I was living in a dorm/hotel, sharing a room with Molly. It was a big, modern skyscraper, walls surrounding a central courtyard and hallways leading off to the side, like a Hong Kong shopping mall. It was sunny outside; there was one deck that faced a quiet little forest like the ones on the UC Berkeley campus. We went up and down escalators to places where we could do our work.

I went down one hallway and on my left, there was a lounge dedicated to dressing up like people from the 1900s and 1910s. Every floor had its own lounge for the college kids where they could dress up in a different theme.

I had to go to the bathroom, so I started walking down the hall towards the bathroom. Daydreaming, I started thinking I was already in the bathroom, and peed on myself. My urine was opaque and bright yellow and it seemed really embarrassing. I wasn’t sure what to do.

Somehow, I got cleaned up and went to the other side of the dorm to meet David, who was sitting at a little cafe table, waiting for me. I had gotten back together with him. I looked at him and smiled, but felt a pang. I felt somehow that I was no longer connected to him, and missed Rahul badly.

A few days ago, I dreamed that Nikki and Debbie had died.

Last night, I was walking around in San Francisco and saw an open door under a long tunnel of greenery. I walked in with my friend and it turned out to be someone’s house, shady and comfortable, with Arts and Crafts details like Spanish tile. The woman who owned it was washing dishes. She invited us to eat some pie, which we did.

Next: I was bowling in the street in the Haight (or it might have been North Berkeley) with a friend and the Devil. Suddenly he said that we had to play with God as well. I would be playing against God. So we lined up on opposite sides of the street from each other. We were bowling into virtual pins–I would just bowl and follow through with the ball even though I couldn’t see any pins in front of me, just a sort of glass garden frame thing. There were bushes behind me and I couldn’t wind up very well. I bowled hard and straight, and the ball crashed through the garden frame, flew up over a fence, and sailed far down a hill into a baseball diamond far below.

The ball was now keys attached to a golden keyring with a “thumbs up” symbol on it, lying in the dirt near the pitcher’s mound. “Go down and get it,” said the Devil. God waved me on down there. He was an old white man with a longish white beard trimmed into a round shape, and a tie-dyed shirt; he looked like a hippie.

To get to the baseball diamond, I had to descend a tower with spiralling stairs and a lot of windows. There were a lot of people rushing up the stairs as I went down. “Be careful,” they called. “The sun is starting to go down.”

At night, a demon came out, and the tower was meant to keep it in.

I thought there was still plenty of daylight, and I had to go get the keys, so I rushed onwards. Then the sun set and I heard the demon coming up behind me.

I ran up the stairs. At the top of the stairs, where I had walked in an empty door, there were countless glass windows that had swung shut over the doorframe. There were words printed around the borders of each one, as a protection. I tried to pry them aside, but I could only move about 10 or 15 of them before their sideways hinged edges blocked me from the lower layers of glass.

I could hear the demon coming. It was laughing.

I hammered at the glass in the tower windows around me. They would not break. Panicked, I thought of how surely they had to keep the demon in, and I could not possibly break glass a demon couldn’t break.

Somehow, though, finally, dawn came, and I was fine. The sunlight came in the windows now, and the doors swung open, and people started to come in so they could go down to the field and play baseball.

I went down to the pitcher’s mound and looked for keys. There seemed to be hundreds of them scattered everywhere, and dozens of variations on the “brass keys on a keyring with a thumbs-up symbol” that was all I remembered. They had different little spells etched on them and I started to worry that if I brought up the wrong set, I would be trapped forever on the baseball diamond, like those people who accept gifts in the realm of Faerie.

Somehow I found the right set and went back up to the sunny California street.