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Tuesday, Mar. 25, 2003 - 2:14 p.m.

Weird dreams and an incident on Inwood Terrace

Weird freakin' dreams last night. Maybe having Casey home tonight will change that.

Doubt it.

So, the first one comes minutes after I fall fast asleep. I was up past midnight reading. I dream I'm at some parade or some college campus thing and I see someone walk by with a big green headdress on and I shout: "It's the Stanford tree! Stanford tree!" You know, the Stanford tree mascot:

As I say it, the person turns and becomes evil. She grabs me by the throat and starts choking me, and then it's one of those dreams where you realize you're dreaming, and you're paralyzed. So I sensed I was partly awake, but couldn't move, and some witch woman was choking me. She was also some sort of Batvillian the opposite of Mr. Freeze, so I started repeating to myself, "It's cold, it's cold, it's cold" so that, in my dream, the setting would become cold and she'd wither and die.

Then I woke up, freaked.

In my other dream, for some reason I found myself back at the newspaper, where one of my former co-workers (and semi-boss) looked at the editor and said, "I'll take him first," and she led me into a room and told me that they wanted to hire me back because of something that happened with a writer who was fired (which actually has happened recently). I said I would need some guarantees first, and she hesitantly said OK, and that's when I started to come up with my list of demands. And I think I woke up in the morning at this one, because I found myself lying awake thinking that first I'd say I need three weeks of vacation, then a written guarantee I would be strictly a writer � no desk work � and finally I told them they'd need to pay me $60,000, which is basically double what I was making when I first moved to the copy desk three years ago. I figured that I have to name a salary that makes the decision for me � too high for them to accept, or too high for me to resist if they do accept it.

Maybe these dreams were influenced by the weird night before I fell asleep. It wasn't all that weird for the most part, but as I'm reading Sports Illustrated in bed a little before midnight, I hear a sudden, loud chirp, like from a police cruiser. It's like a split-second, short siren burst. About half an hour after that, I hear people shouting outside. I mute the TV and hear several voices, including a woman yelling � in a tone that sounded somewhat facetious and not at all urgent or dire � "We're having a domestic disturbance over here!"

My heart started racing and I grabbed my cell phone, put on my robe and went to the front windows. I saw no movement out on the street, but just past Cranky Old Man's house, a police car was parked on the wrong side of the street with one set of wheels on the sidewalk. It wasn't running and its lights weren't flashing, like you'd expect when the 5-0 respond to an urgent call. I couldn't see anyone, so I figured it was one of the houses up past Cranky Old Man's place. The yelling continued, and I heard movement downstairs and wondered if the neighbors were curious too, but in minutes, the frequency of the shouting died down.

Another 15 minutes later, as I turned off the TV and was about to do the same with the light to go to sleep, I noticed the sound of an engine running out in the street. I figured I knew what it was. I got up and opened the door to the bedroom and, in the darkness of the kitchen, the red lights flashed off the walls. I went to the living room and looked out at an ambulance parked in the street, lights flashing and rear doors open. Nobody came out in the 10 minutes I continued to glance out at the street, and I was yawning constantly, so I went to bed. When I awoke from that first dream sometime after 12:30, the lights were still flashing through the blinds. I wonder what happened.

Now I need lunch. I'll read diaries when I get back.

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