(Warning: long, messed-up dream follows)

The dream began in a park. The park turned out to be in UBC, where Mathcamp was recently held. Now, this was a rather long dream, so by now I've completely forgotten what happened there. Nevertheless, this park turned out to be an important focal point in the dream. Throughout the dream, I knew where I was in relation to it.

I ended up walking along a street in the dark (it had suddenly become night as I walked there). I decided to go into this old-looking cafe that I had never known was there before.

For some reason, my mother and my sister were there, playing cards at a table in the corner. I sat down at the table, talked to them a bit (not at all surprised that they had somehow ended up in UBC), watched the game of cards. The game was played with Set cards, but they weren't playing Set.

Mom wasn't doing too well. In fact, at one point, she got so frustrated that she got out a semi-automatic shotgun, and started shooting it out the door of the restaurant.

"Mom," I said, "what the heck are you doing?"

"Shooting this shotgun out the door."

"Well, stop! You're going to hit someone!" I screamed over the sound of the gunfire.

"No, I won't hit anyone," she insisted.

My sister took this as being completely normal. The game continued, and after another round my mom started shooting again.

I got up in disgust. "Okay," I said, "stop shooting, Mom, because I'm going out there."

She agreed.

I went out the door, noting the large number of bulletholes it had, and onto the dark street (which had, for some reason, become much wider). Two of my friends were running across it in a panic.

"Anatoly and Julian got shot!" they exclaimed. (It is unfortunate that two people with somewhat uncommon names were involved, making this part of the dream sound silly - even though it was the most vivid and frightening part of the dream.)

Pangs of grief and desperation. I hadn't known Anatoly all that well, but Julian was a rather cool mentor at Mathcamp. I tried to convince myself it wouldn't be that bad, because it was the last week of Mathcamp anyway, then realized that Julian wouldn't be around next year either.

My sister had shown up too. For some reason I asked her, "Are you sure they're dead?"

"Yes, they're gone," she said. It seems as if their bodies had just disappeared, as in Star Wars, or something.

I ran back to the dorms and into the common lounge. All the furniture in the lounge had been re-arranged. In fact, the whole building had. I told various people that Anatoly and Julian were dead. "Oh, that sucks", they tended to say. I ran to the mentors' office and knocked on the door, desperate to get someone to listen to me. Someone knocked back. I noticed a small sign on the door which said, written in pen, "you have no reason to be here".

A sudden shift in time. Showing an amazing amount of continuity for a dream, I was in a dark room, telling someone (possibly interviewing me?) that I had nowhere to go now, because of the fact that my mom was in jail and that--

I woke up from the dream. Actually, I didn't - I woke up into another dream. At least I knew that the first one _was_ a dream, so I felt incredibly relieved. Nobody died, I told myself. Everything's okay.

I got out of bed in my Mathcamp dorm (in RL, I'm home from Mathcamp already) and saw that I had a deck of Set cards on my desk. In the standard cliche, I would be frightened by seeing something upon waking up that had to do with the dream. I wasn't. I knew that I had borrowed that deck of cards from some girl, and that I should return them. I went out to do so. (Apparently, she lived in a completely different dorm across the campus, even though IRL all of Mathcamp was in one dorm.) I melded in with a group of people who were also going to see the same person.

"Hey look, there's an Indian guy," someone said while pointing at a window of a building we were passing, in a random event which had nothing to do with anything else. (I don't even know if she meant the Asian or American type.) The person who was being pointed at closed the blinds.

We arrived at the girl's dorm. Apparently, everyone had a reason to see her, as there was a line forming outside her door and a mysterious atmosphere inside the room. At some point, the door disappeared and the room became less of a room, more like a cave dug into the hallway wall. I quickly returned the cards when I came up in line, then started walking back with a different girl who had been in the line. (This shows that it must have been a dream, because I tend to repel females IRL). She didn't talk all that much (which is usually my side of the conversation).

"Let's not walk back through the park," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because that's where I started having this horrible dream."


"And I'll need to stop by my room when we get there."


"Because I'm not wearing any pants." (The standard dream cliche manifested itself.)


Within my dream, the song "Stand By Me" started playing from nowhere, as if it were the end of a movie, as we walked on.

I woke up.