Dreaming of...

I've been toeing the line between sickness and health these last few days and taking all sorts of Chinese medicine. I may have contracted a light case of salmonella, if such a thing is possible. That's what I get for eating two-week-old chicken out of the fridge on Wednesday.

Unrelated, I had the strangest dream last night, involving the most vivid assortment of characters from my life. I was back in high school and wondering how to get to my next class. From history, I believe. Or another course like math (which I was flunking). Faces of old classmates whose names I've forgotten. New York friends sitting next to Kansas friends at a lunch table, bidding me stop as I walked past. And in the next instant I was in an imaginary world, just off a ship. I'd stepped into my adolescent conception of an alien planet, figures drawn in shorthand using an oxygen mask and a backpack to signify "not human." These figures were real now, with a culture and a past and a future that may or may not have involved imminent warfare. It was frighteningly real. I woke up a little confused.