After falling asleep again at 7:00am I dreamed of walking with two little girls along a street, in a nice looking town, lined in large old houses with tidy yards. From the looks of things it was spring, because the grass was lush, most trees had barely produced a bud, and there were blossoms. Suddenly I see a man hanging from a tree in someone’s front yard. The proper authorities already seem to be present and looking into it, so I quickly take the girls back in the direction we came from. As we turn away I realize there is more than one body hanging in the yard on this beautiful morning and they all have black bags over their heads as if executed. In our calm but brisk retreat the smallest girl chants to herself, “we are to young to se that.” We come across another house with a beautifully unkempt garden, over-run with mud and moss and pink blossoms. Cutting through this yard we find, to my dismay, another faceless body swinging amidst the falling petals.

Nothing to do but to hurry forward.

Then we come across two unconscious bodies, a man and a woman, on the covered porch of the house. I tell the 4 or so children to wait… have they been multiplying? I climb the paint chipped steps to check the bodies’ pulses and then the dream decides to play a trick on me, the unconscious bodies snap awake with electrical whirring sounds. Somehow I know that they are robots, despite their fleshy appearance, and I tell the kids to run. I try to lead the robots away by dashing around the house and up a gravel alley. The man is hot on my heels but where’s the woman? I wake up.

Is this a nightmare? I guess so. But what stays with me is the vivid fidelity of a quiet town bursting with the liveliness of spring. I only remember the invading insertions of horror as if I saw them out of the corner of my eye.