A Selection from Various Recent Dreams

- I have dinner in a parking garage with my (real) ex, my ex's current (real) girlfriend, and a fictional woman he dated between us named Fiona. Fiona and I are trying to win him over from his girlfriend. Later, I discover that his girlfriend is actually the grad student assigned to teach me my way around the new lab. She shows me the eel tank. The eels do a synchronized swim for me, and I am a little weirded out. I go to do an experiment and discover that all the equipment is grossly oversized--that I need gallons of solution where usually less than a tenth of a liter will do. The light in the biohazard hoods is very bright.

- I move into my new apartment only to discover that it is absolutely nothing like any of the pictures I have seen or the construction site I viewed. It is, instead, an apartment as imagined by Frank Gehry, full of strange curves, exposed brick, and glass in odd places. I decide to stay because the view from the windows (which are all around twelve inches wide and set insanely about the apartment like tinsel) is gorgeous, and I choose the bedroom with the bed hidden either behind or above some rounded bookcases. My bedroom has no walls, only glass that looks out into the hallway. I find out that we have a surprise third roommate named Stephanie who eats only cereal, which she keeps in a rotating dispenser in the kitchen. It is two o'clock in the morning by the time my parents have finished moving, and I am hungry. There is no time to get food, they say. It is two o'clock in the morning. We are going home. They leave and Stephanie tells me I may have a bowl of her cereal.

- I have a girlfriend who always looks twenty feet tall because I only ever see her onstage. She is redheaded, beautiful, and sings in a band. I watch her perform and later we have sex.

- I live next door to a sixteen year-old Isaac Newton. My parents wish us to marry. I stand outside while he talks to my father about fishing and am overcome with despair at the thought of marrying this repressed boy.