In this last dream I'm putting on a play. It's about man's struggle with nature and for some reason we have to use all kinds of live animals. After the performance I'm onstage and the snake keeps striking at me, possibly because I'm holding the preserved dead pig. Someone realizes he can feed the snake its own tail and so we watch as it bites down hard, severing its own body and yielding dark red blood.

During the show, we lose a CD and put in a different one in order to keep going. I am not sure whether it works (I am mortified that it may not) because I am backstage pulling the ropes; the curtain keeps blowing back from an inexplicable wind and threatening to reveal me. I am far too lazy about avoiding it and eventually it blows way up above my head so I stand very still. At some point my mother, in the audience, yells, "What is he doing back there?"

In the previous dream I am hiking alone on a steep rocky place. The view is fantastic--I see stony ridge after stony ridge stretching into the grey, diffuse distance--but then I see an arete crumble into the valley. A huge boulder slides down on the crumbling dust, then shatters instantly at the end. I sleep there and wake up in the morning, to see more of the aretes beginning to crumble, each one closer than the last. I decide to run down the rocky slope. Small, strange animals appear: one twisted, bevelled, smooth creature is hopping around on the brush, taunting me. It turns out to be a cellphone and I wonder if I'm hallucinating but it doesn't matter: I've got to get out of there.

When I get home, all my best friends are there, cooking, and they don't want to hear my story. It is boring to them and can't believe I'm going on.

In the dream after this I am in a clean wood-floored studio room, with about thirty other people, doing "movement" in some kind of workshop. We are trying to encounter one another without words. After dancing around for a bit, two large black men who are in the workshop catch me at the side of the room and ask me to sit down. Their eyes are serious, critical. I am sure they're going to confront me about my racism. Instead the man says he likes my movement.