[Government Man]

To my considerable surprise, I had a Foster's dream last night. As a disclaimer before you read this, remember that this is a dream and there are a lot of things in here that are not only not my opinions, but not even factually correct.

In the dream, I was 10 years old, and Sparky was 8. Wilt was her imaginary friend. Our parents tried to pretend they couldn't see or hear Wilt, to make Sparky get rid of him. Because she refused to do this, and because I was on her side, our parents treated us like we were 6 and 4 years old.

One day, an aunt and uncle died under mysterious circumstances, and their 8-year old son Mickey came to live with us. Unlike us, Mickey acted considerably younger than his age. Mickey was haunted by bad dreams about a twisting ball of evil multicolored rattlesnakes with fangs longer than their heads. He started seeing these snakes during the day and going into screaming fits. Nobody else could see them. Our parents took Mickey to all kinds of psychiatrists, but none of them could help him, so they recommended this sanitarium in the Arizona desert that specialized in childhood hallucinations and imaginary friends. Our father was eager to go there because he was a real estate agent in the dream and he thought he could make money selling homes to the parents of the long-term patients. Sparky and I were scared of this place because we'd heard it was the only place in the world that could make imaginary friends "go away," so we reluctantly made Wilt promise to stay home for the trip.

We arrived in Arizona--the sanitarium was set in the side of a cliff; to make it hard for the patients to escape, we concluded. Mickey started going in for treatments. As soon as we moved into our apartment, we discovered Wilt in our closet--he had had a bad feeling that something awful was going to happen to us. Meanwhile, our dad met up with one of the male nurses and most of my dream consists of his long boring monologue about Arizona real estate, with the nurse unable to get a word in edgewise. The nurse was a bitter man, a Vietnam veteran who identified strongly with his Anasazi heritage, and once he was finally to butt into the monologue, it was to tell our father about the ancient history of the region. Our father soon got bored of his tales of the conquest of the Anasazi and left, but Sparky and Wilt and I had been listening in (and this being a dream, we knew that he won't give Wilt away), and asked for the rest of the story.

According to the nurse, the Anasazi ruled a great empire in the Southwest through the use of mental powers, which the experts of today dismissed as magic. Their enemies the Navaho discovered the Anasazi's weakness, which is that they could not completely turn off their telepathy, and gathered an army of the insane to attack the Anasazi's cliff houses. The mystics were all overwhelmed and killed, but not before they placed a curse on the cliffs that turned the hallucinations of the mad into the most terrifying reality. The invading Navaho were then driven catatonic by the same nightmares that destroyed the Anasazi.

The nurse warned that we must keep our cousin calm at all times when he wasn't with the doctors, or his nightmare would come to life and destroy the sanity of almost any adult that saw his snakes; children were immune. The staff were deliberately selected to be the least imaginative people in America, so they were also immune (the nurse was able to fake a lack of imagination to get his job). The staff had found a way to use the curse to bring hallucinations into our plane of reality to kill them, and to shove imaginary friends out of our plane, causing them to be stranded in Limbo. We asked the nurse if there was anybody who could lift the curse, and he told us the mystics were all killed in the invasion centuries ago. We'd need a time machine if we wanted to find anyone capable of helping us.

The nurse left, and our parents returned with Mickey. The doctors had been unable to trigger an attack, so they were unable to cure him. Our parents saw Wilt and started screaming at us, which set Mickey off. The next scene of the dream doesn't really make any sense--I think it was supposed to be in the style of a Pueblo carving come to life. There were the rattlesnakes, and Sparky and I hiding behind a couch, and our parents huddled up on the couch, and then Wilt somehow transformed into a thick red vine with little Wilt heads instead of fruit, wrapped around our parents. And then it was over and everything was back to normal. Mickey and our parents were unconscious, but somehow Wilt had kept them from losing their minds. Wilt and I stared at Sparky. "What!" she exclaimed, "Just because I made Wilt doesn't mean I can make a time machine!" "Best try the direct approach, then," I replied as I pick up the phone. "Operator, could you tell me if you have anyone listed under 'temporal mechanic'?"

And then I woke up. I had the feeling that we were going to find a time machine, and that we were going to find out that the nurse had ulterior motives in getting his hands on that time machine.

Let me repeat that this was a dream which I had no control over. It doesn't mean that I hate snakes, or the Navaho for that matter, or that I know a thing about the Anasazi.