and we flash back to the family scene where there is smoke coming from my rifle. Back in Ada, we see that the “back home” scenes were all filmed in downtown alleys. Riding in a limo with Gyllenhaal and several others, I say, “Remember this people. You’ve all stood right here.” We see a treehouse in the alley near 14th and Turner. Tom Hanks is inside. We introduce ourselves, but he runs away, obviously insane.

During a nap in the autumn of 1994: The headquarters for the New Order of the Third Millennium would be a 2 kilometer tall titanium phallis at the center of the Dead Sea.

Dream: our friend Anne and I are walking through her neighborhood on a summer evening. A tractor-trailer rig approaches from behind and starts to negotiate a tight corner at the end of her block, right in front of her house. In the process, Anne and I are forced off the road and are almost crushed. At some point in the maneuver, the rig needs to back up, and does so into Anne’s bedroom, where it barely fits. I enter to help navigate, but in doing so I end up almost being crushed. One of the drivers of the rig then informs me that they can’t get the vehicle out, so they want to cut a truck-shaped hole in the back wall so they can back it further. I suggest they get a smaller tractor (the front part of the rig with the engine), at which point I am in my own living room, where Abby informs me that the rig is Canadian, because they are ten percent larger there. Key sources for this dream: the recent death of a young spelunker in Nutty Putty Cave in Utah, and the handy man who came to the house last night to look into cutting a new window in my bathroom.

Dream: Abby and I live in a tethered blimp 1000 feet above Las Vegas. It is surrounded by lavish railing that allows us to watch other blimps float past, thunderstorms roll in, and aircraft crash into power lines.

I am then at Mizza’s, a place that makes pizza from nothing but meat. The booths are made to look like tiny Jeeps. Kathy is dining with us. The meat pizza people seem happy to make something vegetarian for me.

After dinner we decide to walk to the field next door for martial arts training. On the way out, I decided to show everyone my photos from dinner. “Did you guys know about this?” I ask, and tap the glass on the door of the restaurant. “The new phones allow you to display your photos on any piece of glass in the world.” I scroll through my images on the door and enlarge several.

I see David in the field, who will give me martial arts training, which is little more than take-down practice. I am able to defeat him in two out of three falls.

Back home, we discover that Michael has bought my mom (who died in 2009) a nonstick pan. Mom hates it because it burns everything. Michael explains that it has to be specially prepared with an organic rag. Amber is there helping us look for the rag. She dives into one cabinet after another, trying to find it. When she does, it looks just like a regular wash rag, except when we put it on the pan, where it liquifies the aluminum, seasoning it perfectly.

Dream 12-01-18: Abby and I are walking in downtown Ada when we hear a helicopter. We look up to see it escorting a 747 with engines 1 and 2 on fire, turning final for an emergency landing. I grab Abby and say, “We need to move this way.” We run away as the jet crashes into an empty apartment building. We both run back to the crash site to take photos for the newspaper with our phones.

Dream 11-28-18: Abby, my brother-in-law Tracey, and I enter a posh hotel room. In the corners are shiny vortex spots. Abby walks over to one and vanishes into it in a flash, only to reappear from one on the other side of the room. We decide to go to the game, where we encounter thousands of armed civilians, and decide we need to be armed as well, so we each steal an AR-15 and a shotgun. A bear pursues Abby, but at the last minute I shoot it. The pellets from my shotgun move in slow motion, but hit the target. We try to enter another hotel room, this one much less posh and in a basement, with a horse we have stolen. We have to stand the horse on end to get it through the door and down the steps. Once inside, we see dirty vortex spots in the corners, and Abby once again walks over to one and disappears into it. Tracey and I decide to spray for spiders, which are falling on our heads. Abby reappears from the vortex on the other side of the room, looking terrified. She tells me she just spent “literally infinity” inside the vortex.

Dream 11-24-18: Responding to a report of a downtown Ada fire, I discover it is at my own office. I try to enter to see if I can help, only to be stopped by TSA agents and Washington Post journalists. I see flames licking from the top of the stairs where my office is located, but then remember that I moved to the middle of the building two years ago, and was then suddenly relieved that the fire wasn’t my fault.

I see Dan Marsh, who challenges me to a race to his downtown loft apartment. He is much faster than I am, and is wearing an orange jumpsuit, so I am unable to keep up.

Dream 09-25-18: Abby and I are walking on Main Street in Byng when we top the hill to see a house on fire. My first instinct is to get my gear and cover it for the newspaper, but as we take a few more steps, we see many more houses on fire. We speculate it may be arson. We then turn around to see Byng is on fire as well, and realize it is the apocalypse. I decide to stay with Abby. As we return home, we see many people have gone insane. In our house, there are several insane children whose eyes have become huge red disks. Next door at a convenience store, I see police shoot a woman, and look around to see no fire or evidence of an event, and realize that everyone was dreaming it was the apocalypse.

Partially awake during this part of the dream, I see Abby is holding her hands up, talking to someone, obviously dreaming.

Dream: I was hunting caribou, and I was naked for the first time in my life. I am nakeder than the day I was born by a factor of five. I hunt the caribou with lightning bolts that seem to come from the sky, but also seem to come from me.

Exquisitely vivid dream 09-13-18: Riding a bicycle up and down Broadway in Ada repeatedly visiting Gym 210, where they remodel every 30 seconds. Weightlifters teach me a new leg clinch that they say will make me the strongest man alive. I finally arrive on the south end of town at Mansion of the Apocalypse. Inside I find thousands of toy rifles we are expected to use in the coming zombie attack. I find a grey one in the shape of an M249 Saw. I look over to see Amy Jo Johnson get bitten by a radioactive spider. She tells me she will have to go away to quarantine for two weeks, but says she will rescue me when she returns.

Dream 09-09-18: Carl Lewis, Samantha Spears, Eric Swanson and I are on a trip to an underground zombie apocalypse theme park in Wyoming. We are in Abby Barron’s truck, but are towing an eight-story trailer. While parked at a rest area, a guy backs into us, so Carl shoots at him. At the theme park, the activities turn into a real zombie apocalypse, and we barely escape with our lives. On our way home, we stop at another rest area, where I try to make CB radio contact with a camera that has a built-in CB, with no success. I then see that Jamie Pittman is building a new model of airliner out of clouds. It looks great at first, but I have difficulty switching the camera from radio mode to take pictures. The wind picks up, and I tell Jamie, “it doesn’t look too good.” She yells at all of us, “It’s a human being, it should be treated that way!” The cloud airliner then dissipates in the breeze.

Dream 04-01-16: Abby and I are in Boeing’s new jet, the 7447, a triple-decker super super jumbo. The jet is taxiing for takeoff, but gets lost in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Soon we attempt to take off, but gently crash land in Aruba. As Abby and I wait for drinks at the bar, Courteney Cox swims by and says hi.

I turn to find I am the center of a press conference, fielding questions about my new hydrogen superchain fuel that will replace petroleum. I then drift into a theory I cultivated in my twenties about jet engines that use core fan blades the size of toothbrushes because they can borrow energy from the earth’s gravitational waves, like surfers borrow waves in the ocean.

After waking up, I continue to think these ideas through in the shower, including trying to figure out a way to borrow gravity in space, and how to I would put a station on the moon if I were doing it today. Then I went on a time-travel trip in which I take over Russia before the First World War using 29th century technology, and change history.

Profound dream during a nap, February 2007: My people and I are walking in green wheat. The wheat gets finer and finer until it becomes green ash. I hear a poem about becoming of the ash. Abby and I lie down in it together.

Ultra-complicated, ultra-vivid dream 05-26-18: I am a 14 year old black kid who has snuck onto a US Air Force base to use their F-16 flight simulator. It flies well and I demonstrate some sophisticated flight maneuvers. I meet the base commander, who is wearing a new rank between captain and major, which looks like captains bars with a bar diagonal across it. He tells me it is complicated new rank called “Prinz Eugen.” The simulator becomes a real F-16, and I fly it beyond its capabilities because of my extensive video game experience. I then take Abby to the hospital, where we see a woman in a cocoon who has just flown from New York and has no memory of the trip. Doctors tell Abby she either has a spider bite or has been in a knife fight, based on a macro photo they took of her neck. The clerk keeps asking, “What’s Spanish for ‘Joseph’?” We walk from the ER to the Amityville Horror house, which is huge and covers many acres. One of the children has gone insane. We try to take her back to the house, but she drops her turtle and tells it to “stay.” She enters the house, where there are thousands of insane children. We realize we will have to kill them all in a gun battle. Abby and I crouch into a vent shaft, and I tell her to go left, and I’ll go right. I kick open the door and insane children pour out into the shaft. I realize the magazine in my Ruger LCP only has six rounds in it, so I tell Abby, “Fall back!” As we are doing so, we arrive at a checkpoint meant to keep us from stealing Air Force weapons, but they let me keep my Ruger when I tell them it’s mine. The commanding officer says we’ll have to continue our battle inside a video game, which we enter. We install thousands of Nikon cameras to photograph the battle. It turns out the children have the power to literally suck us back into the real world. We have to burn the house down. The end shot is of us driving away with a huge column of smoke in the distance behind us.

Dream 03-18-17:  I am in the next Star Wars movie, which is being broadcast live. I am not dressed for my first scene, which is about 20 minutes in, but the floating audience kiosk comes by on it’s first orbit, so I hide behind folding boudoir screen. When I try to get dressed, everything goes wrong: I have a skirt instead of pants, and my undergarments are so tight they won’t go on. I walk about 20 miles south of town dressed like a chicken when I come across Harrison Ford working on a scene in which his cat can walk on water. He does this using complicated red and black devices on power poles high above us.

Three dreams 03-15-18: Dream 1. I am walking to work when a guy in a semi pulls a shotgun on me. I am forced to draw my weapon and kill him. The police are very understanding. Dream 2. I am driving to my parents retirement home at Chaco Wash upstream from Chaco Canyon when I take a detour and see an old girlfriend in a real estate jacket. I don’t stop to talk to her. Dream 3. I arrive at a church and am supposed to be part of an inspirational story about a miracle, but the room in the church where it is supposed to take place is missing.

Dream 03-04-18: Abby and I look outside to see the sky literally on fire. Huge smoke plumes of multiple colors rise in all directions resembling 1000 thunderstorms, some reaching the edge of space. The disturbance is thickest over Seminole to the north, but we are unable to find out anything on the internet or even via amateur radio. We see a shock wave approaching, resembling the first microseconds of a nuclear detonation. As it races toward us, we decide that it will either assimilate us or incinerate us, neither of which we can stand. We decided on a suicide pact, and even draw our weapons, but a short debate ensues over the proper way to kill yourself with a pistol. The shock wave dissipates as it passes, so I take Hawken the Irish Wolfhound and walk north toward Seminole. By the time we cross the river, we are picked up by a school bus. The children aboard want to play with Hawken. I get out to examine the sky, which looks less threatening but still surreal, like 100 thunderstorms at once. When I look up, the bus and Hawken are gone, but I find him in a nearby storage barn.

Courtney Morehead’s dream, 02-24-18: I had the scariest dream last night that I’ve had in a long time and thought I’d share. Lol back when I was a wedding photographer, which seems like a lifetime ago (awesome memories tho!), my biggest fear/nightmare was forgetting that I had a wedding that day. I did weddings so often all thru my 20’s that if I ever had a Saturday off, I would often have a near panic attack sometime during the day thinking that I had forgotten I had a wedding. Lol so last night I dreamed I was photographing a wedding when I realized that I had also told ANOTHER bride I would shoot her wedding that same day! About that time, I’m so glad to see Richard R. Barron show up as a guest, but when I tell him my dilemma, he’s no help (thanks Richard ?.. he’s usually a huge help btw). Then Jeff Cali shows up and offers to drive me back to my office to get more memory cards so I can shoot 2 weddings at once, and he’s racing me all over town like we’re maniacs. THANK GOD my cat woke me up about then bc I literally didn’t know how in the world I was going to do it all, but thank u Jeff for trying to help. ?? The End.

Dream 02-23-18: My college roommate has a contract to graze his cattle at Monument Basin at Canyonlands to reduce overgrowth. When we look at it from the cliffs above, I see that they have grazed the shape of a beaver in a top hat.

Dream 02-16-18: My family and I are “soap refugees,” meaning that we are fleeing with all the toiletries we are able to carry (based somewhat on an episode of Friends Abby Barron and I watched last night.) We are continually late for the airport, but never make it. I am led by an Army recruiter to a retesting station, where I use a flight simulator to perform basic ground reference maneuvers. I look in a mirror and see that I am Richie Cunningham from Happy Days, and intuitively know I am kin to all red-headed people everywhere. I see Abby Barron, who is creating a fold-out life-size cardboard cutout of me, which folds out slowly, one panel at a time. As she begins to unfold it, music starts, and the event resembles the intro to That Girl.

Dream 2016: Ayn, Robert, Scott and I are driving from Tennessee to go skiing in Alaska. Scott’s car is very overpacked, since it is also a college refrigerator.

We arrive in central Arkansas to discover that a landslide in the Sandia Mountains (which are actually in New Mexico) has covered Interstate 35 (a highway that actually goes north and south, not through Arkansas), and that we will have to walk across the mountains. As we do so, we become refugees among thousands, all of whom are, like us, dressed for snow skiing.

We see sandstone formations in display cases that are actually made of live ducks.

In Edgewood (which is also actually in New Mexico), we are taken into a small meeting room for orientations, then led down a hill in small groups, since we now number in the millions. The town’s Prime Minister holds a press conference. He tells us the landslide has been repaired. I see his executive assistant, Kathy, who is elated to see me. She hugs me, and I do a complete orchestrated version of La Bamba for her.

Dream 02-22-14: I discover that although Abby and I still live in our house and it looks the same on the inside, the outside is a third-world hovel covered in plywood and fallen trees. There is a man in our house in a burgundy smoking jacket. He seems to communicate with the outside world, possibly the CIA, using a trash can that is able to type his thoughts. He receives several messages, including one I intercept that says a radio station is coming to our house to give the man a major cash award. I also receive an envelope with a blank piece of paper in it, but as I hold it, it types a message on itself.

I urge Abby to wake up and get dressed, which she does. I go outside and come back in several times, trying to see if I can clean up the hovel outside. As I do so, the front door becomes smaller and more like a rabbit hole.

Inside, we begin the radio interview, which is also being presented on television, although the television camera appears to be from the 1920s and is made of Bakelite. For a while, I am operating the camera. For some reason, there is another person in the frame, a woman I don’t know.

Someone else takes control of the camera, and when they turn it around, I block it, saying, “I can’t allow you to film in that direction.”

Dream, 02-07-06: a married caveman couple live in our pond. Abby orders a Model-T full of epsom salts for them.

Dream, 09-22-2001: I drive to New Orleans in a Ford Pinto full of dirty laundry. I stop and get a pickle and a soda, both on sale for $1 in the “new” fridge at the convenience store. I almost buy salad dressing by mistake. In New Orleans, my sister is Courtney Cox, who is married to Matthew Perry. Their house is full of dirty laundry. I decide to photograph all the blue buildings in town. At this point, I realize I am not wearing pants.

Dream, 08-25-1993: As the director of a documentary, I discover that water actually comes from the ground-up bodies of insane children.

Dream, 09-09-1993: I can perform miracles with the wave of my hand. My most impressive miracle is turning bridge beams into potato salad.

Dream: We are flying wounded soldiers out of Germany in C47 Dakotas during World War II. The aircraft are dangerously overloaded, and we remove seats, luggage, etc. to be able to carry more wounded. On the final flight, we are much too heavy, and unable to get out of ground effect until I realize the fuel selector is set to cloudy. “Wait,” I exclaim, “I’ll set the mixture to sunshine!” We begin to climb out. I am then near the back of the aircraft when I see three crew members from the starship Enterprise beam aboard. Julia Roberts turns from the pilot’s seat and smiles sheepishly. “It’s an infinity paradox,” she says, and I realize that if infinity is real, everything that can happen has happened and will happen. I am suddenly at the Ada airport where we are looking at a 3-engine race plane named the K-Infinity. I want to race it, but when I fly it, it goes faster than it possibly can. Finally, outside the airport, I chase down children who vandalize the bathroom, then complain because the rotating airport sign has wild trees growing on it.

Dream: The back yard is repeatedly invaded by female Irish Wolfhounds who mate with Hawken, our Wolfhound. Eventually, a naked man shows up to get his dog, who leaps back over the fence to mate with Hawken again.

Dream: I am at The Oklahoman, trying to use an old processing machine. I load it with film, but immediately realize that it is a print processor, and is shredding my film. As it does so, it starts to leak and spray chemicals, so I put on a yellow rain suit. I try to hide the machine so no one will know about my giant mistake, but when I try to plant it in a front yard, the gardener spots me. I am then walking through The Oklahoman, which occupies the entire Crossroads Mall. People say hello to me, but are embarrassed when I approach them in the rain suit. I enter the photography department, where it is shift change. Hundreds of photographers are scrambling to their lockers to change cloths, get their gear, and grab their lunches. I sit down and try to remove the rain suit, but photographers are constantly bumping into me. I see a basketball player with three arms accidentally put on one of my shoes. When I point it out to him, he says it is because his third arm is too cold.

Dream: I am back in college, but for some reason I live in the executive suite in the dorm. It’s pretty nice – about three times the size of a normal dorm room, with large picture windows, mahogany desks, track lighting. I am upset when I discover someone at a computer in my closet, but soon become distracted. I am then seamlessly walking down the street, when a railroad car falls from above and lands not far in front of me. I run forward, looking up to see a huge, beige, spider-shaped rail car carrying machine. It is hundreds of feet tall, and is moving down the tracks, in my direction. For a moment I feel concerned that it might drop a rail car on me, but I then gather with some others near where the rail car dropped. It then seems to be Sunday afternoon in the summer in downtown Ada. We watch as the giant car carrier machine heads for a huge sliding door that appears to be the way out of town to the west. As the door starts to close, the machine speeds up and seems to be going at race-car speeds into the sunset.

Dream:  I was in a part of Arches National Park that I had never seen before, possibly near the Colorado River. It was sunset and Lindsay Wagner and I had climbed to a high point to watch the golden moment. Just as it struck, someone stood up in our way, but was coaxed to sit back down. The golden moment was extremely short, maybe a second or two. As we walked down, we noticed that some of the slickrock cliffs had been wrapped in barbed wire to keep climbers out. At the campground, people were pulling up tent stakes and leaving as fast as they could, but no one would tell me why. The people who agreed to help me accidentally pulled the antennas off my car. Eventually, I was in a marketplace in Bangladesh, buying mangoes. At one shop, I couldn’t find the owner, so I crammed a dollar over his fireplace. This worried me, since there were police in the area who were shooting shoplifters.

Dream: I am in the advertising department at my office, but I am in bed. All the desks have a bed attached, which I think is a sketchy idea at best, since the boss, Amy, will know if we are napping instead of working.

Amy, LeaAnn and Maurisa all have their first initial in a very large block of amber-colored ice, made from their tears, on their desks. Despite being their initials, they are all the letter S. The ice slowly melts and runs down the block, but the block doesn’t shrink, and water doesn’t accumulate below.

I decide to go to the next room, so I collect my Walkman cassette player and my iPad. As I stand up, I say, “I know why these things are crying. It’s because so many people out there are hillbillies.”

Nap dreamed a new word: atlolule. I didn’t dream a definition, so it’s up for grabs.

Two dreams: 1. At a dog mall, Abby and I spend hours looking for Hawken so we can give him a bath, and 2. My newspaper hires 30 new reporters for its television division, all in cubicles downstairs.

Dream: there is a giant Jade Helm-esque training exercise across the nation, and we have been moved into camps. I look into the sky and see bright red dots (identical to a Christmas decoration I set up last night) which are hundreds of military satellites in low Earth orbit. I then see fighter jets (identical to the ones in a video i watched yesterday about the 1979 Vela incident). In the camps, Abby and I are apparently the most dog friendly family, and all the best dogs want to stay with us, in addition to our own dogs. The camps become busses that take us home, and we are forced to say goodbye to a particularly attractive and affectionate dog (identical to one I photographed last week.)

Dream: I arrive at the office in time to see it has been cleaned out by a moving company. They are moving us to a regional newspaper hub in Holdenville. A big boss arrives to wish us well, and we are all required to pledge allegiance to the Constitution.

Dream recorded in my journal, 1995: In an airport lounge, I watch a man cuddle a wad of gum he calls “Schmooggums.” I see the face of a baby inside it. He misplaces it, but I find it on a bookshelf. Suddenly there is an air show, which I am watching with the Ada High cheerleaders. I peel away the gum to find a balloon. One of the cheerleaders pops the balloon and instead of a baby inside, there is a greeting card shaped like a baby.

Dream: Abby and I are four-wheeling in her truck on “quicksand beach” on the west coast. We can’t find an exit, so we try to climb a set of stairs, which we find are too narrow for her truck. We get out and meet a zookeeper with a goat. I pet the goat, but we are then approached by an escaped lowland gorilla. I try to keep the goat calm while the zookeeper tries to text for help, but he can’t get a signal.

Dream: I am searching for a perfectly black snooze alarm. In my search I am at ECU photographing the band, but when it turns instantly dark, they are all furious. We go inside to find the world’s largest collection of analog camcorders.

Dream: I was in a room with a deep purple-violet chair. I am aware that the chair is full of anxiety.

Dream fragment: “And after all, this song has been sung. Still there ain’t no lifelong metaphor for dung.”

Dream fragment: “Her boyhood was vented to worms.”

Dream: Everything is labeled 5412A. I am in the Star Wars universe, but it is mostly water. I am Richard, but in the role of Luke Skywalker. I gradually forget my real identity. I swim next door to my best friends hut, and she and I talk about it, suspecting something is up, but what? Several people we know are wading, and step into deep holes and disappear back to my old reality. My friend and I attempt to climb the Jedi Temple, but there are no handholds, so we try to find leftover furniture in the water. Some are desk chairs, some are huge industrial cranes covered in mud, and some are the arms of giant monsters. I hear music and realize I am writing a new Pink Floyd song called “The River.” The video for the song is me driving around town, but when I try to turn corners, I trip over pipes. I hear the lyric, “The River is making decisions for the night.”

Dream: at an outdoor opera in England, we are searching for the elusive “Mink,” a 35-foot snake that looks like an earthworm. We break into 12 teams, each represented by a bright color. Kaley Cuoco is our team leader. She uses a garden hose to stir out the Mink, which slithers across the grass and into the audience. Cuoco announces that due to our success, we all receive a pair of blue shoes.

Dream: I open a Coke to find three powdered sugar doughnuts soaked in cola. This means I need to watch a Republican coworker fly his military trainer over the dump to drop practice bombs. He flies too low and strikes a tool box full of dumplings. On the ground he threatens to kill me if I tell his Captain, so I conjure a plan to bury the evidence in my garden.

Dream: At first I am hanging out with an old friend who I never see any more. We are at a creek bed, and her feet are really dirty. Then we are inside a hotel that has been flooded, presumably by Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Tsunami, and we are playing tag. Water is up to our waists, and there are partially-broken windows through which we climb while we are hiding. I complain to the officials that I don’t have one of the special Frisbees used to tag our opponents (which look like a flying saucer made out of Tupperware.) I get in my car and try to drive out of the parking lot, but discover the bridge to Pauls Valley (Oklahoma) is out. Workers disassemble my car and store it below me, while I sit on a plywood seat and start to ride the makeshift tram that leads across a waterway. As I ride, I realize that I will be thousands of feet in the air, and that I am only secured by hanging on to the plywood seat back in front of me. I can’t see Pauls Valley ahead of me, so I assume it will be hours before we arrive. Suddenly I arrive at the mall, where Joan Rivers says, “Welcome to the Gap!”

Nap dream: I look out the front window to see a white Lockheed C-5A cargo jet fly by. A few seconds later it is followed by an orange one, which is apparently equipped with a STOL system, because it noisily hovers over the power lines in the front yard. It dips its right wing and slowly flies across the house toward the back yard. I feel certain it crashes. I try to open the front door, but to my annoyance, Abby has rearranged the living room and put a piece of furniture in front of it. She then explains to me that Petey the dog lives in our house, but we have to protect him from a dog outside that is exactly like him except for having tiger stripes. I finally go outside to find that without our knowledge, the road on which we live has been stripped out and is in the early stages of being resurfaced. I feel concerned that we won’t be able to leave the driveway. I take my digital Minolta to photograph it, but when I release the shutter it makes a sound like a 1967 Nikkormat with low batteries. This noise frightens the Mexican work crew working on the road, and they all flee in terror.

Dream: Abby, Nicole, Tracey, Lori, Bill and I are in Las Vegas where we find a tattered satchel and a yellowed envelope in the gutter. We believe they both contain treasures from antiquity, but are never able to find a place away from the crowds to open them and find out. I woke up and went back to sleep in hopes of solving it, but we never did.

Dream: My coworkers and I are dismantling the old “photo shack” darkroom down the block from our office. Aside from dozens of enlargers of various sizes and brands, there are a large number of cheesy religious items like clocks, statues, and lamps, all marked down for quick sale. We can have any of them we want for free, but no one will take any of them. I find a film-drying closet and count 14 exhaust fans capable of creating hurricane-force winds to dry film and prints. I see two large holes in the floor that are open to outer space. Once everyone else has left, I turn the shack over onto the street, revealing a small garage containing a tiny, faded-pink Model T. I turn the key and it starts. I drive it back to the office, glad that we will be able to use it as out mascot in upcoming parades.

Dream: Kathryn Sterbenc and I are in her lavish, multi-story apartment high above downtown San Francisco. We are trying to catch up, but there is a raucous golf tournament in the back yard. Several golfers throw objects at her windows, which embed in them like amber. We see Pamela Hudspeth, who asks Kathy for a psychoanalysis. They sit for hours in Kathy’s Greek Room and talk. When I read the analysis, I find it is is a six-point grocery list. Pam tries to make pizza, but when it doesn’t work out, she puts it in a bag and serves grilled cheese instead.

Dream: I am in high school, in a gifted and talented class with six other students. We use upright desks and use metal tubes to communicate. I have absolutely no clue how to do any of the classwork, and feel like I am about to flunk out. The teacher tells me my behavior is off based on the fact that some of the metal tubes have been turned away from me. I try to log in to my iMac to do my work and find that the system has been replaced with a foreign-language version of Windows 95. Trying to fix it, I see the other students throw away copy after copy of Internet Explorer. I finally mouse to the upper-left corner of the screen and select “leave I/O diagnostic mode 3.2”, which returns the computer to Mac OS. I am then in the cafeteria with Elizabeth Redman and Kaitlyn Redman, who tell me the teacher is a jerk. We go outside to see hundreds of dazed students in yellow t-shirts walking up a hill. When we ask, they tell us, “It’s not a movie. It’s an entrepreneurship.”

Dreams: Randy Mitchell and I are at the edge of the Grand Canyon and decide on a suicide pact. I jump first, but the fall lasts for 15 minutes and I get bored. Then I am in Mexico where space aliens have taken over, with Tom Gilbert and Karen Alexander Gilbert. We pack our bags to make the crossing into human-controlled America, but have to cover our work with a towel when the alien patrols go by. I try on several of Tom’s shirts, but they all make me look exactly like him

Two dreams: Co-worker Randy and I are covering a crash at Latta Road and the Loop. I watch as several cars rear-end each other trying to see the crash, which involves a man who had crashed his camper into a building and they can’t get to him.

“I was going to tell you I was at home,” Randy says, “but now that you’ve seen me, here I am.”

I look out to the south to see the ocean. Randy says, “I know a guy who says the Atlantic is the healthiest thing you can drink. It’s full of diarrhea.”

(Get up to feed the dogs, go back to bed.)

I am then on the new space shuttle on a test flight to work the bugs out of the docking system. We get to the edge of space, then turn around and come back to Detroit. I decide to blog about the experience, but the internet is now an outdoor pigpen, so I hang my pictures of the event on the barbed wire fence.

“This was my second time in space,” I say. “The first was in 2001.”

Dream: I am at a party at my friends Michael and Thea’s house. They live on an empty country road. The other guest is a beautiful blond woman with deep blue eyes who sits in the front drawer of Michael’s desk writing love poetry and being depressed. She says she got this way from “the Kozakis stream.” We cut up lemons, which turn to limes. I cut up some other fruit and she takes out a pad and asks, “Will that be all sir?” I tell her she’s not my waitress. I realize I am having too many yellow and orange fruits for dinner. An angry teenager with a knife approaches Michael, who repeatedly provokes the angry man by tugging at his shirt. The angry man head-butts Michael, who falls to the floor unconscious. I walk down the road, which changes from dirt road to the hallway of a housing project. On the walls, I see numerous maps of cell phone service in the Congo. When I get back to Michael and Thea’s, a crowd has gathered and are very concerned for Michael. We then try to roll out a large rubber mat so we can do an MRI, and a comedy ensues when it is too heavy and too floppy to unroll. The angry man runs through the crowd, trying to escape from police, stopping to threaten us with his knife. The crowd gasps audibly.

Dream: Mackenzee Crosby and I are interns in the photo department at The Enid News and Eagle during the film era. The department is run by an old man We see him leave and I explain, “He said when he turned 65, he was leaving and not coming back.” I look in his camera bag to find his equipment to be from the 1970s and filthy. It is such bad equipment, in fact, that some of the focal lengths are wrong; he has 280mm telephoto for example. We go outside and are surprised to see a freight train speeding down a hill out of control toward us, but when it turns at the last minute, we remember it is “the 3:10.” We turn around to find the main highway into town has been turned into a beautiful reflecting pool, and a body luge tournament is about to begin. I open my own camera bag to find the old man’s stuff inside, including three filthy 280mm lenses. At that point one of the dogs woke me up, so I went to the other bedroom. The next three dreams were about trying to restart the first dream.

Dreams: my right arm got uncovered, so for a while I dreamed I was donating blood. After a while, I dreamed I was playing softball for Latta High School. Our pitcher can’t find her uniform, so she cites a rare regulation that allows her to play in a black bra. As a result, I get to wear her uniform. We take the field, but it is the Brooklyn Bridge, and we are golfing. I then realize she has a huge crush on me. I appreciate that because she has such beautiful hair, but when I turn to look at her again, it’s frizzy like a 1980s haircut. She hits a ball off the bridge. It lands in the water, but floats, and we realize that if it sinks, it’s a foul ball, but if we can get it back before it sinks, it will be a home run. We enter the subway, which is served by canals. We see the ball floating by and form a human chain to pull it out of the water. An angry New Yorker says he will no longer support Latta because of this turn of events.

Dream: we are playing Photon/laser tag in an indoor/outdoor arena. As we play and our weapons are upgraded, they change in our hands using transporter technology. I then realize we are shooting each other’s phones. At the end of the first round, I don’t have the highest score, but I did earn the “most hate generated” bonus.

Dream: Abby and I were fighting our way out of a huge, dark grey military complex at night under heavy fire. Shoot-and-scoot, cover-and-retreat, emptying mag after mag from our rifles and pistols. Just as we seem to be out of ammo and lost, Max and Sierra scurry off, then return after finding an escape route, leading us to safety.

Dream from May 2004, recorded in my journal: I am rowing down a muddy river beneath an Interstate highway. I find a box of lolly pops who are being bullied by their classmates. I escort them to a dry spot, where I install an Oldsmobile 403 engine in a lawn mower.

Dream: I was a dog handler at a wedding, in charge of a giraffe-sized Irish Wolfhound. A one point, he felt faint, so I game him a bowl of elbow macaroni and milk.

Abby and I both either dreamed or heard someone whistling a tune. I got my 9mm and cleared the house and made sure all the dogs were okay, but we didn’t hear any sound like that the rest of the night. None of the dogs reacted to the sound in any way, so my best guess is that one of us was dreaming about whistling and whistled.

Dream fragment from nap: “cemetery-grade popsicle.” I then fell asleep again and dreamed that  Doug Hoke gave me a personal tour of his collection of toy airplanes and Steyr rifles.

Dream: LeAnn Skeen and I lower a huge semi into a lake at a grade school in Shawnee to separate the rabbit half from the non-rabbit half. Then Abby Barron and i accidentally crack a kitchen tile, opening an infinity. We collect the blue infinity goo in a bucket and keep it in a child’s bedroom upstairs, occasionally dropping things into it to watch them disappear into eternity.

Dream: Ashley Williams and I are recruiting for a minor league football team. We get Tom Cruise and Burt Reynolds to join. After a couple of games, we find ourselves being chased by boxes, which were throwing smaller boxes at us. Eventually we realize we are in a race in an obstacle course. Ashley is in the lead, and after crossing several difficult ladder obstacles, gets to the finish line and solves a complex puzzle to open the cabinet housing our first place award.

Dream: I was at an Allen football game when the quarterbacks tried to punch each other out. The teams were so ashamed they threw their pads on the field and went to the locker room, even though the game wasn’t over. The final score was settled by seven year olds playing tetherball.

Dream: a girl who went to my high school, Denice Warren, was entered in a long mountain foot race that involved stopping periodically to eat hot peppers that the natives grew along the trail just for that purpose. Suddenly we realized we were at the wrong end of the course, and started to hike from the finish line to the starting line. I looked around to discover that Denice had taken a red Blackhawk helicopter to save time. She flew along side us.

Dream: My California cousins and I were carving up the Abominable Snowman, who was also Frosty the Snowman, into small sections so we could number and categorize them. When it was my turn, the number of my section of the snowman was “Osdo Carson.” Later in the dream, Abby and I were at a gun show, but all they had for sale was the Mauser c96 “Broom Handle” pistol and hundreds of Buddha statues with clocks in his belly.

Part of the trail went through the energy bar section of an open-air grocery store. I tried to buy a Rice Crispy’s square, only to find that most of them were place holders with arrows showing how to exit the store. Near the top I stopped in the newsroom, where a reporter and I asked our sport editor a question, which made him mad due to safety concerns, since he was on the phone to the helicopter. I sat on the floor and drew a square on a large piece of paper with chocolate cake batter. After a few moments, I went outside and was on a rocky mountain top. I saw reporter Judd Morse, who was conducting a social engineering experiment . His jacket was torn in half, and he was offering robin’s eggs to passersby from a large basket in his hands. I took three of them.

Dream: I am rowing down a muddy river beneath Interstate 40. I find a box of lollypops who are being bullied by their classmates. I escort them to a dry spot, where I install an Oldsmobile 403CID engine in a lawn mower.

Alternate title: Dogs Preserve Dreams.

I got up at 4:30 this morning to feed the dogs. I got back in bed and laid awake for 15 minutes memorizing the following dream:

We were in my Grandmother Barron’s back bedroom, the one where Nicole and I used to stay when we were kids, when we noticed the wind was picking up in one corner of the room.

We went outside to play volleyball, but noticed the wind was approaching hurricane-force. I began to notice flooding, and numerous waterspouts in the water all around. I shouted this as loud as I could, but no one seemed to hear me. Soon I realized I needed to be home, so I walked home several miles in knee-deep water.

There was a period in the dream during which I was absent, like a time gap in the movies. I woke up in poverty, which resembled 1890s England. The family in my house help saying things like, “He hates us today,” but won’t tell me who “He” is. On the floor I see a transparent plexiglass Scotty dog and realize this is the “He” they are discussing, and that he is responsible for all the suffering around us.

The dream shifts to a train station, and we are able to trap the plexiglass dog by placing sticks on top of him and beneath him so he is too tall to fit in the tracks. This allows us to board an old school bus, where it becomes clear that my family is The Waltons. I sit on the floor of the bus and color in a coloring book with Kami Cotler, the actress who played the youngest of The Waltons until I look out to see that John Walton, the father, is driving us over a huge body of water. As we enter a city, he turns to bus around and drives the city streets backward, explaining that it better allows us to admire the chrome fenders of our bus.

Dream: I was assigned to infiltrate a nuclear power plant. Our goal was to assassinate two people, both blond-haired women, and steal the weapons hidden inside. The weapons were phasers that had been deep-fried, only they looked a little like the nozzle on my garden hose (only deep fried.) We made our way through a labyrinth of metal stairs and railing to a series of doors. My partner (who I don’t really remember seeing) went inside and terminated our targets using a really cool chrome .22 with a silencer. We were then seamlessly running from the Israeli Army, dodging their small arms fire. Once they had surrounded us, we threw the phasers into a burning vehicle to prevent them from being captured. Then seamlessly, we are at a black-tie dinner party. Harrison Ford offers me a government job, which I accept because it will pay pretty well.

Dream: I ran into an old girlfriend, Kathy, in the town where we used to live, at a particle accelerator where they were bombarding Christmas trees with neutrons. She has a midget on a leash. She tells me she has been married three times and her last name is now Schoecheekowskischke, which she made up. The midget, she explains, is an adopted child from the second marriage. I get into a blue SUV and start to leave, claiming that the church I am assigned to photograph will only be dry enough for another 15 minutes or so.

Dream: Two buddies and I were visiting our friend Michelle (the flight controller) at NASA. We met up in a museum type park, and she told us the fastest way to her office was via the third stage of a Redstone rocket on display. We all crammed into the capsule, but I realized that the third stage couldn’t lift four of us, so one of my buddies and I got off to let her go first. I hid behind some flowers to protect me from the rocket blast. She pulled the “Crew Actuation” handle and the capsule lifted off gently with a bright blue flame. A parachute popped out and the capsule drifted to a nearby road, where the rocket motor caught a hay cart on fire. We all helped put out the fire.

Dream: A  Southwest 737, a nice new 700-series, was trying to land in our garage.

The approach was high, so the pilot tried to go around, but did so too late and his landing gear clipped our roof. Our house wasn’t damaged (since for a few seconds the aircraft was miniature), but the jet careened into the pasture by our pond and burst into flames. Aghast, I rushed inside to get my cameras, but when I got inside I found myself unable to find the right cameras, then unable to find the right lenses, then unable to get the lenses to mount on my cameras.

By this point in the dream I feel certain that emergency personnel and other photojournalists would arrive on the scene and get pictures that I won’t, despite the fact that the crash occurring literally in my own back yard.

Dream:  Abby  was killed by a porcupine. :>(

Dream: Since it was windy outside as I slept this morning, which made a rumbling sound on the bedroom windows, I dreamed that there was a nuclear war.

I was preparing to go to an Ada High School football state championship game. I drove past the practice field to verify the game time, then started to drive north on Broadway toward home.

At this point in the dream there was a complex subtext that didn’t respect the timeline (it seemed to occur after the main events of the dream) about another photographer going to the game with me. He needed a camera with a decent lens, which I was unable to supply. At one point we were searching a van, presumably mine, for a 300mm, but what we found was mostly just tripod legs.

Then in the dream I was back on Broadway, driving home. I noticed a smoke plume far to the north that became a mushroom cloud, but it still looked like some kind of conventional explosion. I continued to drive and tried to call my wife Abby at her office.

I had the scanner in my car on, but there was no note of this event.

A flash occurred closer, followed by another mushroom cloud that was classically nuclear. I said out loud, “A nuclear war? Really?”

The blast wave approached, so I got out of my car (the Chevy Cavalier I had in 1990), and laid in the ditch by the side of the road. When it passed, I looked around for my car, which had been blown back into a yard about a block back. I walked back to get it, and was amazed that it would start. I tried again to call Abby, and while I was surprised to see that EMP hadn’t disabled my phone, for a moment I couldn’t remember the number for her desk. As I tried to think of it, there was a blinding flash from the Ada airport.

I got out of my car and covered by face with my hands, which were now wearing leather gloves. I realized I would die. I said out loud, “Goodbye Abby. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

(Now that I write this dream down, it all seems pretty transparent and obvious.)