I've actually managed to sleep well these past few nights, and dreamt fairly vividly, but not well.

The other night I dreamt that I had come home for the weekend (which, in my dream, was October 6) and found out, after I'd already been home a night, that Kevin had leukemia. No one saw fit to tell me, except by e-mail — my dad had sent it two days before and got mad because I hadn't checked my e-mail that day. Kevin was going out with his friends even though he said the doctors told him he had only thirty hours or so left to live.

I woke up and went back to sleep, and I dreamt that I had woken up from that dream but Kevin still had leukemia. Then that happened again.

Last night I dreamt for the first time that I can remember that I was pregnant and I wasn't blissfully happy about it. I'd already been pregnant once, at seventeen or eighteen — like I usually am in the dreams where I'm pregnant and blissfully happy about it — and when I'd given birth I had realized I had no idea what I was going to do then, so my parents took the baby from me and I never saw it again. I never even knew if it was a girl or a boy. So I was pregnant again, only this time the father was at least around and not running away — and I kept thinking, "Man, and we didn't even really have sex. We were barely even touching. I should serve as a warning: I only barely had sex twice, and both times I got pregnant." It was last summer and I was twenty-one, and I was working at the movie theater and someone else was pregnant (not Christine, possibly Crystal, even though that was two summers ago) and I was horribly afraid I was going to do something that would cause a miscarriage. One day I slipped on a rug at home and freaked out, but my mother didn't even care. My hands were always on my stomach, and I didn't know how, but I knew I wanted to keep this baby, or at the very least know what it's face looked like before I gave it away of my own accord. (I hoped that was what my parents had done with my other baby — adopted it out.) Really, I wanted to keep the baby.

Then I dreamt that I was part of a movie like Dodgeball, with Ben Stiller as the antagonist and someone else famous (possibly Jim Carrey, possibly someone else) as a man who had recently returned to his hometown, a small mining town that was being crushed by corporate fists and general economic collapse. There was some strange competition involving something that looked like a giant blue-and-white roulette table, and the winner would get some ridiculously large sum of money, and of course Ben Stiller's character wanted it not only for himself but to see the mining town fall apart, and the other man vowed to start a new town for the miners if he got the money. He won, and then there was an Earthquake that swallowed the whole gaming field and Ben Stiller's character willfully stayed behind while everyone else got out, except his servant sort of guy, who said he had nothing else to live for anyway. By this point it wasn't a movie anymore, it was real (in my dream, of course).

So he built a new town where no one had to mine anymore, and strange complexes of buildings. The space between the buildings seemed more like halls than roads, except they weren't covered. Everyone lived connected to someone else. I started a restaurant with a few other girls who could cook and bake, and we tried to convince an elderly woman to make pies for us but she just wanted to boil salt and yell at people through her window.

Then I started to hear screaming one night from a farther-out building, and ran to that place. In one room a little girl was screaming that her hands were burning, but several other people, including the guy who'd won the competition (and was more or less the mayor), were already there and told me not to worry. They said it happened a couple of nights a week — the girl would fall asleep and wake up screaming that her hands were burning, and it had only started happening since she got this new plush toy (it was pretty much a fuschia face with a big grin, with tiny horns, arms, and legs sticking out) and it only happened when she slept with it and touched it. Any place she touched him would burn. And it wasn't just the little girl being strange, like kids can be, or dreaming; they'd touched her hands and felt them burn, and felt strange heat come from the toy. They called it Mr. Evil. The girl didn't want to let go of Mr. Evil, though, even though she knew he burned her hands. I was really unsettled, and believed, like everyone else did except the girl, that the toy was possessed. One night I took it from the room while she screamed and her mother tended to her hands, and I passed the mayor. He looked tired, but he didn't get up; he just asked me what I was doing.

"I'm going to burn it," I said, and I told him it was what he should have done a long time ago. But when I got outside, in the desert-like place we lived in, I was afraid. It was dark, and the toy was demonic and I was pretty much alone there. I thought I'd wait until day to burn it, and then bury the ashes far away so that if they were still possessed nothing evil would grow too close to town.

Then I had to talk to a woman who had been something of an outlaw and who was in love with the mayor. She had wanted to be with him, but he got the girl and all after the competition and the girl wasn't her. She wanted to kill the woman he was with, but I told her I couldn't let her do that, but that she could change things and be happy anyway. Basically, we — one other woman and I — gave her a goth makeover. She was happier then.

Then I woke up.