May 12th, 2002 CE

The beginning of this dream is lost to me now, but the ending I remember quite clearly.

I was on a bus with a number of other people, and we were crossing a bridge which crossed a river. My point of view was shifting every so often; I kept becoming different people. Some of the people on this bus were the main characters from the television show, Angel. As we came to the middle of the bridge, we came upon an old man, with a long white beard, and curly, flowing shite hair, dressed in a shabby black overcoat, and a black, broad-brimmed, circular hat. He held a long whip in his gloved hand, and he was whipping a group of people who I took to be his slaves, keeping them to the centre of the bridge. There was a tall ship in the river beelow, and it seemed to be waiting for the bridge to be cleared so that it could be raised, and the ship could pass through.

The Angel characters and I (it's possible I was one of these characters at this point. It's difficult to say), got out of the bus, and I - possibly AS Angel himself - took the whip out of the man's handsand told him to clear the bridge so that we could get through, and the ship could pass below. Snarling, the old man agreed, but not before laying a curse upon us. Giving this little thought, we piled back onto the bus and started off again.

The bridge seemed to terminate at about the same point as the north end of the Granville street bridge in Vancouver, though it was a very different shape. As we neared the end of the bridge, the city of Vancouver loomed into view. I laughed (I seemed to bee myselff again) to Angel, who was now driving the bus, about what a crude approximation of Vancouver this was; there was three of Science World (a huge, golf-ball shaped structure covered in glittering lights and panels), and the buildings were all far too tall. As we entered the city, I pointed out the many Canadian and British Columbian flags around the city, saying something like, "I hope they all end up being in the camera frame". I think this was some sort of reference to how many TV shows and movies are filmed in Vancouver and make ineffectual attempts to disguise the city somewhere else.

As we got off the bus, I noticed that Wesley (another of the Angel characters)'s facial features were changing every few seconds, whhich we took to be an aspect of the curse from before. At onee point, his beard and moustace were shifting around and changing shape, and I pointed out how bad he'd looked just moments before, with a broad handlebar moustace, "as I well know". He laughed, agreeing. Just then, his beard became a neatt little goatee which I thought actually looked pretty good. I called over to Cordelia (another character) to get her to look at this, but the moment she did so, it was gone. "Oops. Too late", I said.

We were walking westward, at this point, and soon came to a building which in many ways resembled saint Paul's Hospitol, though it was unclear what this building was in the context of the dream; as we stepped inside, there were many people milling around inside, and they didn't seem to be doing very much. The overall aesthetic was that of an old train station, which is common to many of my dreams, though this particullar building was not. we were walking from the south end of the building to the north, through a narrow and crowded corridor, when we were stopped by several membbers of the building's staff and the police force.

Apparantly, they had a videotape taken from the security cameras some half hour ago within this very building, of us doing something terrible. When the tape was placed in a conveniently placed TV and VCR, the scene showed the first few moments of a sexual assault purpotratyed by us upon a very young black girl. The staffer stopped the tape before anything graphic was shown, and said something like "I think we've all seen enough". At which point, the police moved to put us all under arrest. It was clear that the tape was a fake and probably the product of the curse; it had been made before we ever arriveed in town, which we told the arresting officers, but they refused to listen. I was wondering what alias to give the arresting officers, and glanced at the various ID cards in my wallet, the names on which kept changing and shifting in the manner which written words in my dreams always do.

Then I woke up.