I dreamed about the Smurfs first, but I have forgotten the details.

Then I dreamed that I was locked in a series of rooms where I had written down a list of superpowers on a notepad and I would gain the superpowers one by one. The first one was unlocked by orgasm. The second one was unlocked by “phasing”–which turned out to be pressing my open wound (on my side) to another prisoner’s open wound (on his head), hoping for a brilliant flash of light and for our wounds to be healed–but it didn’t work. I was piggyback riding on him and he was running back and forth up and down the hallway. At this point in the dream we were both black men. My grandparents were there–I’m not sure if they were my jailers, but I had to hide my superpowers from them.

I left Dad my car to drive but I had to get back from a campus in Oakland to one in Santa Clara by riding a shuttle that would go all the way down there.

I ran into Grace, who was waiting to see a doctor because she was really sick; “I’m going to throw up!” she said, and I ran to get her a bucket. She barfed suddenly and voluminously into the blue bucket and it was a big pile of moist little grey and black grains but with a bunch of huge, thick, squirming maggots on top (fat and cream-colored, striped with a darker color).

Mom and CHT and Serena and I were living in Dad’s house, but it was owned by an old woman who wanted to also rent it to her son. It was much larger than Dad’s real house. The old woman made us move our long white couch into one of the bedrooms so that we would stay out of the living room. This part of the plot is clearly heavily influenced by the episode of “Malcolm in the Middle” I saw last night.

I had a lot more pets than in real life; in the guinea pig cage there were also rats and hamsters running around, and as I looked in, a big, soft, light brown bunny hopped out from under the couch. I realized with a rush of guilt that I had bought the rabbit a while ago and completely forgotten about it, and it had been living under the couch for a few weeks. I picked it up and put it into the cage with all the other animals and tried to put a lid on top. A female rat got out, though, and when I tried to pick her up to put her back in, she latched onto my finger with her teeth, and blood started seeping from my finger. By the time I managed to get her to let go, my finger was practically bloodless. I was scared, though, and went to the bathroom to wipe my finger off with alcohol and bandage it. There were two vertical slits in my finger where her teeth had gone in.

While I was in the bathroom, the old woman landlady came in and said she was very important; she was slated to be the president of an educational software company next year.

When I went back out, there were a bunch more small furry animals standing on silver platters in the living room, and all of them bit my fingers when I came near–squirrels, sugar gliders, bushbabies. One of the bushbabies left its little yellow tooth behind, embedded in my finger, like a beesting.

Next: Xander from Buffy was a pseudo-radio announcer doing a show through loudspeakers in a parking lot. Ken had seen a tentacle anime and I mentioned that to Tiffany, who mentioned it to Xander; they misunderstood and thought I had seen it and wanted me to go up and talk about tentacle anime for the show. We all had to go and try to find Ken instead.

A house was being constructed on the half-moon lawn at Westgate. Many people were lining up for a chance to work on it, including a broad-shouldered, generic-looking white guy with brown hair and blue jeans, and Mike B.