December 8th, 2003 CE

I dreamed I was in a small, deep valley.

It seemed to be about a mile accross, if that, largely covered by pine trees, and ringed by tall mountains on all sides, with no roads or tunnels leading in or out of it. In short, there was no ready means to get into or out of this valley.

In spite of this, there were quite some man-made structures inside of this valley. A train track wove about in it, much of it raised up off the valley's floor by means of an elevated bridge. There was an old-fasioned locomotive which huffed about on this track for no obvious purpose. There was a sort of gazeebo set into the side of the mountains perhaps 60 or 70 meters up off the valley floor. There was a paved walkway which ringed the entire valley some 10 or fifteen meters below this gazeebo.

Now, the events of this dream are a little tough to piece together. As my reccolection of these events begin, there was some sort of fight going on atop the train as it sped along the tracks. It was oddly archetypal; I was trying to rescue some female acquaintance from this dastadly villain who really did look like a villain from some spaghetti western; he had greying black hair which came down to somewhere just above his shoulders, a small pointy beard and moustache, all neatly groomed. He wore a wide-brimmed black hat which I can best describe by comparing it to that worn by the black spy in Mad Magazine's Spy Vs. Spy comics. He had a brightly-coloured vest on underneath a long black jacket, and I think, some sort of a tie and cowboy boots. He seemed to be smiling all the time.

The thing is, by this point, I seem to recall my already having realized that there was something wrong with the reality of the situation; to my mind, something was obviously amiss, and I was trying to communicate this with this dastardly villain, who, clinging to the outside of this rushing locomotive, was trying to shoot me and at the same time keep my female acquaintance contained.

There's a bit of discontinuity here; I don't know if my dream skipped ahead to this next part or if I simply don't remember what happened next. Regardless, the next part which is clear to me had myself, this villain, a bunch of what seemed to me to be stock characters from some old western film standing about on a wide section of walkway underneath the train tracks, talking peacably. I was explaining that this world was impossible; that it was some sort of dream world, or construct or something; that many of the people and things here were flatly impossible, and that I just wanted to gather up the people who didn't seem native to this fantasy so that we could be free of it. Talking to this villain, I noticed something odd about his eyes; his irises seemed to be spinning and whirling in constant motion. I pointed this out to him, and he just smiled. The spinning seemed to slow down then, as I looked deeper into his eyes, and as they came to a halt, it became clear that they were two tiny blackjack wheels. "That is so cool", I said to him. He just smiled and nodded, thanking me.

At this point, more people were coming up behind me. Two of them were massive figures, perhaps nine or ten feet tall, wearing old-fasioned space suits. Both, it could be seen inside of their suits, were skeletons. One of them began to speak to me, though clearly his jaw bone wasn't moving as he did so. He was telling me about how he likes to play chess while in orbit. He really didn't seem to be all there to me, mentally, and I tried to be polite to him, assuming he'd died on some mission while in his space suit, and just wasn't really clear on this fact. I shook his gloved hand when he came up to me, and he started flopping about awkwardly, as though he was having difficulty standing (perhaps due to a lack of tendons or muscles). I gently extricated myself from the situation, as I really just wanted to get out of this crazy environment, not interact with its denizens. Along with these two undead spacemen, there were some fairly mundane and unexceptional people, whom I ushered up to the gazeebo.

Getting there, I saw there were already a fair number of people sitting either on the floor on on benches, in a circle. I began to explain to them that this whole crazy world was just some mental construct of all of ours, and that if all of us were to decide to leave it at once, we could be free of it. One of these people; an old homeless-looking man who was sitting on the floor, asked me why it was these specific people. I pointed out that the people gathered there were believable, plausable people, who seemed in fact to be real. I pointed at him, saying "Yo I can believe in", then pointed at the next person to him, saying "her I can belive in", then pointed at the next person, saying "him I can believe in", then stopped, getting a good look at him; he had comically distorted features, the wardrobe of some cartoonish characature of a hobo, and a tiny bright red plastic hat. "Wait a minute, that's just the hillbilly from down below", I said, referring to the gathering of characters with the villain I'd just left.

Carrying on, there was some brief discussion of why this had even happened, and how we could prevent it from ever happening again. There was some talk of it being the product of some sort of "mists" which, apparently, I had produced in my own dreaming. I felt tears in my eyes (a surprisingly tactile sensation for a dream), as I realized I'd subjected all of these people to this. At this point, there was this brilliant flare of light which emanated froim me, which I then suddenly saw at some distance removed from myself, as it spread to encompass the entire structure in which we were standing.

And then I woke up.