The music woke me up. When I opened my eyes, I saw golden leaves falling around me. The carpet of leaves crunched as I walked through the trees. Although the shafts of sunlight streaming down felt warm, I shivered when I saw the large spider webs. I walked faster, not wanting to look to closely at the vaguely shaped bundles among the webbing.

Suddenly, I noticed the prismatic pink dragon. He must have been watching me the entire time I slept. Approaching the creature, I noticed a strange thing. He was labeled with his name in floating text. I’d never met a dragon before, but Fred looked friendly. Since he hadn’t already eaten me, I figured I’d be safer with Fred than waiting for the unseen giant spiders.

Chatting briefly with Fred, I began to remember that I was supposed to be looking for a hole which would let me peer into a different universe. Although he wasn’t able to give me exact directions, Fred encouraged me to keep looking. And soon enough, I found the big hole, conveniently labeled.

I was drawn to the hole. I should have been afraid, but I couldn’t keep myself away. Now I noticed that while I could see my hands, and feel my head, the rest of my body was missing. Yet I could still walk, and I could move my hands and turn my head. I was reasonably certain that when I had fallen asleep, no part of my body was transparent. Right, I was well overdue for a reality check.

Luckily, I could still see my fingers. I counted them twice, but still came up with five for each hand. I made a quick mental note to check again after looking through the hole. I leaned over the hole, and glimpsed some light and shadows. I looked closer, and then I was surrounded by a personal tornado pulling me through the hole.

The music changed, and instead of the ominous forest, I was standing on a small iceberg. Most of my body was still transparent, and I could put my hands through my torso. But I still counted five fingers. So was this a dream or not?

I was alone on the iceberg, but I could hear someone speaking. “Both space and time are your canvas,” she said. I looked around, but didn’t see the speaker. I did see what seemed to be a large easel. I walked over to see if there was a picture, but the easel disappeared. “What have you set afire?” she said. Now there was a burning figure in front of me, but it didn’t actually melt the ice.

I sat down and waited. A parade of different objects appeared and disappeared, accompanied by the disembodied voice. I was tired, and worried that there was no obvious way to get out of this place. The objects continued fading in and out. I looked at my fingers again, and this time counted up to seven!

I started trying to take control of the dream by predicting which object would appear next, and where it would pop up. I made a cage, a wagon wheel, and a dragon sculpture. Each time, I knew what the voice would say before she spoke. I wanted to see how much I could shape my dream universe, so I stood up and grew wings with rainbow feathers.

With only one stroke of my wings, I ascended into the air. The clouds were so low that I reached them before the iceberg shrunk out of view. Now I could see an archipelago of icebergs, arranged in a pattern. They spelled out letters: S F 0. Was this a message for UFOs? Or was I reading it upside down?

I couldn’t remember all the ideas I’d listed for tasks to complete in a lucid dream, but it seemed like a good time to look up an old friend. At first I wondered if I should bother to go see someone who’d essentially be just a manifestation of my own thoughts. But after some debate, I decided that even in the real physical world, we still experience other people primarily through our own mental filters. Who we see around us depends large on who we are looking to see.

I looked down, squinting so I could see the ley lines. They stretched underneath me like silk ribbons, waving a little in a magnetic wind. I followed the brightest line. It pulsed and glowed as I skimmed over the ocean, and a flock of birds flew ahead of me. Slowly, I landed on the edge of the crater.

Looking down, I saw the silent ranks of Easter Island heads. I knew that I should think of them as Rapa Nui moai, but the pop song about Easter Island heads was playing as a kind of sound track. I couldn’t see anyone else yet, but I knew who would be meeting me here. So I walked among the giant figures. Up close, I could see their patina of lichen, salt spray, and weathered rock.

For the heck of it, I levitated one of the statues ten feet above my head. I imagined a bouquet of mylar ballons, each shaped like a miniature moai, bobbing at the ends of their ribbons. I stood under the shadow of the brooding head, looking up at its empty eye sockets. Then, another head arrived. The two giants pressed their noses together, and leaned towards each other until their foreheads touched. Holding this pose, they settled into the grass.

Finally, my friend stepped out from behind the second moai. I recognized him, although none of the details were rights. Without saying anything, we walked up to the crater’s rim and looked out across the ocean. The sun was going down, and flocks of sea birds were busy swooping around and calling to each other.

The sky darkened until we couldn’t see the horizon between the water and the air. We stayed together while the silence took root, grew branches, and flowered around us. Dreams are already a universe where all the boundaries are weak, but I could feel the lines around me blurring even more. I wasn’t the only person in my own mind anymore. In the darkness, I couldn’t see my hands, yet I knew that my entire being had become transparent. No longer held inside my own skin, I was everywhere at once and nowhere in particular.

It was disorienting to be in more than one place. I didn’t have eye to see the world around me. I didn’t have any way to hear sounds, or touch objects. For many hours, I explored my expanded being. I was the roar of a waterfall and the shaft of an arrow speeding into the sun and the curve of a footprint left in the sand.

Then I woke up again, as the daily newspaper banged into my front door. It was just after dawn. I quickly jotted down everything I could remember about my dreams and went to brush my teeth. But after three attempts, I couldn’t get the toothpaste to come out of the tube the right way. The first time I got a thick smoke with the smell of sandalwood. Then a red salamander wiggled out. The third time, I got wasabi paste. I figured this was going to be one of those annoying days when I get thwarted in the simplest endeavors.

Giving up on the toothpaste, I brushed with water and wasabi. At least the taste really woke me up. I had some cotton candy for breakfast, fed the mastodons, and headed to work on my bicycle. I remembered to oil the chain before leaving, so when the wheels turned the gears of the music box, I didn’t get that pesky squeaking when the song looped around.

On my way to work, I almost got tangled in a man’s fishing line as he cast across the road into a large rose bush. Ignoring his shouts, I sped along. Crossing the bridge over a little stream, I noticed that I’d forgotten my shadow at home again. This was the second time in a week when I’d walked out without my shadow. Hopefully, I could just borrow a shadow from someone at work if I needed one during the day.

The grassy strip between the sidewalk and the road was full of blooming dandelions and four-leafed clover marked with white chevrons. Here and there, I noticed a dandelion blooming blue. I remembered how I used to press the four-leafed clovers between the pages of a dictionary, saving a little piece of luck for later.

Daydreaming, I biked right off the edge of the road onto the gravel shoulder. I stopped, and got off so that I could walk my bike back onto the pavement. Of course I had managed to veer off the road right into a big diamond patch, and now there were gem pieces stuck in my tire treads. I carefully picked them off before getting back on my bike, hoping to avoid a puncture flat.

I must have missed a piece, because less than a block later, I heard air hissing out of my back tire. It was a toss up whether I should just walk the bike two more miles to the office, or whether I should fuss with changing the tube on the side of the road. I didn’t have any early morning meetings, so I decided to just stop and change the tube.

While I was prying the tire off the rim, a crowd of people with blue and pink hair drove by in a tiny convertible. They stopped just past me, and asked if I wanted a ride. I thought the car looked pretty full already, since I could count seven people, but they insisted that this was one of those cars that was a lot bigger on the inside. I had to believe them after they fit my entire bike into the back trunk, which already held a decorated Christmas tree, two oars, and couple of milk crates full of shoed. I didn’t catch everyone’s name, and some of the people seemed to be telling me names that had phonemes I couldn’t distinguish, but they were a friendly crowd. Two of them were juggling penguins as the car pulled up in front of my office and dropped me off.

I tossed them a stray penguin that had fallen out, thanked everyone, and waved good-bye. As I walked into the building, I noticed that the carpet had been replaced with a couple inches of sawdust. Some people must have brought their kids in for the day, because there were a bunch of children making sawdust sand castles in the lobby. It had that new carpet petrochemical smell, but that didn’t seem to bother the kids.

Someone had kicked the sawdust around in the elevator so that it was pile higher in one corner. I guess that’s one way to see over everyone else’s head when you’re stuck in the back. I blew on the elevator’s pinwheels to select the fourth floor. It had taken me a couple hours the first week I worked here to get the hang of spinning the pinwheels. They turn when you blow on them, but you need to blow in exactly the right way, or sometimes they just twitch or even run backwards. Everyone knew how to operate them, but no one could describe it well enough to teach the new employees. But new people would get the hang of it soon enough, and it was often fun to surprise visitors who had never seen this kind of elevator before.

My computer told me that the daily online backup script had failed on a few files again. Apparently, a couple of my write ups had been forgettable enough that the automatic backup system kept skipping over them. I decided not to worry about it, and quickly scanned my email. A couple interesting items caught my attention. There was going to be brainstorming meeting about responding to a request for proposals to build a computerized coaching system for teaching divination techniques. And the management was asking everyone to try to keep their chocolate consumption elevated for the next week or so while federal neuron-inspectors were going to be visiting.

After I answered all the urgent mail, I got a cup of tea. The tag on the teabag had a picture of a dragon named Fred. I finished the tea, and got back to work debugging my universe delivery system.