I dreamed last night I was talking with Ken Keysey. Very amiable talk. Very encouraging conversation.

In part of the dream I was walking through my old High School. The school had been expanded over time so that dozens of thin-skinned aluminum prefab classrooms surrounded the old brick building. The aluminum classrooms (the idea that aluminum causes memory loss is now a hotly disputed item, with all the data which were cited to assert that our bauxite buddy makes us forgetful creatures being reviewed and called into question, and in fact after a casual study of the issue I now think that aluminum does not cause any significant memory loss in humans) were full of cartons of old student homework and other student debris including countless long-since discarded pot pipes. The cartons were stacked against the walls like sand bags. This had been done to prevent lead alloy projectiles which might be directed at the school by who knows what fanatical haters from injuring the students. I found an old essay I wrote in one of the cartons. My essay was not remarkable. What was remarkable is that in these cartons, not in the form of writing or photos but in dream-possible palletized awareness, was the concept that God gave us colors which can be mixed and changed and combined into infinite shades so therefore s/he gave us this toy which never wears out, as long as we have the will to play with it.

In another part of the dream I needed a wheel repaired for my bike and found the price too high at the old shop. So I decided to shop down the way and went to another guy in a different part of the huge brick industrial haunt. He had a shop where he did repairs for free. Somehow the naturally disturbing economic ramifications of this arrangement didn't bother me. This free shop was new and had been set up in the recently abandoned offices of some fancy estab, and so dude was working on bikes and wheel-smithing over a shiny wooden floor with windows all draped with fancy curtains and all these shiny lamps on side tables, and the dude from the other shop came around and I was joking saying look at this shop, real high class. Then I left and had to high-tail it home to get ready for work and had a key which fit these old well-worn keyholes at the corner of each block, the keyholes being in the curbstones, so I was unlocking each block before rushing along the sidewalk to the next block. Then I said the heck with it, since it made no difference, and stopped unlocking the blocks (un-blocking the locks?) as I went. It was then that I came across a house where people were exploring consciousness, with no drugs in obvious use.

And that's where I found Kesey. As we talked, we moved through various morphs of landscape: hardware store, my old back yard, several nondescript subconscious locations, and a college campus of great promise, talking of many things.

Very active dreams. I had slept with the "splint" which was prescribed by a Sleep Apnea doctor. A year or more ago I went to a sleep study facility where technologists who stay awake all night observe the data generated by several sleeping clients in little rooms equipped with infra red cameras and wires on our heads chests etc. hooked to an interface that goes to the mainframe where the techs play video games all night while the machine records our brainwaves and there's a gyro-lamb that records our movements etc etc as well as O2 saturation clips on our fingers and a mic for snore level monitoring found I have real bad sleep apnea due to an extra flap of flesh in my throat. The data showed that without the 'splint' I stopped breathing many times a night for thirty seconds and more. Oxygen levels in the blood decrease, the heart labors; the sleep is fragmented. As a creature, I am better off using the machine, which defeats the flesh flap without the need for surgery. So I have this machine that stops the apnea, it's forced air that drives back the flap, acting like a 'splint'. I used the machine for a few weeks after the study. Then I stopped using the machine. Last night was the first time in a long while I had used the machine. Interesting. Life once again providing stimuli for the mind and spirit. Good old life. What a hound.

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