"There is a category called `imaginative' and `scifi' and `fantasy' and it's all such pedestrian hackneyed rubbish. If you want wonder, go to sleep."
- Woesong.

--
The setting is corridors circling like smoke from campfires, like connective conduit tissue in parking garages, only they are pedestrian, only they expand without becoming noticeably wider, higher, it's just that your perspective allows for autos in the dim rows up above. It's an ant colony.

I see even a helicopter hover, and it's like a cartoon because I can observe the pilot, who is an average guy in Sunday afternoon knit shortsleeve; he is roundheaded, slightly ruddy, and his wife is seconding beside him, and he lurks and fires weaponry onto an auto below where shoppers are returning. The pilot is lackadaisically shooting the shoppers who would become auto traffic in their vehicle parked beside the road which continues looping in a prehensile coil upwards from where I stand.

I see Ray Smith approach along that roadway now, he stops briefly to set off a pistol into the head of an elderly woman who is herself in the act of busying to start up her auto after shopping. Smith continues on his way. I watch him.

I'm thinking, this isn't right. Often I don't know the rules in my dreams. I will make an issue to test this one.

I wait for Smith to arrive at my level. Smith in waking days was an older guy from my high school. He had a "curl" one year when he was new. Hair greased in a lap over his forehead like Bill Haley. Some didn't like him. Some don't like anybody. Later he became an auctioneer. I don't have the scale for that.

I arrest him. He doesn’t mind, doesn't contest; it's as if I'd accused him of littering. Someone nearby agrees to watch him while I go for the law. I take off down the darkening corridors.

I begin to think I may not have a firm grasp on reality. I should at least go and verify the old one is stilled in her auto up above. But I am not sure of which street. The names of streets is from the seaside town where I live now, which is itself a twist of the track of the reality train. Before there was just one long and winding road.

Someone is bringing a product in cellophane out of a frozen locker. The guy in apron sets it on a trundle and rolls it down the corridor, and I move. I am looking, and I say the proverbial about not finding one when you need one.

And someone up above in the higher reaches of the colony says, they will be here shortly. They are always here when we close. For it is remote and dark up there come closing time.

I see a line of skirmishers, like theatrical or third-world rentacops. They have showy clubs and badges and they are all in a line. I suspect I will complain to one of them, and as I am near, I see finally an official uniformed police officer.

She listens to me, responds by walking off towards the gents' room, where I have left Smith and his guard. Now we're going to do something. My doubts, at least, will be cleared up. Does Smith have a handheld weapon? Is there an older lady perished in her auto up above? We'll see now.

The room where they have gone, Smith and the guard, is like a rest room with accessories. There are tables and counters to take off your outer layers. (Smith, I notice, is well dressed, with topcoat over arm like in forties urban film.)

When I wake up, just this morning, I think, this is not a kelp dream. (I think of most dreams like the seaweed wrapped around your shins when you wade out of the ocean; there is much sealife around all the time of your sleep but the last wading feet is all you remember.) This is a dream from much earlier in the night. I think, maybe it's from another night.

It's a time like all time when I am not sure if there is an objective backboard to bounce the ball off. But I have confidence the cop will straighten it all out. Maybe tonight.