I have proved Einstein's Relativity in my dreams. Albert told us that one who traveled near the speed of light away from the earth would be exponentially younger than a twin on earth once he returned. I have noticed that long sequences in dreams, as in the one following, occur in very limited dreamtime. I can gauge the latter because I am often awakened just prior to the alarm and drift back to sleep for a very few minutes. In that time, much occurs. Therefore:

1. Dreams travel at near the speed of light, and
2. Albert was right.

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On a campus, moseying this way and that, dark in keeping as always with my lack of visual perception, or perceptive vision, I have an assignment, though I'm not in school. I know I must, but I don't understand how. It's like high school; I was somehow disengaged when something important was explained.

I understand the outline of it. We are to diagram a root of a local tree, which resembles an apricot but without flour or fruit. It remains low to the ground, sinuous as if struggling to rise, and somehow one large root follows the trunk up out of the ground.

The assignment is to gash the root just above the ground, then lay the tool we used aside, and draw the innards of the root. I see Niki J's artwork, and it's very nice. She used a motor-driven utensil I don't recognize, and it's laying before the tree, which has a large gash exposed in the root/trunk near the ground.

I will use an ax. I will set to work shortly. First however as in all my dreams there is a certain amount of walking one way with decisive intent and then coming back in the reverse direction with an equal amount of assurance. I'll start on my work pretty quick now.

From close up, I'm watching the crew dismantle a postmodern drag engine. They talk to one another like on any work crew. Two of them lift a blower off, which is unlike any blower ever seen outside a scifi flick. They place it over on a bench.

Now I must take the engine somewhere. (All my dreams are moving, as my days be sitting.) We start off, but we have, of course, two cats to take with us. One bounds off up the wrong path and I must catch her. She has the shape of a squirrel and a bobbed tail and grey-white-black coat, and the funny part is, I can catch her.

The other is off to the other side, and there is danger, because an auto is coming now. I rush to that side of the road, and just barely catch this one before he leaps into the path of the oncoming vehicle, whose driver gives one of those patented disgust headshake frowns.

I enter a dark bookshop. The engine is to drive something important there, maybe the card catalog, for all I know. I leave, and find a lady signing in at the desk lobby. Her family motor is just set in the floor behind her, like an inboard Evinrude. Everything drives something else, and I don't question it. The lady notices a list on the counter, mentions it. Hey, there's a list.

Yes, I say. It's my lifting routine from fifty years ago. Haven't used it since, but I like to keep it handy. She continues her entries onto the form.

I am somehow not troubled by a visit from Clyde Hembry, who was in waketime the nadir of the sump of our old hometown society. I mean, seedy thugs try and avoid Clyde, and all that kept him out of prison for major crimes was a lack of imagination. But he is there briefly on some nefarious mission and it's innocent as far as I'm concerned so I give him the location of a certain green of the Golf Club.

This is as wide as the social span runs in our town: from the Golf Club, the smalltown unexclusive enclave yet nest of the most posh families we can afford, and Clyde, but I seem to believe Clyde has a justifiable need of the data so I give him "A-21" and I step outside. I will show him where. I expect him to follow, and he does, but too slow is he at leaving my quarters to suit me.

Here he comes. It's sunshine outside, and I stride forth. I look at the numbers on the greens. I see H and then guide over that way for B section. The greens, I see, relate to large metropolitan newspapers. This makes perfect sense to me. I recognize now that A-21 must mean the San Jose Mercury News.

Over this way, Clyde. Watch the traps.

I am rushing through a moving train. I have to tell Reloj something I've just read.

It was in Schopenhauer. See, the way I understand it, is, you cannot substitute one string of longing and desire for another. I see it as a golf ball. You cut into the cover and you unwind one length of thread and stretch it out on the table. Then you take another and you substitute it.
Schopenhauer says you can't do that. Any impulse or drive is so deeply rooted there is no way to synthesize another for it. I go to tell Reloj that, rushing through the cars, out one door onto the platform and into the next.

We are going to a therapy clinic somewhere up ahead which will cure Reloj of his smoking habit. One of the strategies is the trading off of the need to smoke with other oral fixations. But I found a copy of something from Schopenhauer which says we're bound to fail in our mission.

Sublimation? Is that the term?

Eyes are cast above me. I notice the glaze, all along the rows, in every car, and then I know the cause. There are TV sets up high to my left.
Nobody wants to talk Schopenhauer here.

Everyone is blankly staring, as in a trance. There is noise coming from the TV sets.

Anybody? They only stare at the sets up on railings, two to a car. They do not hear me. They do not even see me.

Does this mean perhaps Schopenhauer was wrong? It's good, if so, because maybe then Reloj can quit smoking after all.

I wonder when I'm awake if Schopenhauer ever wrote anything like that.

The young black lady was prepared to save our rotting southern community, lord knoweth how or even why.

She was the director of something she called Fascinating Theatre. On the surface, it looked just like any cineplex. It was the largest building ever in our town, and we were all convinced by the simple fact of it. Such grandeur is very impressive. Its erection showed she had faith in Fascinating Theatre in our town. Now, we didn't truly understand the theory, but with such grand developments, we didn't figure we had to, no more than the sun coming up most mornings. Most everybody not otherwise engaged, which was most, became a shareholder, an employee, or both, of Fascinating Theatre.

She taught us that theatre could not be confined to the ten screens within the walls, but must follow us all the day and into the night. All of us must attend the movies, and when not inside the Theatre we must be working for its success among us, and grateful for our very existence as a direct result of Fascinating Theatre.

She convened a meeting to show us what she meant. The city manager (this was the little bigshot Napoleon complex who was the boss in our office once upon a waketime) was trying to manipulate her. After all, she was a woman, and Black besides.

"I don't think we need both me and the mayor for this ceremony..." he laughed. She must've agreed. Immediately, he was out of the project, and only the mayor stood at one side on opening night.

There was developing a Theatre class, and a detritis of the left-behind. I was over there across the street come opening night. Here come the Director, with another one who resembled her. She was dancing, an African dance, scooting along the walk together with her follower, on the edge nearest the street, grinning broadly, their arms syncopated in a motion like the drive wheels of a locomotive. It seemed to be directed at me, standing there in blank stupefication, but maybe all the left-behinds felt that way. I stood across the street, in front of the old Drive In Theatre, which was decrepit and dying, just watching.

It resembled a dance the natives of the Serengeti might have performed to mark the coming of the white man's railroad. It was a celebration of the successful introduction of Fascinating Theatre to our town, or maybe the failure of the old way, or both.

All that the Theatre class did during the day related to Fascinating Theatre. You tried to catch their eye, thinking, you're kidding, right? but they never blinked. When they talked, they did so in banal boosterism, advertising the savior of their community. They sounded like TV commercials. We laughed at them, but we were unnerved. There were few of us, and we had after all been rejected by the Fascinating Theatre.

He is a professional forensic craftsman. He is taking apart a revolver, and he is dusting the shells, and he puts the works through a variety of very close order chemical tests there on the table while we watch. He is sweating.

He cannot find what she wants found. He shrugs. His hand is shaking now. She informs us all that probably they must now tear down the front end of the vehicle. I don't know what she means, but he does. His voice cracks as he says, "I can't do it now; I've been here for sixteen hours!"

He is afraid of being taken off the project through failure, or exhaustion. Then he would only be one of us.

There were chats in the coffee shops, casual encounters at Clayton's Grocery, wives in their turnip patches bent double at the waist out on the broad flat field, men sitting on summer evening porches running water from a hose at the St Augustine...

No more. Now in our town nothing else is but the Theatre.