2006-07-25 - 6:24 p.m.
One night sleeping at the squat, I had a dream (or did I?) that I got up in the middle of the night and crawled to the edge of the elevated room we slept in to look down over the large garage floor below us. There was a couch we�d found on the street in the middle of the otherwise barren space. Sometimes a �houseguest� would sleep on it, but no one was doing so tonight. I saw that it was engulfed in blazing flame, realized I must be dreaming, and crawled back to bed.
In the morning, I left early (I believe I was going to a training program downtown I was briefly enrolled in to learn to be a �SOES bandit� a.k.a. a day trader) and didn�t think about the dream or look at the couch. When I came back, everyone had been out of the house for the day (all four of us actually had jobs, some at pretty high-tech firms � recall that this was the height of the dot.com bubble), but had returned before me.
�Hey, you won�t believe it!� a roommate called to me. �Guess what happened? Last night, the couch lit on fire!�
�Wow, uh.� I remembered my dream. �Did it like burn up?�
�No see, it�s right there.�
I went over to it and looked. There was flame damage to the arm, but it obviously hadn�t been totally ablaze.
�I don�t understand. What happened?�
�Oh, I was smoking on it last night. I must have left a cigarette burning. There�s nothing else around to pick up the fire, so it probably just burned itself out.�
Thank God for our sparse surroundings, I guess. I could just picture the headlines otherwise: �HOMELESS LOSERS SET CIGARETTTE FIRE � BURN SELVES UP�.
What was going on, I wondered. Did I just happen to have a similar dream by coincidence? Did I actually wake up and see the small fire in a sleepy daze, then spin it out into a dream of a giant inferno? Why couldn�t I distinguish between reality and dreams? Maybe I was going crazy. I mean, look where I was living. Maybe I should get a real place.
� 2006 Geoff Gladstone
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