I’m living in an old western town that hasn’t modernized although it is the present. The tallest building in town is an old five-story hotel that now operates as a gang’s operations center. This gang comprises the local government, law enforcement, and criminals. Typically, I walk the main street without incident. On one occasion, I witnessed Eminem talking with one of the gang members about how, when he first met them he was weak and intimidated and that it was that meeting that made him decide to toughen up.

The gang members are supposed to know who not to rob, but even amongst their ranks, there is corruption, and the town is becoming ever more dangerous. A friend of mine walking with two other people is picked up for questioning and taken to the old hotel. I enter the building, not knowing there is supposed to be a guard here. People I run into figure I must be someone because no one who is not a member just walks through here unescorted.

As I stroll the hallways, I become increasingly uneasy as it is obvious I shouldn’t be seeing what I am seeing and I wonder how it is I can walk along without interference. I step out on a fourth-floor balcony to find out whether the people I am looking for can be seen on the street. This vantage point offers a bird’s eye view of what is happening in town. I see two young men running up the street, popping through two different false walls in the façade of houses along the street.

This is a brave move; normally, they should not have to run and hide, but this is another example of the corruption within the gang. As I walk back into the hallway, I happen upon a man who is lifting a few thousand dollars in cash off of someone else’s desk. He looks at me, and I at him; I sense he is stealing the money; he tries to play it that he was not sneaking into or away from the desk, but I know, and I think he knows I do.

I leave the old hotel and go back onto the street, but as I walk away, it occurs to me that this guy who nicked the money got a good look at me, and I didn’t bother to take in much detail about him as I was already nervous about being there. I am afraid he is going to blame me for taking the money, and I will have a severe problem to deal with soon. I figured I had better return and explain what I saw.

This time, as I walk in, a member of the gang slaps a guard and tells him he is not doing his job and to stop me from entering like that. I am told to wait on the veranda. After some time, I began to think that this was going to be considered snitching, which is not cool either. I decided to change my plans and leave.

But the can of worms has been opened now, and as I am a half-mile back up the road, a looming figure steps up with a heavily pock-marked and shiny dark face, not saying a word. He looks at me with the words on his face, ‘Where do you think you are going?’ Without a word, I follow him back to the old hotel.

Through panic about what I’m going to tell whoever it is I am about to have to talk to, I have to make this believable as I am certain I shouldn’t talk about the money, but then it also crosses my mind that at some point they may learn about the money, come to question me about it and then wonder about the story I told them and why on this opportunity I didn’t explain the missing money. Argh, what to do? Wake up; your bladder is calling.

I started playing Mahjongg again recently and was reminded why I quit playing it last year. The game leads me into repetitious dreams, usually of some task that gets repeated ad nauseam, disrupting my sleep to such an extent that by morning, I’m more exhausted than rested. The dream is either sorting into some complex order of things that I am frustrated at the futility of the task and my ignorance as to how to speed the process so I can finally finish or like the Twilight Zone episode where the same scenario is lived out repeatedly: I am doing something over and over and cannot move beyond a certain point.

Well, this morning, I got lucky, and my last dream halfway broke me out of repetition, but in the dream, I had to go to prison. One moment, I am with Caroline; the next moment, I find myself among a group of prisoners on a rocky island in the ocean. Our landing spot is being hammered by ferocious waves. I am told not to worry as the island is too high for the waves to be of consequence, but I am watching a wave that comes close to spraying the flat rock surface we are standing on. Another wave, 60 feet tall, comes in over the previous one, and it is obvious that this one is coming my way. I grab a pole and hold on while the wave crashes over us. Dripping wet, we are ushered off the platform as it is now unsafe.

Next, I am driving a blue Hyundai down a long fenced-in driveway to the office complex on the far side of the island to finalize my transfer to this institution. I did find it slightly odd that my “real-life” car would be here. Only now does it begin to occur to me that I will not be able to go home today, tomorrow, or the next day. These people are serious. But why am I here? I am to be retrained in the American Way. Seems I drifted into deviancy, informational deviancy, to be precise. No excuse can be accepted that the materials I was in possession of could be considered artistic expression and collectibles; it is against the state. So, as in China during the Cultural Revolution, I am going to be reprogrammed; I will be shown my way back to being a true American.

But what about Caroline?

Forget about it; you are here for the next four years.

But I didn’t do anything!

You are an agent in possession of objectionable material and could be a danger to the state.

I am interested in intellectual activity, and I own obscurities for art and cultural reasons; I am an agent of curiosity!

But those subversive materials could hurt others, could hurt the state, and as you can see, they are hurting you now.

Oh my god. What am I going to do? Can I call Caroline? Ask her to wait for me for the next four years.

NO. When you could have put your life in patriotic order, you chose to be rebellious; now, we must help you become a good citizen.

Hey, this is like communist China!

Be careful; you could end up here for five years.

What do you have that incriminates me?

Take a look at this.

I am handed a book from a stack of what looks like scrapbooks. Someone has compiled photos, books, flyers, and materials that are said to be mine into these volumes. I recognize some of it, unfortunately, all Nazi-inspired motifs, but the communist stuff is definitely not mine.

I protest; this communist stuff is not mine! I am told that I am in denial and that this will add time to my stay in prison. Again, the horrid reminder that I am actually about to start serving a prison sentence, although I have never been to court, and now, worse, I start to panic about prison rape. The communist imagery is flipping by page after page; occasionally, something that was actually mine catches my eye. Why am I here? What is the ultimate purpose of pulling me off the street? Could it be that someone wants to witness me falling into humiliation?

This is where the dream is about to spin into repetition, as so many others do when playing that damned Mahjongg. I will roll over these questions or go over the images in the scrapbooks over and over and over again until they start to blur, and I get confused as to why I am doing this again and again. I wake up knowing I cannot play Mahjongg again.

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.

The dream begins with two characters I imagine as being bad guys who recruited me to help make a “core sample” from a super-capacity fiber trunk. A core sample lifts a traveling stream of information that can be analyzed or hacked and has serious security-violating issues. Not only that, but the data must be lifted in such a way that all receivers downstream do not see anomalies in timestamps or travel time, which will trigger alarms suggesting a drain or hack of the fiber stream. This future moment in which this occurs is when light is being used predominately for both computing and data distribution. We have learned to shift, hold still, and otherwise move photons with absolute precision. Due to this, governments have made quantum teleportation outside of government and U.N.-approved scientific applications illegal. The reason is that with optical computing and optical quantum teleportation, criminals, terrorists, and hackers would be able to project imagery into locations that would lend confusion and terror or be used in acts such as making a victim believe the door to their home had just been kicked in and then the person is forced to sign over financial information to someone they believe is there to harm them when in reality it is nothing more than a hologram being quantum teleported using the photons available during daylight as the distribution system for reorganizing images at another location. So, the guys who have me, I feel threatened by their demand to have me help lift this core sample; I don’t know if I can trust them. This is a crime of high proportion, but I have the skills to properly lift the stream undetected, and somehow, they also know this. These contractors leave me to do my work as they set up in a van with part of the equipment that will carry the data chunk, but before I can get to work, Howard Dean shows up. Turns out that Howard Dean is the nefarious character here. The two guys who contracted me wanted to expose Howard, but Howard needs this network to remain untouched as he has found a way to hide his QT packets (Quantum Teleportation) and is using an old peer-to-peer network to camouflage his steps and place of origin. Howard signals two celebrities to join him by placing his hand and voice into their reality and signaling them to follow the hand. What happens in how they get to our location is unseen by me in the dream. Maybe they are not really here, maybe Howard isn’t here either, or maybe the entire thing is a hologram; without moving too close and becoming overly familiar by trying to come in contact, I cannot distinguish who is actually here and who is not. I suppose I cannot know for certain if I am where I think I am. Now, I am left with the dilemma of how to stop Howard from his hijacking of reality for his political and financial benefit and expose that our government is committing information warfare against its own people.

Burned and worn-out shells of city blocks with broken streets are all that is left of civilization. No one over 50 can be seen. Going out can be problematic, but my guide, a woman about 30-something, has no problem maneuvering the landscape. She takes me to where she lives through a series of broken-out walls past other squatters who are living with the best shelter they can find, typically on the floors below the long-gone roofs and off the ground floor as a measure of safety. A school has been set up to try to preserve the language, logic, and civility skills, but the situation is precarious due to crimes committed in the effort to get things to trade. One of the students demonstrates, while in the woman’s living space, a glass device with two substances that come together to create a plasma containing electricity that flows over the flat piece of glass inside the glass bottle. Communication between species has changed as two animated lions are going on about something or other while lying on their backs, talking back and forth with one another.

Leaving from the front door of the house, walking up the street around the corner and around a house at the next corner, coming back again to walk through the front door of the other house, walking clockwise around the interior perimeter, exiting again through the door you entered jumps you forward in time. Or so found out a girl from an old Indian witch/shaman who told her a story of people moving into the future near where she lived. In her time she had many a person trying to follow her to catch her secret, with a few people coming close to discovering where she was disappearing to.

One crotchety old man even thought he might have figured it out that all he had to do was walk to the other house and around the outside with four coins in his pocket where he would learn what the magic was, but the girl didn’t let him know nor does he figure out that passing through the first house is of importance to passing through time. Fast forward to the present, and the house is being renovated when the new owner finds a hidden drawing showing a figure eight and a half with a poem going something like, “in today and down the hall out the door into tomorrow, I skip the path into the future to follow the path back to today.”

After figuring out that the other building is the necessary point to complete the loop he stumbles into the secret that has for two centuries been well guarded. The owner determines there are magnetic field anomalies in which vortexes are leaving the earth, similar to the phenomenon in Sedona and Machu Pichu, and that crossing these in the right pattern will jump you back and forth between two time periods. Initially, his timing is off, and he misses days, but on further contemplation of the poem, he recognizes the girl said skip, which shows that she was maintaining an even speed between rotations around the block. This then has him trying experiments where he speeds up or slows down his looping, which allows him to adjust the years between jumps.

Cut to the future, and someone is notified by software that notices an anomaly on a satellite image that a door to a historical house, which is cared for into perpetuity by various grants and hidden ownership, has had its front door opened during a satellite sweep. The software recognized that this door hadn’t been opened in 37 years, which presented an anomaly that required someone to look into the situation, so the house was targeted for automated surveillance. After some time, the images show someone leaving the house, walking around the block, and back into the house; the person then never emerges. One thing leads to another, and soon, someone in the government puts the puzzle together and figures out that the speed at which you move between the two vortex fields will determine how far in time you jump.

The home, now controlled by a secret government agency, is used in an experiment that successively ups the speed until the jumper moves in such a way between times that the house is destroyed during the final jump while the mysterious owner and the government time jumper are both in transit thus trapping them both without a method to return nor the resources to effectively live rich lives but as the government jumper was the original girl from the beginning of the story who had become a woman waiting for the opportunity to reenter the house which the government had sequestered years before her leap into the time where she had been trapped, the man had already been trapped in a past where he could no longer find the home and the two meet as they both walk towards where the door would have been, but finding an empty lot are forced to live together due to the secrets they share and how they use the information about the future to make a better life during the time they lived in the future. The home was destroyed by a freak storm in the 1850s. The magic was thus broken, but the girl from 19th century New Bedford and the contemporary man from the 21st century find each other.