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Last night I had a dream that John McCain was the head of the New York Philharmonic and picked Sarah Palin to be his first violin without hearing her play. I know it's a laughable comparison, and probably a specious one at that but it stuck with my long enough for me to want to mention it again. It is unfair in a sense because it's not as if Palin's never been a leader, and so McCain presumably had some measure of her abilities before choosing her. But I also think it holds this kernel of truth in that a position of first chair in any instrument at the New York Philharmonic is important, and if the conductor just picked some random person who may or may not be talented from a large pool of applicants based on one hearing and his intuition, then people would be in an uproar, and that's just a symphony orchestra.

I think the important thing here is something I heard Paul Begala say. McCain made a decision with his "gut" and holds that up as the sign of a maverick, but we've had eight years of leadership by the gut, and not a whole hell of a lot of thinking, and it's gotten us nowhere. I don't think that that's going to change just because of the guy at the top. Furthermore, if this is the type of thinking that McCain puts into a position like this, what kind of research and thinking will he put into other key areas? I firmly believe that instinct and intuition are a key component of intelligence, and we need to be able to heed them, but they're not the only component of intelligence.

McCain is speaking and acting like a man who's only working off his gut. And that's a dangerous think for a leader of a nation as big as ours.

I had the absolutely worst nightmare I've ever had last night. I was stuck in a prison camp with my kids and some other people and we were free to walk around the building we were in, which smelled of sawdust and fire but we couldn't leave. The building was filled with power tools and industrial equipment, and some of the walls were lined with old wood paneling.

One of the other prisoners, someone I had become friends with, wanted to rebel, and I was tacitly encouraging him to, even though I was more focused on my kids. So he went into the other room and smashed one of the machines. The minute he did it I became horrified, as did the rest of the group we were captured with.

The lady that was running the building came in to find out who had smashed one of the machines but couldn't figure it out. She would swivel her head left to right looking at all of us and we all stood in silence looking at her. I held my kids close. Finally she grabbed my son Owen and dragged him into the next room. He dropped the little orange feather he had been playing with, this only thing that had been his toy in this camp. I quickly picked it and scooped up my daughter and starting talking in her ear so she wouldn't focus on them taking her baby brother and I was twirling the feather in my fingers trying to interest her in it: "Owen wants you to have this honey. He said you could play with this for a little while..." over and over again and I pressed my other hand against her ear so she wouldn't hear him scream when they killed him. And I cried and cried and cried. I heard one of the power tools start up and I woke up just as he was screaming while they killed him.

I woke up crying. There were tears running down my face and I felt weak all over. I went and found Owen and just held him for a while and cried in the middle of the night. I've never had a nightmare so horrible as that before.

Several nights in the last month I've had a recurring dream where after I fall asleep I wake up in the middle of the night to see police and soldiers in black riot gear marching down the street with tanks and armored personnel carriers and as I'm trying to figure out what's going on I'm yanked from behind and cracked on the head with the butt of a rifle. When I wake up I'm in a concentration camp and it's dark again and I'm only with guys and none of us know where our kids or wives are and there are riots and people being beaten and killed.

That's when I wake up. I always have to check on my family and look out the window for a few minutes before I can fall asleep. It's not something that keeps me awake for gives me anxiety before I sleep but it still bothers the hell out of me when it happens.

I dreamt that I lived in Botswana on a ranch with a white family from South Africa. My mom and step-dad had volunteered to be missionaries and I was worried for a safety. The land was always hot and dark. The sky was always a dark purple like rainclouds and thunder was just around the corner. I kept begging for a rifle so I could learn how to shoot and keep us safe.

My dream was probably influenced by a review I heard on NPR.

I had a dream last night that I was working on a documentary about breasts, the purpose of breasts, why men are so attracted to them, all of the features of boobs. I was trying very hard to make it scholarly work but no one believed me that that was what I was doing.

Somehow though, I was able to convince many celebrities to come speak on film, and Kim Deal, from the Pixies took her shirt off for the movie.

This is a long dream, so it's really going to be in two parts:

I was staying at a friend's house, a large brick Victorian near a little town in Pennsylvania, situated on the side of a hill. Heather was at some event, and Debbie had brought the kids over, and I watching them. My friend was having a summer get-together and lot's of people were there, but despite all that, the babies were asleep. I was down in the basement washing and folding clothes. There were windows that ran along the ceiling of the basement, at ground-level, and I could see it was getting dark outside.

Suddenly a loud clap of thunder rocked the whole house, and I dropped the clothes I was folding and ran outside to see what was going on. A storm was coming, and on the ridge to my right I could see dark clouds forming and lightening piercing the sky. My brother-in-law Harold was there with me watching the storm and we watched as the lightening slapped the ground again and again with large tremulous explosions. I ran up to the widow's walk on the top of the house to get a better view. When I got up there, the entrance was boarded up, but the wood was warping, so I pushed them out, and everyone from the party joined me on the roof.

As we stood there, a lightening bolt shot down and vaporized a house into a cloud of dust. Right afterwards a thin snaky tornado appeared and danced on the ridge before vanishing a few seconds later. I knew what was going to happen next.

I looked forward and saw a tornado forming not far from the house and headed our way. I had visions of the kids and their locations in the house and I burst down the stairs and into their rooms, grabbing Owen first from his crib and then McKenna in the living room, sleeping on the couch. I could hear everyone screaming, and the house was starting to creak. The tell-tale sound of an approaching train warned me that it was getting too late, and I would never make it into the basement in time.

I jumped out the window with the kids in my arms and ran across the yard laterally to the dark black tornado. The kids were not afraid, but held onto me tightly. As I got further and further away from the house, the tornado got weaker and weaker until just before it would have destroyed the house it broke apart into a thousand black whisps. I stood there, with the kids in my arms, looking at the sky getting darker and darker and decided it was time for me to leave and go home.

I dreamt last night that I was a beat cop in Philadelphia investigating a serial axe-murderer. I, and several other police officers had found the bodies of some teenagers that had been hacked up while having sex. While looking through the area for clues, I found a pile of green-bar printer paper that was from the killer. It was from a college in Harrisburg, and was covered with the names of people.

We were trying to figure out if the names were people he was thinking about killing, or the names of computer accounts at the college that he was using to remain anonymous.

I was trying to figure out my next step while sitting on the bed of the house where the kids were murdered. Another officer walked in, except it was actress Emily Mortimer, and she was a cop too. In my dream, she and I had dated. She was changing out of her patrol uniform because she was covered in blood. I got uncomfortable and walked out.

Later, I talked with her on the telephone and told her that I thought we should start dating again. After I got off the phone with her, as I was standing in the rain, I had a vision of the killer, and what he looked like. I knew suddenly how he was operating. I reached out in my vision and talked to him directly. It's like I was sharing the vision with him. He spoke to me, as a floating disembodied white clay head. He laughed at me and said that I would never catch him. Slowly his left eye, once completely black turned completely white, like the rest of his face, and then vanished completely while he laughed.

I'm only recalling fragments, but I remember dreaming that I was in a German Disco, and people were running around smearing a gold glittering paste on each other that had an Ecstasy-like drug in it. I kept trying to dodge the people that were smearing it, and I was trying to get out, and just as I neared the door, someone got me on the neck, and I could feel the drug enter my body. I thought my eyes were burning and I wasn't able to walk straight. All of the hallways seemed to wobble and the walls vibrated. Part of me was terrified, but it was like I was disconnected from parts of myself and I couldn't feel myself caring enough about my own terror to do something about it, so the terror sat like a horrfied child in a dark corner of my soul.

I dreamt last night that I was back at Rider, in college and I was invited to a party, but I didn't know my way around, and I needed someone to help me get to the building on campus where it was occurring.

Katie Holmes was there, and she was going and she agreed to help me, so we got into my old Dodge Shadow and we were driving around New Jersey. At one point, I took a wrong turn off of the highway, and we entered a town that had huge old brick skyscrapers, and was built on the side of a hill. It was beautiful, and I fell in love with the town and I wanted to stay there, but we knew we had to get back to campus, so I turned the car around and started driving back to school. On the way to school we stopped at a Baskin-Robbins to have some ice cream. Mel Gibson was there, and he was running the store. I bought a double scoop of caramel pecan and Katie Holmes had some chocolate variety. Mel Gibson kept trying to talk to me, but I couldn't hear him above all the noise in the store, and the ambulances roaring by on the street.

I walked outside with the ice cream and say ambulance after ambulance driving by and I asked James Earl Jones (playing the dean) if they were all going to Rider, and sighed and said they were. The party was getting out of hand and people were taking too many drugs and getting hurt. A large group of old people in suit stood watching the parade of ambulances, and I realized they were the university trustees, and the Dean was going to lose his job.

I returned to school with Katie Holmes, and we walked by the party. It was outdoors, and people were killing each other, and dancing, and thrashing, and taking drugs. It looked like a scene out of Mad Max.

We ducked into a house and ran upstairs. My mom and other people lived in the house, and McKenna was there. Katie Holmes started playing with McKenna and her toys, and I went to sit in another room and think. I wanted time to be alone.

I tried to get as much sleep as possible so I could remember all of the dream, but no dice. All I can remember is this:

I was working on a comedy movie with some black guys and we were looking for funding.

We decided to approach Michael Rapaport, who starred in Bamboozled, Higher Learning, and Zebrahead. We thought maybe he would give us funding.

But when he saw the idea, and that we were making fun of UPN and it's racial bias, he got really mad and tried to start a fight with me. All I could think in the dream was how ludicrous it was for Michael Rapaport to tell me that we couldn't make fun of racial stereotypes given all of the racially charged movies he's done. And that it was even more absurd for him to start a fight with me about when I wasn't the only writer, and a lot of the material came from black writers too.

These are the only fragments I remember, but here goes:

I was enrolled in a German class, but it wasn't just the German language, it was German culture, and German food, and German architecture. It was complete immersion in all things German. Heather was taking the class with me, and the classroom looked like an antique shop with hutches and armoires and cabinets scattered around holding old books and bottles of schnapps and brandy. A permanent yellow light shown through the windows on the far wall, lighting up the dost motes floating in the air.

I was trying to convince a friend of mine R___ to take the class with me because for one of the classes there was going to be drawing and painting and we needed nude models and I wanted her to be the model.

..........

Later on, I was taking a trip with Heather and we had bought a Jeep Liberty. My friend Brian was going with us, and it was only a two day trip, but he filled up the entire back of the Jeep with miscellaneous bags, they looked like the archetypal carpetbagger bags, and he wouldn't explain why he needed them all, he just did.

Last night's dream was two parts interconnected. I dreamt that I was working in a large bookstore that was both a store for customers and a warehouse that shipped books for Amazon and other booksellers. I had a special purpose that I would search for rare and unusual books.

While I was at work one day I was on an errand at one end of the building, the front end of the building, where I'm not typically doing business, and I needed to get back to my office, so I decided to run through the warehouse. While I ran through the warehouse I noticed that a lot of the stacked boxes were not stable and many were in danger of falling over. I had to many times run down a different aisle than I wanted to just to avoid an avalanche of books and boxes. All the while I could hear the omnipresent beep of forklifts and someone speaking, and I knew that I had to get to my office before the speech was over. It was imperative.

I made it back to my office in time and dropped off several soapstone and jade statues on my desk. It was past lunch time and I was starving. My office was big, and shared a corner of the building with a small cafe that was run by two sisters. I knew they would be closing the lunch side soon, so I walked over to grab something to eat or I would be starving all day. When I walked in, the girl behind the counter with the curly hair was there, and she smiled at me. She was wearing a blue shirt and bandanna over her hair while she swept. I didn't know her well enough, but she looked very similar to her sister. I looked over the offerings and picked a carrot cake/cheesecake looking thing. I opened up the display counter myself and picked it out. I'd been around long enough and knew the other sister well enough that I could do that. The cake looked and tasted delicious. While I was eating, I became aware that I could hear the thoughts of the girl behind the counter.

"Why isn't he looking at me?"
"My sister said he should like me. She he'd like me. Why doesn't he like me?"

I looked down at my wedding band. I wondered if she couldn't see it. I was starting to get embarassed that I could hear her thoughts. What was this all about?

"Maybe I should ask him out."

I hurried through my lunch. She kept looking at me. I wouldn't look at her. I set my plate down.

She approached me. "How was it?"
"Oh it was good."
"Good."
"Have you tried the flan?"
"No, which is that."
"Here I'll show you."

She came around the counter and stood next to me. I tried to search the air around her head to figure out what she was thinking but my sudden ESP was just as suddenly gone. Where was it? What was she thinking? As we stood there, she reached out to touch my arm. I bolted and ran out of the café I ran through door after door after door, just running through doors to get away.

The further I ran, the worse I felt. I realized that I probably made her feel really bad, and I didn't want to do that, so I walked back to the cafe and took off my jacket, and stayed for a while, talking, and helping clean.

I dreamt last night that one of my co-workers was trying to kill me. He had snapped and gotten a gun, and was in a warehouse making plans to kill me. In the process of coming after me he had killed many other people and he was pinned down in the warehouse by the police.

I think the dream I had last night is related to the project I'm working on at work now. At work I'm trying to remake a critical report function that we hand-built using ActiveReports from Data Dynamics. ActiveReports is a pretty nice product ala Crystal Reports, and other reporting tools, though it does have it's shortcomings. I'm coming up against the deadline to have the demo done soon, and I'm feeling pressure to make it look really sharp.

The Dream: