"This is a dream, isn't it? I want to stay."

We're in a car, myself and a couple of other guys. Brian the carbonated lasagna inventor is driving. We're going north on May Avenue, and we're out past the north edge of town.

The sky starts getting dark as we drive under lowering clouds. We're talking about something but I interrupt to point out cloud-to-cloud lightning crackling overhead to our right. Everyone stops talking to watch it.

Ahead to our left, there is what looks like a row of small fires running on an east-west line down a hill - perhaps started by lightning. The sky is quite dark now. As we get closer, I see there's an amusement park on the side of the hill and the lights I thought were fire may actually be some sort of lighting display in the park.

Suddenly, there's a tornado behind us coming up the road and crossing diagonally from southwest to northeast. Brian is about to turn east - it seems like we're at Edmond Road, but there's something about us going to Quail Springs.

"Don't turn! Don't turn!" I yell, because turning right would again put us in the tornado's path.

Brian keeps driving north. A smaller, less well formed tornado comes over the hill, travelling south and coming straight at us. It's smaller, and we can see clear through the dust it's kicking up. Brian hits the accelerator and we barrel straight through it. The car is bounced around some but we reach the other side. Another tornado appears, exactly like the one we just encountered, and we barrel through it.

We're still driving beneath the dark clouds and another funnel appears behind us, traveling north and gaining ground on us. Then, ahead of us, there is suddenly a huge, and I mean huge, piece of heavy road equipment. There's a flat cylindrical wheel like the ones on steam rollers, only it's the width of the entire road and maybe twelve feet high. There's some sort of superstructure above it that I can't clearly make out. The thing is barreling along at a surprising speed, but not as fast as the tornado closing in on us from behind.

The machinery is too big for us to get around. The tornado is behind us and gaining ground. Then suddenly there's a second road machine behind us and we're sandwiched between them, with the tornado still presumably behind it.

The driver of a small car ahead of us sees a little opening beneath the structure of the road machine ahead and darts through, making it by only a hair's breadth. There's no room for us to get through.

"What are we gonna do?!" I yell from the back seat.

Brian turns around and yells, "Relax. It's a movie."

Suddenly we are watching the giant machine on a screen. We're no longer sitting in the car, but in a theatre, and the audience is applauding. Is the movie over, I wonder, or are they applauding because Brian finally got me to quit yelling?

Now on the screen is a scene from another source, seemingly built into the plot of this film, about a child who also somehow confuses reality with a movie. While this scene seems familiar to me as I experience the dream, I don't as I sit here writing whether this was something I saw once, something I dreamed in another dream or something made up as I dreamt tonight. But sitting in the theater, I notice the nested levels of confusion between reality and film.

I also notice we're watching this on some sort of huge TV screen. There's a swinging hinged door which has been opened out to make the screen visible. Below it, a conventional movie screen has been covered with a drop cloth held in place with duct tape.

Suddenly I'm in a new location. It seems to be a college campus. There are other people there, but not anyone I was traveling in the car with. Another tornado appears behind me, bearing down on me, but I'm walking into a large sturdy brick building and the approaching tornado doesn't fill me with the same dread the others did.

As I walk in the building, I'm in a spacious lobby area and there are several other people around. "There's a tornado coming," I say calmly. "Maybe we should head to the basement." Everyone moves to the stairway, but no one seems frightened or alarmed. One of these people seems to be Larry, a photographer whom I knew many years ago in TV.

We're down in the basement. I glance up through a window near the ceiling and see the tornado hitting the building above us. Some windows break and some guttering or other metal is torn off and crashes againt the wall, but other than that, the building holds.

I'm standing in a corridor. Several other guys are down there standing around.

"This is a dream, isn't it?" I ask. No one replies, but a couple of them look at me with a Spock-like arched eyebrow. "I don't know what's going on here," I add, "but I want to stay. I don't want to wake up."

"You were never groomed for leadership, were you?" one of them asks. His tone is sympathetic, not mocking or condescending. He opens a door -- one of those big double doors that separate hallways in school buildings -- and disappears behind it.

Next I am sitting in a room. It looks like a college classroom, new and well-lit. I'm sitting at a table and there are two or three men across from me. One of them hands me a piece of paper. "Do you know what this is?" he asks.

The paper is about a half-sheet of typing paper, folded and unfolded many times, well-creased and dog-eared. There are some hand-written notes on it. The writing is small and crabbed and the lines uneven. The paper has been wet at some point, and the notes are smeared.

I can't read all of it, but I recognize the words "Lyndie England" and "CBS News."

There are two or three more men sitting at a separate table to my left, placed perpendicular to the one at which I am sitting. They look at me quizzically. I feel like I'm being interrogated.

I start to explain who Lyndie England is in 'my world,' that is, this waking life. They look at me like they don't believe me. They seem suspicious. I look at the note again, feeling some pressure to decipher it and explain it, but I can't.

And then I wake up.

There were no women anywhere in this dream, except among the audience in the theatre, for whatever significance that may have.

---

Since about 2001, I typically have had dreams involving tornados when there were important decisions approaching in my life. One may be approaching now, although I can't discuss it here yet.