Sometimes, the dreams arrive in rapid-fire, and then months go by where I vaguely remember fragments. This morning, though, I’m pushed out of bed by a persistent high-tension drama. The dream started with me on an assignment to do a photoshoot. The guide to the location appears to be a national park ranger; he takes me to a run-down industrial area. After maneuvering through the empty buildings, neglected railroad tracks, and through broken fences, we enter a very large warehouse. The floor to the east, west, and south walls is covered in sand. The north of the interior is a large standing wave surging with more and less water that changes the height of the wave. Watching the water flow, it is confounding how, as it gushes with more water, the break at the shore stays at nearly the exact same spot. Looking for a place to start shooting, from the west wall, I make my way east when, on the crest of the wave, I spot two sets of large antlers. They are mating marine elk. They bob and dip in the rising and falling waters as they and other marine elk attempt their lovemaking in what looks like the most precarious position to do so. As I walk the beach, I try to avoid stepping on crabs, it turns out they are crab-like beetles. Except these don’t run away as people approach; they run for you. Caroline warns me of them on my back, and I try to show no concern, hoping that if I don’t think of them, they won’t bother me. Wrong approach; they are soon on my back, going down the back of my pants. I holler to Caroline to help. She picks them off me, and soon another 4 of them are crawling up my pants leg; I think one is under the front of my shirt; check my hair. I’m starting to get very uncomfortable and head for a door paralleling the wave on the north wall and enter a steep stairwell made of red brick. This is one of the two columns on either end of the structure where this 1000-foot-wide wave is crashing into the warehouse floor.

In the stairwell heading up over slippery bricks, the environment here could be from Escher with its large corners, misplaced windows, and openings going nowhere. Areas are lit with pastel colors, with corners lit with a gradient of light that begins in pink and gradually becomes blue. This looks like a perfect location for some dramatic photographs, but I am told this is not where the photos are supposed to be taken. I am not going back out into beetle land to fight with those pesky and sometimes painful creatures, so I quit and am soon back outside.

Coming down the hill is an SUV carrying a passenger who turns out to be the man I’ve been contracted by for this photoshoot. Biggy Smalls is in the backseat; I’m instructed to get in and drive. As we drive forward, menacing men approach the car, and unseen men sitting with Biggy in the dark of the backseat encourage him to shoot the man who approaches. There’s a constant undertone of voices telling him to shoot people as he and I try to discuss the logistics of finishing this difficult photoshoot. Biggy is reasonable but a bit one-track-minded regarding wanting these photos. As we approach the building with the wave inside, a large police vehicle arrives, and Biggy instructs me to throw the car in reverse and begin to make my way out of there.

Bullets are flying, and Biggy’s gang moves forward, firing as we back out, trying to make our way to safety. All of a sudden, the beetles don’t seem such a big deal compared to being in the crossfire. We drive north, but Biggy insists we dump the car as the police would have identified it at the scene we just left. So, on foot, Biggy and I walk with a light step through a rundown neighborhood of what appears to be squatters having taken over. Biggy peers into windows, cracks in facades, past doors falling off hinges; he is looking for a potential ally where we can take cover. Wrong door and it will be another enemy who will shoot Biggy dead again. I’ve known the entire time that this is Biggy in the afterlife. We continue to creep silently up the street until we both see cops a couple of hundred yards across the street, we try to slip to the left. Biggy tells me how, even dead, he’s a magnet for white hatred and law enforcement. Now we are being chased by the police, but we are on foot; this is surely going to end badly….I can no longer handle the tension and wake up.